Journal of Cyberspace Studies

Journal of Cyberspace Studies

Little digital natives and the public moral order of Persian social media

Articles in Press

Document Type : Original article

Authors
Kosar Saadatnia 1
Bijan Tafazzoli 2
1 Department of Communication Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
2 Department of International Relations, Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkiye.
10.22059/jcss.2026.417807.1259
Abstract
Background: Although the "digital native" has been empirically discredited as a scientific category, it survives as a folk figure through which adults register wonder and alarm at children's platform lives. Research on children and the internet has relied largely on Western, survey-based studies of children's experiences and parents' reported concerns, or on episodic moral panics amplified by professional media.
Aims: This study maps how Persian-language Twitter users publicly construct the intersection of children and the internet, examining the temporal architecture of the discourse across the September 2022 blocking of Instagram in Iran, its thematic structure, its frames of concern and their gendering, and the engagement dynamics that determine which talk travels.
Methodology: A corpus of 1,467 Persian tweets posted by 1,385 accounts between February 2021 and May 2025 was analyzed by combining non-negative matrix factorization topic modeling (benchmarked against LDA and a co-word network decomposition), dictionary-based frame analysis, PELT change-point detection, and negative binomial engagement regressions, with the full corpus closely read and all excerpts translated by the author.
Findings: The dominant genre is lateral family surveillance: young adults publicly exhibiting the online conduct of younger relatives, with an exact child age stated in 31.6% of all posts. The 2022 blocking contracted the discourse by 38% before it recovered above baseline; the children-in-protest frame briefly saturated the corpus and then evaporated. Concern is sharply gendered, 96% of sexualization posts and 88% of child-influencer posts are girl-marked, the influencer economy is the only growing frame, and state child-protection vocabulary appears in 0.5% of posts. Kinship anecdotes drive conversational reciprocity; policy indignation does not.
Conclusion: The public moral order of Persian social media is constructed from the family outward, not from the state downward.
Keywords
child influencers
children and the internet
computational communication
digital natives
framing
gender
lateral family surveillance
Persian social media
topic modeling
Subjects
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Journal of Cyberspace Studies

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 07 September 2026

  • Receive Date 03 July 2026
  • Revise Date 17 July 2026
  • Accept Date 18 July 2026
  • First Publish Date 07 September 2026
  • Publish Date 07 September 2026