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TikTok, Visuality, Music, the Diaspora, and Iran’s Gen-Z Uprising

TikTok, Visuality, Music, the Diaspora, and Iran’s Gen-Z Uprising

Picture of Tom Walsh

Tom Walsh

Table of Contents

Editor’s Introduction:

As censorship and suppression by the Islamic Republic evolve, so do Iranian strategies of resistance. During the 2009 Green Movement, Iranians began using social media in innovative ways to organize and disseminate information. In the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” (WLF) protests, a new social media platform emerged, offering Iranians—especially Gen Z—a novel space to strategically and, at times, subtly amplify their voices. In this article, Dr. Tom Walsh examines TikTok’s role in amplifying the message of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in Iran. Dr. Walsh kindly allowed us to publish his paper pre-print prior to peer-review publication after taking part in our 2023 Middle East Studies Association conference panel Exploring the Inspirations and Ambitions Behind “Woman, Life, Liberty.” Dr. Walsh argues that young Iranians, both in the country and abroad, have skillfully used the platform’s visual, linguistic, and auditory features to raise awareness of the movement’s core themes. He uses “Visual Discourse Tracing” to analyze the 30 most-liked TikTok videos, highlighting key visual elements such as haircutting, hijab removal or burning, and make-up tutorials as symbols of resistance. He underscores the importance of elements like movement, language, and music in creating a transnational protest culture, highlighting the crucial role TikTok played in amplifying the voices of the WLF movement and attracting global attention to their cause. 

As Dr. Walsh offers an in-depth examination of social media trends during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, the Iran 1400 Project complements this analysis with a range of content that explores the broader evolution of the movement over the past century, including various forms of resistance. Furthermore, Dr. Walsh’s article is part of a comprehensive collection of content provided by the Project on the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement listed below. 

 

Abstract

This paper argues that understanding the diversity of social protest is crucial to conceptualizing the character, inspiration, and ambition of Iran’s Gen-Z-led uprising, both at home and across the diaspora. Through this, it addresses several considerable gaps within the social science literature. Previously, few scholars have theorized the specificity of the visual, as a powerful political tool. There is a growing, but limited, literature on social media as a vehicle for change. Furthermore, a lot of this research has focused on Twitter/X – a platform unpreferable amongst ‘Zoomers’. TikTok is a social media platform that depends on visuality and audio. As such, it creates its specific forms of messaging. Although not sufficient on its own, a core lens through which to understand the protests is generational. This paper seeks to apply a methodology of “Visual Discourse Tracing” to the Iranian protests – adapting it to allow for multimodal analysis. It uses this carefully devised, process-driven method, to highlight the core ways TikTok has amplified the message of the Iranian protests. In doing so, it aims to contribute to future studies into social protest, encouraging researchers to challenge previously held assumptions and biases. This applies not only to the discipline but to Iranian studies specifically. The majority of Iranian Gen-Z protesters, both at home and abroad, were born after 9/11. As such, they do not possess strong anti-Western views. What they do remember is Khamenei’s brutal suppression of the 2009 Green Movement, his denial of vaccines, and the downing of Flight 752. The Islamic Republic is no longer able to control the youth’s access to the wider world, and their hope of a more liberal life. The Iranian youth are more active on TikTok, and the Iranian diaspora has been fundamental to the visibility of the protests across social media. For a sense of perspective, in the first month of protests there were 350 million Tweets on the Persian Mahsa_Amini hashtag – that is 50 million more than there were on the Ukraine hashtag between February and the end of November. Many of these tweets are accompanied by visuality, depicting the brutality of the regime and the strength of the protesters. Together, visuality and audio define the character of contemporary protest. Their specific character across social media needs proper theorizing when understanding the wider Iranian protest movement.

 

Introduction

This paper highlights the core visual, linguistic, and auditory styles that have characterized the Iranian protest movement across TikTok, following the murder of Mahsa Amini on the 16th of September 2022. It focuses on analyzing the 30 most-liked TikTok videos, running from the 16th of September to the 31st of October 2022. This period coincided with an unprecedented period of international coverage. On Twitter/X, there were 350 million Tweets on the Persian #Mahsa_Amini hashtag during this time (Jones, 2022). TikTok also saw huge spikes in content-creation. The platform is a fairly novel, under-researched, social media app, which by its very nature, lends itself to multimodal analysis. Content is visual, linguistic, and auditory. I have been working on a methodology called Visual Discourse Analysis (VDT), which can help highlight how these various forms of discourse have been used to raise awareness of women’s struggle for freedom within Iran. The paper speaks to the central research question:

How have Iranians within Iran, and across the diaspora community, used TikTok to highlight the cause of “Woman, Life, Freedom”, following the murder of Mahsa Amini?

In answer to this, the paper argues that young Iranians have effectively harnessed the potential of popular TikTok formats and styles to raise awareness of the lived experiences of Iranian women and, in doing so, aid the cause of the protest movement. A range of styles have been used including make-up tutorials, fashion-style videos, cartoons, repetition, compilations, and music, to create a largely homogenous multimodal protest culture. It is not removed from the movement on the ground in Iran, as it directly speaks to it, adopting the core symbolism of the real-world protests, including hijab removal and burning, hair-cutting, and the use of political slogans. As TikTok is primarily used by young people, this part of the Iranian movement has played a crucial role in raising youth awareness across the world. To date, the top 30 videos have amassed over 42 million likes, and this number continues to climb. 

I am aware of the importance of allowing this content to speak for itself and refraining from inflecting too much of my perspective onto it. As such, the remainder of this introduction discusses my motivations for studying this topic, detailing an awareness of positionality, my limitations, and the narrow contribution I can make to knowledge. 

