Hugo Velazquez Perez Kovach and Ally Temple (2023) "Crystallized Exposure." This video presents a data visualization of one million posts collected from Twitter in November 2022 using the tag #MahsaAmini. Our aim was to determine how many hashtags were populated from the least to most significant by countries. We needed a way to depict the hashtag's popularity globally. Each crystalized structure represents a country/region. The cluster increases in size while the shape changes. Size represents the increase in the number of tweets.
Jin, Jiyan, Azadi in Iran
(Woman, Life, Freedom)
On 16 September 2022, the 22-year-old Kurdish woman Jina (Mahsa) Amini died in a hospital in Tehran, Iran, under suspicious circumstances. The Guidance Patrol, the religious morality police of Iran's government, arrested Amini for allegedly not wearing the hijab in accordance with government standards. The Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran stated that she had a heart attack at a police station, collapsed, and fell into a coma before being transferred to a hospital. However, eyewitnesses, including women who were detained with Amini, reported that she was severely beaten and that she died as a result of police brutality, which was denied by the Iranian authorities. The assertions of police brutality, in addition to leaked medical scans, led some observers to believe Amini had a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke due to head injuries received after her arrest.
The significance of her death is multi-layered. While the hashtag #MahsaAmini served as the largest category through which this story was shared across social media, her real Kurdish name was Jina.
As Soha Saghazadeh has guided us on the centrality of the name Jina and the Kurdish root of this chant, see "'Jîna:' Erasure of Kurdish Women and Their Politics from the Uprisings in Iran" by Farangis Ghaderi and Ozlem Goner. The extended version of this article has been published in IJMES, "Jin, Jiyan, Azadi and the Historical Erasure of Kurds." Also, find Jin, Jiyan, and Azadi articulated in transnational joint struggle in this collective statement: "Jin Jiyan Azadî, as in Free Palestine."
#MahsaAmini on Twitter
RT @Taheri_Movement: #NavidAfkari's brother, #HamidAfkari has been arrested in front of the Intelligence Ministry's detention center in Sh… |
RT @emilykschrader: Hey @elonmusk we’ve got a big issue going on Twitter with pro-Iran regime accounts threatening Iranians abroad, includi… |
RT @Action4IR: @TheDrIman Hossein Ronaghi's life is in danger of death, please be his voice
@washingtonpost @reuters @TIME @foxnews @cnbc… |
RT @HichkasOfficial: #ElhamAfkari who's been kidnapped by the Islamic Republic, is on hunger strike. IR's accused her of working with @Iran… |
RT @__Injaneb96: . @womensmarch you are taking away our voice, the true voice of Iranian women by inviting someone that not long ago was at… |
RT @Omid_M: “It’s not scary for me to get shot or killed, what is scary is seeing leaders of democratic countries shaking the hand of those… |
RT @shahinnajafi80: منطق جمهوری اسلامی بر پایه ایجاد ترس و تفرقه شکل گرفته است. هرکس به هر عنوان پیرو این منطق ایجاد تفرقه در انقلاب باشد،… |
RT @shahinnajafi80: منطق جمهوری اسلامی بر پایه ایجاد ترس و تفرقه شکل گرفته است. هرکس به هر عنوان پیرو این منطق ایجاد تفرقه در انقلاب باشد،… |
RT @JasonMBrodsky: So true: “I’m not asking the leaders of democratic countries to come and save us. I don’t want them to save us, I want t… |
RT @shahinnajafi80: منطق جمهوری اسلامی بر پایه ایجاد ترس و تفرقه شکل گرفته است. هرکس به هر عنوان پیرو این منطق ایجاد تفرقه در انقلاب باشد،… |
#مهسا_امینی
#MahsaAmini https://t.co/wlsNrZ4xTE |
بزمیست که واماندۀ صد جمشید است
قصریست که تکیهگاه صد بهرام است
#MahsaAmini #مهسا_امینی
63746 |
Network Visualization on half a million tweets on #MahsaAmini circulating among 60,000 users in November 2022. The red tweets are in Farsi, the green are English, and the white are French.