​Hossein Kermani is a senior researcher at the Political Communication Research Group of the University of Vienna, Austria. Hossein is studying social media, digital repression, computational propaganda and political activism in restrictive contexts, with particular attention to Iran. His research mainly revolves around a) the discursive power of social media in changing the microphysics of power and playing with the political and social structures, and b) the strategies that have been employed to manipulate and dismantle social media activism in non-democratic societies. In order to do so, Hossein is chiefly combining social and communication theories with computational techniques, in particular Social Network Analysis (SNA), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and critical discourse analysis. He is the principal investigator of the BeyondCBA project, which is funded by WWTF. 

Hossein has recently published in, among others, New Media and Society, Big Data & Society, Information, Communication, and Society and Asian Journal of Communication. His first book, Social Media Research in Iran (in Farsi), was published in 2020. His first English book, Twitter Activism in Iran, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2025. Hossein is now working on his second monograph, The Art of Delirium: Social Media Suppression in Authoritarian Regimes, which will be published by Nature Springer in 2027.

Updates

My book is published now! 

My new book, Twitter Activism in Iran, is published recently by Palgrave McMillan. This book investigates Twitter activism in authoritarian regimes, with particular attention to Iran. Twitter provides citizens around the globe with a free and quick way to engage in politics and public discourses. The role of Twitter, alongside other social media, is even more critical in authoritarian regimes where official media is systematically monitored and censured. Thus, social media is vital in restrictive (non-democratic) societies for people to seek their liberty, raise their voice, and create counter-narratives and discourses. There is substantial research into Twitter and democracy, both in democratic and non-democratic regimes. However, Iran, as a country with a high population of tech-savvy users who actively participate in political discussions online, remains understudied to a great extent. Twitter in Iran has been blocked since the 2009 presidential election and its subsequent protests, the Green Movement. Nevertheless, Iranians have been continually using it to date. Recently, another significant hashtag movement unfolded in Iran after the death of Mahsa Amini. But it is only an instance of how Iranians employ Twitter to fight a dictatorship. Given the unique context of Iran as a non-democratic society with a high number of Twitter users, this book tries to explore how Iranian users participate in politics, challenge the regime, mobilize their protests, and shape anti-regime discourses. It also examines the strategies that the Iranian regime takes to dismantle Twitter activism. Therefore, this work will fill some gaps in the existing literature on Twitter and democracy, which is relatively Western-centered. 

You can access the book via this link: 

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-81538-6