Secondly, the paper briefly comments on history, acknowledging that this incarnation of the women’s movement cannot be separated from the longer nuanced, complex, struggle within Iran. Thirdly, I provide an account of the murder of Mahsa Amini, the suppression of the protest movement, the subsequent firestorm across social media, and the generational elements characterizing the struggle. Fourthly, I detail the specific utility of TikTok as a site of social protest, discussing its ability to capture attention through multimodality and its power within the Iranian protest movement. Fifthly, I detail the specific power of the visual, understanding it as immediate, circulable, and often unambiguous – as such it has an acutely emotive and powerful impact. Sixthly, the paper details the methodology of VDT, showing its suitability for capturing the multimodal nature of the visual culture, present across the 30 TikTok Videos. Seventhly, the paper presents the results, Step 1 of VDT (Visual Design,) presenting 3 tables. Table 1.0 details the occurrence of various visual frames, Table 2.0 shows the different music that appeared across the videos, and Table 3.0 details the various uses of the English Language. Eighthly, I analyze the production, distribution, and consumption of the videos –  limited in their reach due to the high levels of data protection on the platform and the option of anonymity – as Step 2 of the methodology, known as “Visual Interpretation.” Generally speaking, the videos were produced by lone actors, freely acting as young people seeking to raise awareness. Ninthly, the paper conducts Step 3 of its method, “Visual Explanation”, including Step 4, “Omission”. Here, the core visual frames are condensed into several sections for analysis – these are “Get Ready With Me Videos/Make-up Videos”, “Hair Cutting/Hijab Burning and Removal,” “Iranian Woman to Camera,” and “Cartoons and Banners.” Together, these different frames worked to create an effective, powerful, and emotive visual culture through which Iranian young people at home and abroad have been able to project their voices in pursuit of social change.

 As an explicitly contemporary account, this paper is primarily concerned with what is new about the Iranian protests. It speaks to Iranian scholar Janet Afary’s contention that:

One also needs to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to capture those subtle transformations in gender roles that are not reflected in historical accounts. Forays into poetry, short stories, novels, cartoons, and cinema, as well as works by cultural anthropologists, sociologists, literary critics, and economists of the region can yield great results (Afary, 2009, 1)

They have, however, also used the English language to appeal to international audiences. Even if many original slogans and messages were in Farsi, protestors have worked alongside the Iranian diaspora to provide translations and cast as wide a net as possible. The now famous protest song “Baraye” is a case in point – remaining in Farsi phonically, but with precise written English translations accompanying versions of the video (Speedy5310, 2022). The world-famous group Coldplay welcomed exiled Iranian actor Golshifteh Farahani on stage to amplify this protest song around the world (Guardian News, 2022). The English language can be seen as part of a broader effort to cast as wide a net as possible when spreading the message of the Iranian protests: “Woman, Life, Freedom”.

 

A Brief Note on History

As this paper is primarily concerned with what is new about the current Iranian protests, less attention is paid to providing a detailed historiography of the women’s struggle in Iran. However, it is important to remember that both Islamic and secular women have been protesting against the Islamic Republic’s repressive policies since the revolution in 1979. Going back even further, Esfahani correctly states that “[f]or more than a century, Iranian women have been trying to improve their status in the Iranian patriarchal system” (2014, 34). In Iran, there is a long and storied history of active female protest, which is often misunderstood and over-simplified. 

In 1979, despite the leftist posturing of Ayatollah Khomeini, once in power, the Islamic Republic quickly abolished the Shah’s Family Protection Law. This move granted men what amounted to full custodianship over women, giving them absolute power in matters of divorce, and reducing the legal age of marriage for girls to nine (Mahdi, 2004, 434). Many women were imprisoned, tortured, and executed for their involvement in protests. One Iranian woman, who managed to flee the country, was Nahid Persson Sarvestani. In the film, “My Stolen Revolution” (2013), she stated: “[f]or 30 years, I have tried to keep what happened in Iran away from me. But everything today brings my memories to life. I was lucky… to escape. Many others remained”. The suffering of Iranian women is connected throughout the long struggle and cannot be completely isolated into specific periods. Also, many members of the Iranian diaspora continue to feel the suffering experienced by their compatriots in a real and visceral way. The women’s movement is highly nuanced and cannot be purely understood as a battle between Western values and Iranian values or between secularism and Islam.

Many female Islamists within Iran interpret their faith in a non-patriarchal way, but male-dominated leadership seeks to constrict the rights of women as a tool of social control. It is incorrect to portray the women’s movement as explicitly areligious or secular – many practicing Muslims within Iran want to restore women’s right to choose when it comes to hijab. In the 1990s, the editor of Islamist women’s magazine Zanan, Shahla Shirkat, stated that: “[w]e should tolerate and respect each other’s convictions. Even though we do not share the same philosophy, belief and thought, we can and should work together” (Kian, 1997, 91). Iranian women across the religious and political spectrum have shown tolerance and understanding in their approach to women’s rights.

Furthermore, the involvement of women within the political system is not as great a taboo as may be expected. Contrary to Western assumptions, “the militant participation of women… does not conflict with their traditional seclusion and treatment as second-class citizens, and their roles as… wives and daughters” (Tabari and Yeganeh, 1982, 14). It is important to note that female engagement within the political system has been a mainstay since the revolution, albeit within the narrow parameters of the Islamic Constitution of Iran.

 

Mahsa Amini, Social Media, and the Iranian Protests

On the 16th of September 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, was murdered by “The Guidance Patrol”. They are also sometimes referred to as “the morality police”. She was arrested for not wearing the hijab “properly”. For this, she was beaten severely. Footage shows her collapsing, as a result of severe head trauma. Since then, Iranians have been protesting in a variety of different ways – in the streets, in places of work, in schools, and on social media. Popular slogans have framed and guided the protest movement, including “Woman, Life, Freedom”, “Death to Khamenei”, and “Independence, freedom, optional hijab”. Videos from the country have shown women and girls publicly cutting their hair and burning their hijabs. Footage also shows women knocking off the turbans of Iranian Shi’a clerics, showing the middle finger to the Ayatollah, and stamping on his pictures. While women have been protesting the Islamic Republic for decades, the scale of the movement and the severity of its messaging and action are significant. The involvement of young people, especially those from Generation Z (born 1997-2012), has given these protests a unique and distinctly contemporary character. Much of their protest has been played out on TikTok, the social media application. 

These young people have faced severe consequences for their involvement in the protest movement. The Iranian “Human Rights Activist News Agency” puts the total number of murdered protesters at 530 (BBC, 2023). Protestors are facing long prison sentences, and some face the death penalty. Hadis Najafi, 22, and Sarina Esmailzadeh and Nika Shakarami, both 16, were killed by Iranian security forces. They supported the women’s movement through social media activism by regularly posting on TikTok. Their families have faced untold suffering, compounded by being forced into false confessions by the Iranian state (Ghobadi, 2022).

While people from across Iranian society have supported the movement, the Iranian youth have represented the tip of the spear. Undeterred by the death of their peers, protesters doubled down for many months, growing the profile of the movement across the world.

