verbal violence in the comments on popular Iranian Instagram pages

The present study was aimed at examining verbal violence in the comments on popular Iranian Instagram pages. In the initial stage, the official Instagram pages of Iranian celebrities (who lives in Iran) with at least one million followers at the time that the present project was approved were identified. Then, the followers’ comments were analyzed in terms of verbal violence. In the present study, the Brown and Levinson's politeness theory (1978 & 1987) and the Impoliteness theory by Culpeper (2011) that are focused on the concept of face, and are related to the Goffman's theory of dramaturgy. The qualitative method of thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Finally, analysis of 1500 comments with verbal violence revealed 9 Global themes as follows: Celebrity’s personal and professional life, Welfare, Sexual, Gender, Politics, Religion, Ethnicity and Social concerns. In the next step, a thematic network of the global themes as the main and repeated patterns of the textual data was drawn, and subsequently, two other levels of themes, i.e. the Basic and Organizing themes were categorized, described, and analyzed in 9 tables.