Influencers Mobilization for Feminist Digital Activism: A Thematic Analysis of Iran's 2022/2023 Protests on Instagram and Twitter (now X)

Social media has become an important tool in feminist hashtag movements. When examining feminist movements, there is a core group of users, referred to as influencers, that post often and engage with content and other users. These central players have many followers and, as a result, have greater influence on the spread of the social movement and its focus. Knowing that influencers can be central catalysts in activist efforts, there is a need to study how influencers contribute to the spread of a social movement including the type of content they post, and what function their content has. With feminist causes spreading globally and influencers playing such a central role, it becomes important to understand the functions of influencers who operate in censored environments. In this paper, we focus on the 2022/2023 Masha Amini Iranian protests. In the 2022/2023 Masha Amini Iranian protests activist influencers have not only encouraged and created spaces for “generating discourse on various social, cultural, and political issues in Iran” (Tahmasebi‐Birgani, 2017, p. 186), but they have also fueled the movement’s spread from both inside and outside of Iran. In this study, we draw from Lovejoy and Saxton’s (2012) theoretical framework of microblogging functions to examine the types of functions of activist influencers’ content. The present study investigates the diffusion of protest-related content across social media platforms to investigate cross-platform differences. These differences create a need for a comparative lens that challenges the notion of social media as a homogeneous and undifferentiated unit (Matassi & Boczkowski, 2023). The present paper has two goals:

1. To understand the communicative functions microblogging serves for activist influencers in the 2022/2023 Iranian protests on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram.
2. To identify and describe the similarities and differences between how activist influencers use X and Instagram for their activism.