Iranian Policy Makers & Social Media Policy making Challenges, Patterns & Explaination of a Proposed Model

This Article is intended to examine the current Iranian policy towards social media & the effective forces ruling this policy & future trends. So, during the interviews with 20 key Iranian policy-makers of virtual space, it provides a different & new cognition towards this challenging issue in Iranian social media policy-making. The statement of problem, concerns the conflict between policy-maker's mental paradigms & how the users use these media, which provide a proposed model to ameliorate the status quo between their media consumption & some determinative policy (like Filtering). Commixing the findings of systematic reviews of selected researches, with implementation and analysis of interviews through open, axial and selective coding with qualitative data analysis software MAXQDA, conducted to a proposed model for policy-making in this field. The research outcome determines that policy makers viewpoint to the social media is not necessarily in conflict with the users usage, but the inadequacy of existing structures, ignoring legal, administrative or controlling tools, as well as scattered policy making methods, provide too many challenges for social media policy-making. This has made it too difficult for policy-making institutions to converge & synergize. This article also emanates from the first academic research as a Ph.D thesis in social communication sciences, which is done after the establishment of "Supreme Council of Cyberspace" (by Iranian Supreme Leader in 2012) & the "Computer Crimes Law", passed by the Iranian parliament in 2010.