As such, there is a sense in which this movement can be explained as “generational.” The median age in Iran is currently 31.7 (World Population Review, 2023). Gen Z protestors, often called Zoomers, are especially tech-savvy and adept at avoiding surveillance and circumventing the restrictiveness of the Iranian state. They also have a completely different understanding of the world than is often assumed of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Both within Iran and among the diaspora, the majority of Gen Z activists were born after 9/11. None of them have any direct memory of the Iran-Iraq War and the threat of Saddam Hussein and very few of them were alive when George W. Bush included Iran within his “Axis of Evil.” Their primary antagonist is the Islamic Republic and its leaders, who suppressed the 2009 Green Movement, denied access to COVID-19 vaccines, and restricted their rights to freedom of expression and bodily autonomy (Dagres, 2022). This generation can connect with the West via the Internet and many are drawn to Western culture.

The anti-Western sentiment of the late 20th Century, on which the Islamic Republic used to depend, has gradually deteriorated within the psyche of the Iranian youth. The Islamic Republic can no longer depend on popular support for its regime security, only strict authoritarian control of the central arms of the state. Turnout was only 48.8% in the 2021 election – the lowest ever (Statista, 2023a). A total of 372,687 votes cast were invalid, with many believed to be spoilt ballots (Statista, 2023b). The recent protests have compounded the problem for the government, bringing forth condemnation from domestic, regional, and international actors. Through the reach of social media, the movement has been able to achieve unprecedented levels of publicity internationally. Elements of the Iranian diaspora, calculated at 4,037,258 in 2021 (Academic Accelerator, 2021,) played a central role on TikTok. Through social media, “transnational space becomes a space in which different physical and virtual positions and actions overlap, enabling the construction and negotiation of identities and interactions among Iranians all over the world” (Ghorashi and Boersma, 2009, 687).

 

TikTok as a Site of Social Protest

TikTok is a social media app created by Beijing-based designer Zhang Yiming in 2016. It specializes in short form videos, varying from fifteen seconds to three minutes in length. Unlike any other app, TikTok is notorious for its compulsive quality. As soon as one opens the app, videos selected by the algorithm (to match your preferences) begin to play with accompanying audio. By simply swiping upwards, users can enjoy unlimited access to highly stimulating content, catered specifically to their interests. In 2023, TikTok users spent an average of 95 minutes per day on the platform (Wallaroo Media, 2023). It is highly interactive, encouraging users to collaborate and cross-reference each other. This is done through mediums such as “duets” (creating videos with others) and “stitches” (clipping and incorporating elements of other people’s videos into your own). In this way, it facilitates the rapid construction of complex, inter-connected, visual cultures. Fan, Luo, and Wang (2023, 226) found that whilst “research indicated that… escapism and mood enhancement are the primary motivations”, TikTok also served as a means of “expressing the hidden self and connecting with friends and secondary causes”. 

Videos are regularly accompanied by music. Social movements on TikTok regularly repeat the same song throughout their content, knitting the protest together. Music has been a vital tool of social movements for generations. It is hard to think of any protest movement throughout the 20th and 21st centuries that did not have a soundtrack. Music plays a specific role, in that, “[i]t helps establish and maintain collective identity, leads to vitalizing emotions, takes advantage of free space afforded by political opportunities and helps establish and maintain social movement culture” (Danaher, 2010, 818). Music has the potential to bridge gaps between “us” and them”, provoking “vitalizing” emotional reactions and engendering solidarity (Taylor, 2000). Rhythm can effectively work as the marching band, driving collective group consciousness.

TikTok videos tend to contain subtitles (most commonly in the English language). This means that messages can be clearly translated, providing the visual imagery with fine detail. There is little room for ambiguity on the platform – meaning is conveyed in a direct manner.  The use of the English language projects and amplifies the message of the Iranian protests as widely as possible.

TikTok content is multimodal, usually containing visual, musical, and linguistic discourse. The fusion of these modes of communication creates unambiguous, emotive, connected, and direct videos. Many of these videos copy or mimic each other, using similar custom templates and songs. While it would be reductive to call the videos “memes”, they do seem to be “memetic,” in that they “[relate] to each other in complex, creative, and surprising ways” (Shifman, 2013, 2). In this sense, they are intertextual and speak to each other. Individual TikTok videos of the Iranian protest movement cannot be understood in isolation, but as small elements of culture, that constitute meaning as part of a much larger whole. 

Put simply, the visual and musical components hold the emotive, impactful, and visceral power of each video. Spoken linguistic discourse and subtitles ensure that the protest videos are unambiguous in their meaning. This clarity is essential for successful protest movements (Satell, 2016).

As such, social movements benefit significantly from the platform, as “[t]he connections between users, including their (in)direct interactions, the intimacies, and other affective registers yielded, function as momentums of the movements by forming ‘affective publics’” (Lee and Abidin, 2023, 3). TikTok is a particularly visceral and evocative platform, in which most videos are accompanied by music. Visual content is often highly stylized and caricatured, even when a video attempts to promote a brand or provoke a comedic reaction. So, when TikTok is used to raise awareness of political oppression, the format facilitates the construction of a highly graphic, emotive, and impactful digital narrative. Users deploy “non-verbal messages in strengthening the messages delivered so that their presentations are stronger and get a wider reach” (Putro and Palupi, 2022, 41). Literat and Kligler-Vilenchk (2023, 1) view the platform as “a vital space to study social movements due to its centrality in youth lives and its ability to give voice to youth political expression in richly creative ways.”

In Iran, TikTok is technically banned, like most social media platforms, but youth activists can access the app through Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). The “Regulatory System for Cyberspace Bill” has sought to further restrict Iranians’ access to the Internet and social media in an aim to force the population onto the restricted and monitored “National Information Network.” In particular, the bill has sought to outlaw VPNs, which many young Iranians use to access blocked sites like Facebook, Twitter/X, and YouTube. Thus, as the Islamic Republic attempts to suppress the voice of protest at every turn, the Iranian diaspora finds new ways to amplify their increasingly quietened voices. As Roksaneh Salartash put it:

Many argue that “performative activism” on social media is not effective, but the current uprising in Iran is a unique case. The people in Iran are so limited in their speech. Protestors who share photos and videos of the revolution online often get arrested or threatened by police. This is why the Iranian diaspora worldwide have become their voices… While the regime uses the media as a tool of oppression, the Iranian diaspora uses it to expose the country’s human rights violations and keep the movement’s momentum around the world (Salartash, 2022)

The Mahsa Amini Persian hashtag had 350 million tweets by the end of October 2022 (Jones, 2022). On TikTok, there are single videos on the English Mahsa Amini hashtag with millions of likes. The amplification of the message is unparalleled within the last several years of Middle Eastern politics. Even from a global perspective, the Ukraine hashtag only received 250 million tweets in the first nine months of the Russian invasion, showing the true scale of this movement.

