Social media and the new canon of use for social protest: The case of cutting hair to show solidarity with the women of Iran

Abstract

Social media platforms now play a major role in how societies debate social and political issues. Yet scholars have shown concern in regard to how the affordances of social media give form to such debate, shaping not only how we interact and engage with ideas, but also the very nature of the ideas themselves, notably where nuance becomes difficult and where bolder statements and shows of emotion are favored. In this paper, using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, we consider a trending feed from X in 2022, centred on the hashtag #MahsaAmini, which carried images of women cutting their hair in response to the death of a young woman in Iran at the hands of the security police. We reveal how the hashtag represents the highly complex situation in Iran through buzzwords and symbolism, and an ethnocentric discourse of gender empowerment. We explore how the affordances of social media as a material of communication have formed canons of use, or standardized social practices for social protest, where clear detail and purpose is lost behind collective moral display. Given that such hashtags can now have a leading role in agenda setting, this has consequences for the kinds of social and political discourses that come to occupy public space.