No Intermedia Agenda-Setting in the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Iran

The next session at AoIR 2022 that I’m attending is on the COVID-19 pandemic, and we start with Hossein Kermani, whose focus is on the situation in Iran (and he begins with a shoutout to the people who are currently fighting their brutal regime in the streets – and online spaces – of Iran). He notes that there is plenty of research on intermedia agenda-setting, but questions about the mutual influence between traditional and social media in non-democratic countries have yet to be properly addressed.

In such countries, media will usually be more strongly restricted, and social media could thus play a powerful role in setting political agendas and shaping public opinions – even though the use of social media platforms may also be highly restricted. The present project explores this role of social media during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran.

The media landscape in Iran is highly restricted; all official media are under the control of the regime, and online media too need to be licenced by the regime and cannot cross certain lines. Social media fill the vacuum that this creates, and have been used widely to challenge the regime and create counter-narratives to regime propaganda. The government has sought to fight back against this by blocking platforms such as Twitter and Telegram, and by developing its own ‘national information network’, but local users are circumventing such restrictions by using VPN and other services.

The present project, then, compared the topics and themes present on mainstream and social media platforms, focussing for social media especially on Twitter, Telegram, and Instagram in January to April 2020. Random samples of 6,000 social media posts and 3,000 news articles from its dataset were manually coded, and five major themes and 16 sub-themes emerged from this analysis: news and information, virus and health information, solidarity and hope, mismanagement, and fun. Official Websites focussed predominantly on news and information, while mismanagement and health instructions were more prominent on Twitter and Telegram, respectively, and the other themes were also more visible on the social media platforms.

But even within these categories there were notable differences in how social and mainstream media addressed these topics; the agenda of these different media forms seemed independent of each other, rather than showing signs of any intermedia agenda-setting. This may be a result of Iran’s authoritarian, non-democratic media environment, as well as perhaps to this early stage of the pandemic.