PTP Researcher Wins Rare Honor for Groundbreaking Study on Fake News in Persian Twitter

Amirali Tafreshi, a staff member of Pardis Technology Park (PTP), has been selected as a winner at the 16th Farabi International Festival in the Social Sciences and Communication Sciences group. This marks only the sixth time a communications researcher has achieved this honor since the festival's inception in 2007. The award ceremony was held at the University of Tehran, attended by Iran's President, the Vice President for Science and Technology, and the Minister of Science.

Tafreshi, a doctoral graduate in Communication Sciences from the University of Tehran, was recognized for his dissertation, which won third place in the "Young" section. His research, titled "Analyzing the Influence and Impact of Fake News in Persian Twitter: Measuring the Influence of Cyber Forces in the Core and Centrality of the Conversation Network During the COVID-19 Era and Identifying the Political Geography, Behaviors, and Content Framing of These Forces," examines the role of cyber forces as modern instruments of power in shaping public opinion within Iran's social media landscape.

The study investigates the fake news ecosystem on Persian Twitter, aiming to demonstrate the extent of fake news influence during the pandemic, the strategies and behavioral patterns employed by cyber forces for content production and distribution, and how they fuel social polarization through salience and semantic framing.

Employing computational social science approaches, computational propaganda analysis, and network analysis, the research extracted and analyzed over four million COVID-19-related tweets and evaluated more than 250,000 user accounts using fake account detection tools. The findings reveal that approximately 38% of all tweets published during the study period were generated by cyber forces, which successfully penetrated the core and centrality of many network clusters. Collectively, the results indicate the formation of a "polluted public sphere" and the emergence of widespread cognitive warfare on Persian Twitter.

This recognition is particularly significant as the Farabi Festival's judging panel selected only one researcher in the "Young" section for Social Sciences and Communication this year. Tafreshi has previously published numerous articles in prestigious international journals, including Information, Communication & Society, the International Journal of Social Research Methodology, and Social Media + Society. He continues his research activities in media and social networks.

Prior to this achievement, he served as the head of the content analysis and discourse analysis team that secured second place in the national call for "Understanding and Analyzing Iranian Society's Discourse and Behavior During the COVID-19 Crisis" organized by the Vice Presidency for Science and Technology.