For Women, Life, Freedom: A Participatory AI-Based Social Web Analysis of a Watershed Moment in Iran's Gender Struggles

TL;DR

This study analyzes Iranian Twitter discourse post-Mahsa Amini's death, revealing increased polarization and a slight rise in positive attitudes toward gender equality, with active participation from Iranian women in AI annotation.

Contribution

Introduces an ensemble active learning pipeline with Iranian women annotators for stance classification, highlighting their role in meaningful corpus creation and analysis.

Findings

Polarized discourse increased after Mahsa Amini's death.

Positive tweets about gender equality grew slightly more than negative.

Pro-protest accounts resemble baseline Persian Twitter activity more than state-aligned accounts.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a computational analysis of the Persian language Twitter discourse with the aim to estimate the shift in stance toward gender equality following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. We present an ensemble active learning pipeline to train a stance classifier. Our novelty lies in the involvement of Iranian women in an active role as annotators in building this AI system. Our annotators not only provide labels, but they also suggest valuable keywords for more meaningful corpus creation as well as provide short example documents for a guided sampling step. Our analyses indicate that Mahsa Amini's death triggered polarized Persian language discourse where both fractions of negative and positive tweets toward gender equality increased. The increase in positive tweets was slightly greater than the increase in negative tweets. We also observe that with respect to account creation time, between the state-aligned Twitter accounts and pro-protest Twitter accounts, pro-protest accounts are more similar to baseline Persian Twitter activity.