 

Specific Power of the Visual

This paper understands visuality as having an immediate, emotive, often unambiguous nature, which marks it as distinct from other forms of discourse. Gabi Schlag (2016) provided the motivation for analysis of the visual, pointing to its neglect within international relations, security studies, and political science. The temptation has been to focus on language through discourse analysis, neglecting the visual as its own powerful form of communication. As she put it, “symbolic forms do themselves constitute meaning and cannot be reduced to the spoken or written word alone” (Schlag, 2016, 181).

Lene Hansen (2011) argued that images are immediate, circulable, and ambiguous. They are immediate in the sense that they elicit an emotional reaction as soon as they are observed. This is especially true when considering the visceral and often traumatic visual content contained within the videos of the Iranian women’s movement. There is good science to support this, particularly within the field of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), showing that the majority of flashbacks contain visual memories (Wang et al., 2019). Visual stimuli leave a specifically deep and profound impact on the human psyche. They leave an imprint. As Pant (2015) points out, the human brain translates visual data and processes its meaning 60,000 more quickly than language. In this way, images are uniquely and immediately emotional.

In the world of social media, especially TikTok, images are increasingly “circulable”. Hansen uses the term “circulability” to refer to the rapid way in which images spread. Pictures depicting traumatic events do so especially rapidly, searing themselves into the public consciousness. This was true even before the world of social media, in which images such as “Tank Man” and “Napalm Girl” forced their way into the international psyche due to both their emotive and explanatory character (James Der Derian, 1992, 134). A contemporary example of this is Alan Kurdi, a two-year-old Kurdish Syrian boy whose dead body was pictured on a Turkish beach. This image spread to elicit an outpouring of support for refugees fleeing Syria, raising awareness of their struggle. As Mielczarek put it, “[w]ithin hours, Aylan was a symbol, a hashtag and a meme” (2018, 1). Social media exaggerates the immediacy of this process. When opening an app, users can see traumatic and disturbing content ‘by accident’. As Hansen writes, this is something to pay close attention to, as “the possibility of seeing – even if one decides not to – is in itself an important condition” (Hansen, 2011, 57). While this may be traumatizing for individuals, social movements benefit from this ability to elicit widespread awareness and provoke a response.

The third part of Hansen’s theory, “ambiguity”, is where this paper deviates. Images, especially traumatic and emotive images, often have unambiguous meanings. For instance, the image of the second plane hitting the World Trade Centre has near universal immediate meaning – words are not needed to fill in the blanks. Subtitles and headings can help to frame a picture or use it politically, but they are not always necessary. The words can add to meaning but are not required for meaning to exist. This is often forgotten in the modern era of social media, in which content creators pack their videos full of captions and scripts. Often, traumatic images speak for themselves.

 

Visual Discourse Tracing and Multimodal Analysis

Across a variety of different case studies, I have been gradually developing a systematic approach to visual discourse analysis, adapting LeGreco and Tracy’s (2009) process of discourse tracing and Wang’s (2014) approach to visual analysis. I decided to coin this approach Visual Discourse Tracing (VDT). While this paper focuses primarily on the visual, it also includes an appreciation of the multimodal nature of the data considered. TikTok videos are multimodal in that they contain “discourses which involve more than one mode of semiosis” (O’Halloran, 2004). Most prominently, they contain captions/subtitles and music. How these media types contribute to meaning has been discussed previously – this understanding is integrated into VDT, to offer a holistic impression of the wider movement.

Visual Discourse Tracing uses Wang’s (2014) model as a framework. The first three steps are borrowed from their work, but two innovations are made to step three, and an entirely new step (step four) has been added. The approach:

 

Step 1: Visual Design. 

What is actually in the image/video? What objects, people, and events are depicted?

Step 2: Visual interpretation. 

Borrowing heavily from Fairclough’s (2003) notion of interpretation, this step seeks to analyze three factors – production, distribution, and consumption: “during ‘production’, producers… are the main focus; ‘distribution’ focuses on how the news media disseminate ideologies…; and ‘consumption’ is concerned with how viewers unconsciously assimilate the ideology” (Wang, 2014, 269). 

Step 3: Visual explanation. 

What wider contexts help to make sense of the image/video? What events are occurring? What relevant social practices are at play? Which themes are most prominent, and how do they relate to/explain reality?

In my previous paper, ‘How to analyse visual propaganda in the Middle East’, I made some additions to Step 3:

“Innovation A: It is important at this stage to consider the idea of frame, or narrative. Borrowed from semiotic analysis, this concept refers to “a central organizing idea or storyline that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events, weaving a connection among them” (Gamson & Modigliani, 1987, 143). Awareness of prominent narratives is important, as it allows for better understanding of purpose and meaning” (Walsh, 2022, 7).

“Innovation B: To be comprehensive, research projects should consider the specificities of these relevant identities, for example, sectarian identity in the Middle East. This requires significant analysis of data and literature, as well as theoretical innovation” (Walsh, 2022, 7).

I also created a new step, which will be integrated with Step 3 in this paper:

Step 4: Omission. 

What is missing? What does the image not contain and why is this significant? How might meaning change if certain aspects of the image were different?

This is a crucial and often neglected step in understanding the visual. Understanding what is not shown is crucial for unpacking the wider meaning and intentionality behind the image. As well as this, “by substituting various elements in your mind’s eye… it is possible to build a more nuanced understanding of each to the overall meaning of the image and its dependence on cultural codes and myths” (Hansen et al., 1998, 213). It can also help to unpick some of the biases of the observer. For instance, when observing images of Middle Eastern suffering, it can be useful to think of how Western audiences may respond differently if these were images of Ukrainian suffering. Thinking about these ideas creates a more expansive, explorational, and potentially emancipatory approach to research. In this way, VDT offers many potential avenues for impactful work across a wide variety of disciplines.


