The study of Public Political Voice with an Emphasis on the Role of Social Media: Towards a Grounded Theory

For the purpose of studying the development process of political voice, the campaign activists (#مادرم_ایرانی_است_من_کجایی_ام) were interviewed and the content of the most retweeted messages were qualitatively analyzed. Findings depict that “organize first, protest later” prepared a division of work between activist mothers, officials, NGO’s, and Journalists and some strategies like: preventing politicization, distribution in the virtual space after consensus between policy actors and intertextual reasoning were implemented. The social media became a ground for parts of the campaign to share contents and narrate, familiarize, organize and notify, do hashtag activism, recognize each other’s voice and try to make the voice heard by people and officials out of the campaign. The most important contexts are: the shortage of trust, negative cultural attitude to immigrants, antagonistic political environment, international (the insecure Middle East, international support), and social media (impossibility of incarceration of voice and facilitation of horizontal and vertical relations)