Hossein Kermani, PhD

MSCA Postdoctoral Researcher

Main Research Areas

Social media activism
Computational propaganda
Digital and computational methods
Critical discourse studies on social media

Hossein Kermani is a MSCA post-doctoral researcher at the Political Communication Research Group of the University of Vienna. 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.
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. He is now working on his first English book, Twitter activism in Iran, which Palgrave Macmillan will publish in 2024.
Hossein welcomes interested students to work with him on their Master’s thesis or Ph.D. dissertations.

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Hossein Kermani

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+43-1-4277-483 12
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Publications

2026

Kermani, H., Makki, M., Fatemeh, O., Yarahmadi, P., Mahdi Soltani, H., & Hosseini Khoo, Z. (2026). Incivility, domination, and resistance: rhetorical practices on Persian Twitter during the #MahsaAmini movement. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 13(1), Article 392. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-06663-9

Makki, M., Kermani, H., Yarahmadi, P., Oudlajani, F., HosseiniKho, Z., & Mahdi Soltani, H. (2026). Digital battleground: Exploring the role of social media platforms in digital activism in Case of Mahsa Amini movement in Persian Twitter. Communication Review, 1-28. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2026.2631908

Kermani, H. (2026). Hashtag activism and its enemies: a discursive analysis of suppressing #MahsaAmini on Persian Twitter. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.

Kermani, H., Neyazi, T. A., & Lecheler, S. (2026). The limits of computational propaganda: Investigating underexplored platforms and contexts. Political Communication, 43(1), 89–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2025.2595596

2025

Kermani, H. (2025). Computational propaganda. In A. Nai, M. Grömping, & D. Wirz (Eds.), Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Communication (pp. 245-249). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Kermani, H. (2025). Connective action. In A. Nai, M. Grömping, & D. Wirz (Eds.), Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Communication (pp. 266–270). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Kermani, H., Bayat Makou, A., & Behzadian Nejad, R. (2025). Decoupled agendas under repression: Social media and state media during COVID-19 in I. Frontiers in Communication, 10, Article 1598405. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1598405

Kermani, H. (2025). The art of delirium: Social media suppression in authoritarian regimes. Communication Theory, 35(4), 197-213. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaf006

Kermani, H. (2025). Twitter activism in Iran: Social media and democracy in authoritarian regimes. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-81538-6

Kermani, H. (2025). Framing the pandemic on Persian Twitter: Gauging networked frames by topic modeling. American Behavioral Scientist, 69(10), 1289-1304. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642231207078