Through this approach, and an understanding and integration of the analysis of other forms of discourse, this paper shows the specific nature of the Iranian protest on TikTok. It does not just focus on the image itself, but also the wider social practices, identities, musical trends, and contexts that help to frame them. Using this, it is possible to show how the videos speak to each other, constituting a social movement that is both Iranian and international, domestic and diasporic, secular and Islamic, homogenous and heterogenous. Any attempts to simplify the movement or find a catch-all explanation will always fall short. This paper’s research spirit speaks to the essential nuance of the movement. As opposed to an “ethnography”, this paper’s approach can be defined as an “automatography” (Jones, 2019), making sense of the character of the Iranian protests across social media. The socio-digital exchanges of content creators contain images, are collaborative, and contain unique digital tools (Oprea, 2019). As such, this paper plays close attention to the technodiscursive specificities of TikTok. 

 

Results and Discussion

Step 1: Visual Design

Visual Content Videos that Contained it
Hair Cutting 15
Actual Physical Organized Protests 11
Tears 14
Women 30
Men 15
Children 2
Posters/placards/banners 7
Cartoons 3
One Woman speaking to Camera [Iranian] 10 [9]
The Hijab removed/burnt 3
Make-up/face paint depicting violence of Iranian regime 6
Picture(s)/Video(s) of Mahsa Amini 7
“GRWM (Get ready with me)” video format [Contains clip of GRWM Video] 3 [1]
Dancing 2

Table 1.0 Visual Content in top 28 #MahsaAmini TikTok Videos

 

Song Videos that Contained it
Tom Odell – Another Love 12
Indila – Tourner Dans Le Vide 3
Phantogram – Black Out Days 1
David Guetta ft. Sia – Titanium 1
Halsey – Without Me 1
Alan Walker and Ava Max – Alone, Pt. II 1
Vague 003 – drowning (slowed + reverb) 1
Matt Mattese – As the World Caves in 1
Anil Emre Daldal – M. 1
Other 1

Table 2.0 Songs in top 28 #MahsaAmini TikTok Videos

 

Type of Content Videos that Contained it
Video Caption 30
Printed text pasted on video 21
Subtitles 4

Table 3.0 English Language in top 28 #MahsaAmini TikTok Videos

 

Notably, all of these videos contained women. Half of the videos contained men – lending credence to the notion that this is not solely a women’s movement, but one commanding support from across Iran and the wider diaspora. 14/30 contained people crying real tears, demonstrative of the outpouring of shock and emotion following the murder of Mahsa Amini and the subsequent brutality enacted on protestors.

Videos varied in style. Many involved Iranian women, both within Iran and abroad, speaking directly to camera. Others showed footage of real physical protests, happening in Iran and across the world, in solidarity with the advancement of women’s rights in the country. Others use the “Get Ready with Me” (GRWM) fashion format. Haircutting featured prominently, as well as the removal and burning of headscarves. These practices have been cornerstone symbols of the internal protests within Iran. Their prominence across diasporic groups and allies shows how the protest has trickled into the wider global consciousness. In this sense, those within Iran and outside of Iran are talking to each other through shared symbolism. Make-up was used in a creative, profound, and evocative way – depicting black eyes, blood, slogans, and calling for help. Make-up effectively and simply symbolised the violence facing women in the Islamic Republic.

The most prominent song – tying many of the videos together – was a version of British singer-songwriter Tom Odell’s (2012) song “Another Love”. On TikTok, songs are often clipped. The most impactful lyrics are chosen, to fit with the shortened video length. The lyrics included are as follows:

And if somebody hurts you, I wanna fight
But my hand’s been broken one too many times
So I’ll use my voice, I’ll be so fucking rude
Words, they always win, but I know I’ll lose

And I’d sing a song that’d be just ours
But I sang ’em all to another heart
And I wanna cry, I wanna learn to love
But all my tears have been used up

On another love, another love
All my tears have been used up 


The only other song that appeared more than once was Indila’s (2014) Tourner Dans Le Vide. The lyrics:

French:

J’aimerais tellement lui dire mais je n’ose pas

Lui qui m’fait…

 

Tourner dans le vide, vide

Tourner dans le vide, vide

Tourner dans le vide, il me fait tourner

Dans le vide, vide, vide

Tourner, tourner dans le vide

Tourner dans le vide, il me fait tourner

 

English:

I would so much like to tell her but I don’t dare

He who makes me…

 

Spinning around in the void, void

Spinning around in the void, void

Spinning in the void, it makes me spin

In the void, void, void

Turn, turn in the void

Spinning in the void, it makes me spin

 

Although French and Persian songs were included, all of the written and spoken language was in English. Aware of the English language’s unique ability to harness higher view and like counts, influencers use it in a variety of formats to convey meaning. All videos contained captions, with hashtags, offering support to the women’s movement and calling for awareness. 21/30 videos contained printed English text, that essentially hovers over the video itself. This is an effective and sharp tool for grabbing attention and establishing messaging.

 

Step 2: Visual Interpretation

Production, Distribution, Consumption

It was not possible to pinpoint the location of each account and/or video. TikTok allows users to withhold their location from public view, in line with security and data protection. However, some accounts choose to provide this information regardless. The young woman depicted in @tytysplanett (2022) and @persiatok’s (2022) video suggests specifically that she is in Iran. Many of the accounts are based in Europe, Canada, and the United States (US). At least six of the accounts were made by people based in Europe, six in Canada, and two in the US (at the time of the video’s creation). One account was confirmed to be based in Dubai. However, many of the videos contained compilations of clipped footage from all around the world – from North Africa, to China, to Turkey, Europe, North America, and beyond. This style was particularly popular within the “haircutting” videos – showing brief clips of people from around the world, symbolizing transnational unity.

The overwhelming majority of the videos contained content involving Iranian women from across the world. Videos containing an Iranian woman speaking directly to camera are easier to confirm as legitimate lone actors, whose intentionality is merely to inform, raise awareness, and engender support. However, TikTok makes it especially difficult to get detailed information about accounts and influencers. Some of the accounts that clip footage from elsewhere are made by obscurely named, anonymous accounts, such as @persiatok and @itsblurry7, which contain only one and five videos respectively. Unfortunately, it is impossible to dig into the origin of these accounts as no personal information is required to set up an account. 

More unfortunately, there has been significant evidence across other social media apps, such as Twitter/X, that nefarious actors have been co-opting the Iranian protests for their own agendas. With accounts that do not even provide a name, and choose to remain entirely anonymous, only sharing content from other users, researchers would do well to bear this in mind. This is not to accuse any specific account of subversion or co-optation, only to instill a healthy skepticism about non-original content and its intentionality. 

