"Alone like a Magician...#Ali_Karimi", the examination of public opinion about the elections of the Iranian Football Federation: the social construction of reality on Twitter

Text-centric social media platforms such as Twitter play an important role in shaping public opinion to the extent that users can frame what they perceive as a reality. The purpose of the present study was to examine public opinion about the Football Federation elections on Twitter. Therefore, after the Football Federation elections, 2531 tweets were extracted by searching for hashtags and Brown and Clark (2006) approach was used to discover the themes, which yielded 57 subthemes. subthemes produced the 7 main themes "Characters and Stars", "Football Community", "Football Structure", "Non-Football", "Media", "Football Emotions" and "Corruption in Football" on Twitter. The findings showed that Twitter helps users create frames that traditional media cannot or do not want to create. Studying frames shows how users use social media to overcome traditional media coverage, provide alternatives, and change perceptions.