The Impact of Twitter Social Network on the Political Participation of Tehran Users

Social networks are the new generation of internet websites and are consisted of people as well as groups. The inclination to social networks has brought a significant evolution to the social system of countries in all over the world. These networks have provided their users with an environment for communication, participation, and settingup groups mostly for the ones who are interested in sharing personal thoughts andactivities with others. In this regard, participation with political issues is one of themost important activities in social networks. Political participation is indeed citizenactivities in order to influence on the process of political decision making and decision taking of governments and it is a complicated work through which can be hopefulabout the growth of social resource, control and power, organizing a majority of the population and responsibility of the government. Therefore, possibilities and abilitiesof social networks and the way they perform during present century is perfectlyeffective. Consequently, the necessity of considering the role of these networks on thepolitical participation has urged me for doing this research using three intermediate variables of political trust, political knowledge and political efficiency. This researchis done based on “The role of social networks on the political participation ofcitizens”. In the following study, the citizens in Twitter that had 10,000 followers werechosen to be the target population and from which 320 people were selected as asample and the questionnaire was used as an instrument to examine the subject of thestudy. Among the four hypothesis of the research, findings showed that the amount ofTwitter usage and their political participation with intermediary of political trust andpolitical participation of citizens with intermediary of political knowledge has asignificant effect but the hypothesis on the role of Twitter usage on the politicalparticipation of citizens with political efficiency does not have a significant effect