Marc Owen Jones suggested that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the US, Israel, and the expelled Iranian group Mojahedin-e Khalq, have been amplifying the message across Twitter to advance their positions (Walters, 2022). As a social media analysis expert, he discovered the 350 million Tweets on the Mahsa Amini hashtag. On observing the data, he pointed to worrying trends suggesting nefarious involvement. He stated:

“Who is tweeting these things? OK, so let’s start with the obvious one, political activists, there’s journalists, there’s real people who are politically involved using the hashtag, right? Of course, that’s happening. What’s very interesting though, is there’s the sort of unaccountable tweeting about this, fundamentally anonymous (Walters, 2022). 

There are some relatively anonymous accounts within my own data on TikTok, but they only account for a very small percentage – only two of the accounts are completely anonymous. However, when considering the wider movement, it is essential to avoid assuming the intention, person, and motive behind anonymous accounts. Iranian journalist Farnush Ghadery (2022), who also showed that far-right Islamophobic groups have been co-opting the movement, summarized this approach well, writing: “[f]rom outside the country, we owe it to the Iranian protesters – some of whom are sacrificing their lives – to portray their efforts adequately and denounce politically oriented, opportunistic co-optation”.

 Fortunately, this problem appears less of an issue on TikTok due to the personalized nature of content on the platform. The majority of content creators are young people acting relatively independently of external actors. Their videos spread rapidly across the world, most prominently to other young people, who engage via commenting, sharing, and “stitching”. 25% of users are between 10 and 19 years old, 22.4% between 20 and 29, and 21.7% between 30 and 39 (Shepherd, 2023). After conducting a 6-year research project, Literat and Kligler-Vilenchik (2023) found that TikTok has heightened the political awareness of the world’s youth. 

The top 30 TikTok videos mentioning Mahsa Amini in their caption or a hashtag between 16th September and the 31st of October 2022 have amassed 42,219,000 likes as of August 2023. Each video received at least 514.2 thousand likes. All of them contained some use of the English language. TikTok does not allow researchers to view where these likes came from in the world. This is unfortunate, as it would give a sense of where the movement resonated most. 

Nevertheless, this paper can reliably say that the content was primarily created by the Iranian diaspora, most commonly by young women. Most content appears to be entirely genuine, produced by lone actors seeking to raise awareness of the movement. Reaching over 42 million likes, these 30 videos have had a profound effect on raising the international consciousness of the Iranian protest movement, reaching a wide international audience.

 

Step 3: Visual Explanation (including analysis of Step 4: Omission)

This section analyses several of the key visual themes, popular among the 30 TikTok videos. The universal presence of women is significant in itself, demonstrating the way in which the movement has been led by female voices and has generated solidarity from women across the world. However, this section wants to explore the more specific visual dynamics of the videos, so the content “women”, “men”, and “children” are not provided with their own sections of analysis. It is simply important to remember that whilst the movement has been led, both domestically and internationally, by young women, it has enjoyed a far wider base of support, that transcends age and gender. 

“Tears” are present across essentially all the various sections, so reference is made to crying as a powerful visual tool throughout. This interacts effectively with the Tom Odell (2012) song, whose most prominent lyrics are “all my tears have been used up”. “Actual Physical Protests” are present in many videos – their relevance and crucial importance across the world is viscerally displayed throughout. Protests of this kind are powerful:

Because they direct attention toward an injustice and can change people’s minds, a slow but profoundly powerful process. Protests work because protestors can demonstrate the importance of a belief to a society at large and let authorities understand that their actions will be opposed, especially if those protesters are willing to take serious risks for their cause (Tufecki, 2020).

 Many of these protest videos contain images of Mahsa Amini. “Pictures/Videos of Mahsa Amini” appear across various types of video – as such, they are discussed throughout, due to their central importance to the whole protest movement.  

Condensing the visual content into thematic sub-sections, the following section analyzes: “GRWM & make-up”, “Hair cutting & Removal/burning of hijab”, “Iranian women to camera”, and “Cartoons & posters, placards, and banners”. However, the other themes, contained within Table 1.0, music from Table 2.0, and use of the English language from Table 3.0 are integrated into their analysis. Together, these visual styles have created a rich and powerful protest culture across TikTok, mirroring many of the central practices present within the grassroots, physical, protests within Iran.

 

3.1 GRWM/Make-up

One particularly powerful form of video common across TikTok is the “Get Ready with Me” (GRWM) format. Writing on the impact of GRWM videos, Amy Lynne Hill has argued that influencers “engage in acts of stylized self-representation, and over time and through the repeated synoptic viewing of their videos… they each seemingly stabilize into culturally intelligible female subjects” (2019, 338). These videos usually show young women trying on the latest fashion, but as Gen Z has become increasingly socially aware, it has used these formats as effective tools of protest. The videos in Table 1.0 show young women putting on modest clothes and headscarves, only to leave a small piece of hair visible – the text reads in various versions of “GRWM to get killed in Iran”. These subtle visual cues hold significant power in meaning-making, a powerful tool to convey a sense of incredulity and disbelief over the oppressiveness of the Iranian regime to a young global audience. 

(@nikaazarrii, 2022b)

(@soulmaz, 2022)

(@sararoudbari, 2022)

The screenshots above all show young women wearing headscarves. The three captions read “Grwm to get killed in Iran” (@nikaazarrii, 2022b), “POV getting ready to be murdered in Iran” (@soulmaz, 2022), “GRWM to get unalived in Iran” (@sararoudbari, 2022). All three seem to be specifically referring to Mahsa Amini, appearing within ten days of her murder. Mahsa Amini wore her hijab in a fashion similar to the young women in these videos, with some makeup on and pieces of hair visible. The reappearance of this serves as a powerful symbol of young women wanting to express themselves freely, but being forced into abiding by the Islamic Republic’s standards. 

As mentioned, typically, GRWM videos show young women freely expressing themselves and their identity through clothes. The protest movement has flipped this – using the easily translatable and universal medium of fashion to denote the complete lack of freedom of expression in Iran. @sararoudbari (2022) and @nikaazarrii (2022) are both in tears when wearing the hijab, denoting a sense of despair, fear, and trauma. By highlighting the problem, they aim to demonstrate the burning necessity for change. As Hill wrote, “GRWMs… do not show things the way they are, but rather as they should be and will be if the practices within them are observed by enough people across the patriarchal… societies which consume them” (2019, 342). Often, they do this explicitly, showing a more realistic standard of female beauty. In the case of the Iranian protests, it is through the absence of personality and expression that this need for change is highlighted. Again, this highlights the significance of omission, or ‘the meaning that is conveyed by not showing or saying,’ to visual content. This focus on the theme of “freedom of expression” has appeared consistently across the movement, portraying enforced hijab as its antithesis.

