A Content Analysis of Instagram social network pages (A case study of Persian Instagram from BBC News Agency)

Governments acknowledge the influence of social media in guiding public opinion. The ease of communication on these networks has allowed foreign media to communicate directly with the audience and guide public opinion. The present study has analyzed the BBC News Network posts on Persian Instagram to be specified the news motivation and goals of this news agency in four areas: political, social, economic and cultural.

This research is applied in terms of aim in terms of nature, it is descriptive-analytical and its research method is content analysis. The statistical population of the uploaded Instagram posts is Persian BBC and the sample size of December posts(November30 to December 30,2020). The unit of analysis is propositions, words and the full text of news posts that MaxQDA softeware was sued for data coding. The validity of the findings has been obtained by other experts (triangulation technique) and the reliability has been obtained by experts.

Based on the research findings, the posts uploaded in four dimensions have12 political themes, 5 social themes, 5 economic themes and 6 cultural themes.

In the final analysis of the themes of most of the BBC Persian news posts in the mentioned dimensions, it has a negative aspect and includes features that are threatening for the field of order and security.