 

Make-up tutorials are extraordinarily popular across TikTok, making up a significant percentage of all videos. Like the GRWM format, make-up videos are an effective way of “speaking Gen Z language.” The trend of using make-up as a tool of social protest is prevalent across social media. One prominent example is when TikTok creators clipped US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s speech, calling out sexist remarks from Representative Yoho, and used them to soundtrack feminist make-up tutorials. Content creator Purple Haze Mue told Dazed, “[m]ake-up is a great way to grasp people’s attention and spread messages. It’s a non-threatening and a non-aggressive way to speak to all kinds of people, even those who don’t enjoy beauty” (Newman, 2021). Newman writes that Gen-Z creators and TikTok users have “grown up in a thriving culture of beauty YouTubers, on a diet of make-up tutorials and product hauls, and with a rotating door of beauty influencers” (Newman, 2021). TikTok is hugely popular within Iran, and with the media age at 31.7, millions of young people are similarly connected to this style of video. Thus, its potential to transmit profound political meaning through visuality is especially acute.

Make-up was used in a variety of ways across the dataset, not purely as “make-up tutorials,” but also to tell stories and on the faces of protestors on the streets. This first example, from @makeupbyshab (2022), uses make-up to denote the brutality of the Iranian morality police.

                             (@makeupbyshab, 2022)

(@makeupbyshab, 2022)

The choice of music adds a deeper emotional impact to the video – Halsey’s (2022) Without Me. This song choice implies the daughter’s slow loss of her mother, which is also implied within the visual narrative of the video. On the left, the mother is seen wearing her hijab in a relaxed fashion before it falls off. When the daughter tries to pull it back on, the screen flashes, and the mother is shown as having a black eye (made with make-up), implying she has been punished by the morality police. Shab, an Iranian woman living abroad, uses her platform to shockingly represent the treatment of Iranian women. In this way, makeup is used as an “overt form of self-presentation and political combat” (White, 2019, 140). Furthermore, the symbolism of the suffering child is universal in its ability to engender empathy and support (Seo, 2014; Bouvier and Machin, 2018). The presence of the flag of the Islamic Republic on the cheek is a common theme across many videos, making the audience completely clear about what the video criticizes.

(@naznil_z, 2022)

In a YouTube video, content creator Arian Rodriquez (2015) said make-up “is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”. There is a sense in which make-up works as a powerful expression of resistance against the Islamic Republic, reclaiming the right to freedom of expression and dispelling notions that the wearing of make-up denotes Western patriarchy. 

These modes of expression have powerfully conveyed meaning, engendered support, and imagined a better future. They have been popular across social media, both within and outside Iran. As Eliza Campbell (2023) put it:

Content generation on social media and other platforms about the protests has largely been driven by and around women, with young women in particular utilizing popular video-sharing formats or apps like TikTok to blend cultural and political commentary, in the form of make-up or fashion tutorials that are designed to draw attention to the injustice of Mahsa’s death, while cleverly evading the platform’s moderation of politically charged content. Through simple visuality, GRWM and make-up videos have powerfully conveyed meaning, gathering millions of likes and raising international awareness of the Iranian protests.

 

3.2 Hair cutting & removal/burning of hijab

Like applying make-up, “cutting hair is a symbolic gesture rallying rebels against the Islamic regime” (Chafiq, 2022). Furthermore, “[w]omen burned their headscarves in protests, which spread rapidly across the country, as a symbol of their rejection of the state’s control over their private choices” (Bazoobandi, 2022). The Islamic Republic sees hair as a sign of beauty, to be hidden. The hijab is used to protect this beauty from general observance, essentially saving it for the husband. Thus, the two practices of hair cutting and removing/burning the hijab are profound symbols of resistance. The four images below all use haircutting in different, but equally powerful ways. 

(@sergio_fahri, 2022)

(@vancouverfashionweek, 2022)

 (@berivan_beria, 2022)


(@parasta_marandi, 2022)

In the @sergio_fahri (2022) video, a woman is shown cutting her hair, with the word ‘HELP’ drawn over her mouth with lipstick. This is one of many clips that show haircutting within this video. “Compilation” videos, like this one (@sergio_fahri, 2022), feature across the dataset. Through multiple clips in rapid succession, showing both women and men cutting their hair around the world, these compilation-style videos harnessed their potential to convey the widespread, diverse, nature of the support for the movement.

Using fashion, the @vancouverfashionweek (2022) video juxtaposes two of the central symbols of the Iranian protest movement – haircutting and the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom”, which is emblazoned across the jumpers of the models. 

Detailing a protest held in Helsinki, the @berivan_beria (2022) video, the most liked video in this dataset with 4.8 million likes, shows a young girl cutting her hair as her mother, wearing a stylish and colorful headscarf, looks on in tears. Another protest video, @parasta_marandi (2022) shows a young woman cutting her hair in Germany, kneeling in front of a picture of Mahsa Amini as a sign of respect. 

These 4 videos were chosen as examples to demonstrate the diverse, yet connected, ways haircutting was used to knit the various disparate parts of the protest movement together through shared visual language.

The video from @iammohammad (2022), shown below, depicts a protest apparently in Iran. Although his location is marked as New York, the footage seems to show the streets of an Iranian city, suggesting this content was not generated by the user but borrowed from elsewhere. Women are seen rhythmically moving towards the fire, swinging their removed hijabs, and throwing them into the flames. The caption reads: “They killed her,But Mahsa Amini is alive in our mind”. The video was posted just six days after Mahsa Amini’s murder.

(@iammohammad, 2022)

Together, these powerful visual tools of protest have concisely encapsulated the feeling of the women’s movement. The imagery of Mahsa Amini shows her liberally wearing her hijab, with her hair visible, and wearing make-up. This symbol of a young Muslim woman expressing herself serves as a central piece of visuality, tying these forms of protest together. Her image depicts a nuance that is often ignored by both the Islamic Republic and international Western voices – that a woman can wear both a hijab and make-up, that a woman can be a Muslim and show her beauty. The brutality of her murder has been met with passionate and vehement reactions against the enforcement of mandatory hijab. Writing about the burning of the hijab following the murder, Sara Bazoobandi (2022) opined:

Across the world, the hijab is a personal religious choice made by women. In Iran, however, it was transformed into a symbol of oppression and marginalization. The current rejection of the hijab by Iranian protesters, therefore, does not necessarily equal a rejection of Islam, or Islamic values. Rather, it represents the anger and frustration of the people—namely women—who have been deprived of their basic freedom of choice for decades.  

Across the protests, Islamic and secular women have been united by the right for women to choose how they wish to express themselves. Haircutting and hijab removal/burning powerfully send a message to the Islamic Republic that the enforcement of strict standards of “Islamic dress” will no longer be tolerated.

 

3.3 Iranian women to camera

Both within Iran and across the Iranian diaspora, TikTok videos were created in which a single Iranian woman “spoke” to the camera. “Spoke” is in inverted commas here as sometimes this was done through captions, or text printed on the screen, rather than through verbal communication. Nine of the thirty videos were consistent with this format. Some were informational in style, providing updates on the protests and the oppression being enacted by the Islamic Republic. Many also contained emotional calls for help. The second most liked video in this dataset (3.8 million likes) was produced by a young Iranian woman from inside Iran, under the handle @tytysplanett (2022). There is no more effective, powerful, visual form than physically expressed emotion. In the video, the young woman’s face and voice convey fear and horror in equal measure. There is no music, only her voice. Her words are crucial here, using subtitles to make them as clear as possible. Her words interact with her tearful, exhausted, fearful physical expression to create a powerful demonstration of the impact of the murder of Mahsa Amini and the subsequent crackdown on protestors within the country. She says: 

I don’t know where my family is… They said that everyone are being killed… I feel like I’m trapped in a small case… I have my human rights. I just want them I want nothing more… If you don’t stand with me I’m going to lose faith in everyone (@tytysplanett, 2022)

(@tytysplanett, 2022)

This particular video shows the emotional lived experiences of young Iranian women, provides information, and calls for solidarity and support. Her reference to being “trapped in a cage” is, perhaps unconsciously, mirrored by the constricting nature of the narrow shot in which she appears, and the small room in which she sits. It invokes feelings of claustrophobia, oppressiveness, and suffocation. Upon watching the video, viewers are viscerally impacted by her fear, empathizing with her struggle.

Iranian women speaking to the camera, both within and outside of Iran, have played a significant role in informing the world about the reality of women’s lived experiences in Iran, conveying emotion and fear, and clearly and directly calling for help and solidarity. Visual and linguistic discourse have worked together to make these videos powerful instances of multimodal content.

 

3.4 Cartoons and banners

Cartoons are simple ways of transferring meaning and imagining new futures. As Totry and Medzini put it, cartoons “translate political, social and economic issues into locally familiar cultural symbols, as well as using symbols that are universally recognized” (2013, 22). They often use powerful symbolism to denote political meaning, highlight injustice, and call for change. Banners are less explicitly visual than cartoons, often relying on words. Nevertheless, they are similar in that they are small, simple, ways of offering solidarity to a movement. 

The video from @nanil_z (2022), depicted in the screenshots below, contains two cartoons. The first shows a hand, cloaked in the black robes symbolizing the Islamic Republic, pulling Mahsa Amini’s hair as she lies in her hospital bed on a ventilator. The second image shows the Iranian people toppling a statue of Ayatollah Khamenei. Together, the cartoons work to highlight the injustice and offer a solution. All successful protests need a critique of society, a vision of a better future, and a way of getting there. These cartoons encapsulate the ethos of the Iranian protest movement – to respond to the oppression of women by removing Khamenei from power and creating a more equal society under the banner of “Woman, Life, Freedom”. Mahsa Amini’s murder accelerated this demand, but this is part of a much longer intersectional feminist process within Iran, to bring justice to Iranian women, but also to Baloch and Kurdish populations (Ghadery, 2022).

 

(@naznil_z, 2022)

(@naznil_z, 2022)

The banner in the video below simply reads #MAHSA_AMINI, #HELPIRAN, reminding people of the murder, symbolizing the brutality facing Iranian women, and calling for help (@shilan3452, 2022). Such banners were seen across the dataset in various languages, often containing images of Mahsa Amini. The woman holding the banner stands amongst a crowd of protestors, lifting her banner above her head and opening her mouth to chant, shout, or sing. The written word and visual framing ensure that this image speaks for itself, at once encapsulating the spirit of the Iranian protests and its call for change.

(@shilan3452, 2022)

Conclusion

This paper detailed and contextualized the core dynamics of the wider Iranian protest movement on TikTok. Via utilizing the novel method of VDT, it has shown the core elements of the movement’s visual culture. Defining the Iranian protests as “generational” is simplistic, but it is true to say that ‘Gen Z’ has driven many elements of the struggle, especially on social media. TikTok is primarily used by ‘Zoomers,’ as such, young Iranians at home and abroad have utilized popular styles of visual and audio content to appeal to mass audiences around the world. GRWM videos, make-up tutorials, compilations, stitches, and repeated popular music create an interactive, multimodal, protest culture across the platform. Sharing the symbolism of the grassroots movement within Iran, haircutting, hijab removal and burning, pictures of Mahsa Amini, and political slogans such as “Woman, Life, Freedom” have been widely dispersed. In total, the top 30 TikTok videos containing mention of Mahsa Amini posted from her murder on the 16th of September to the end of October 2022 amassed over 42 million likes by August 2023 and hundreds of thousands of shares and comments. This paper contributes to the understanding of the movement, especially the involvement of the wider, global, Iranian diaspora, which has played a crucial role due to the Islamic Republic’s crackdown on Internet usage within Iran. It has sought to amplify the voices of the women’s movement; not to speak for them in any way. Through this, the paper has highlighted how visuality has been used to provide simple, emotive, and brutal depictions of the lived experiences of Iranian women. These dynamics are crucial parts of the picture, helping young people especially, to make sense of the suffering of women and girls within Iran in the pursuit of “Woman, Life, Freedom”.

 

Bibliography 

 

TikTok Videos

 

Researcher & Lecturer | + posts

Tom Walsh is a lecturer of International Relations at Northumbria University and an associate instructor at the London School of Economics. He is currently working on a new project on the Iranian women's movement, Iranian state propaganda, and the emancipatory use of TikTok by protestors.

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