IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2018 - 51

or Islamic dress code, is required in Iran. We believe
that this is the reason for the news published by Persian
users concerning the laws of the judiciary cultural commission of the parliament of Islamic Republic of Iran
regarding the wearing of hijab while driving. The most
frequent tweet of Arab users regarding hijab was hijab
advocates' and Anti-extremists' tweets.
We call attention to the fact that our study is constrained by five obvious limitations. First, we provided
only a brief snapshot of a period of one week. Second,
we limited our analysis to Arabic and Persian Twitter
conversations. Third, messages were interpreted within
the context of Twitter's 140 character format. Fourth, a
significant weakness regarding the word-level analysis,
is that detecting the use of irony and sarcasm is objectively impossible, as a fuller appreciation of context and
motivation, among other factors, would be required.
" in the search to capFifth, we used the keyword "
ture conversations about hijab. This could potentially
contribute to selection bias and failure to identify messages without this keyword that may have content related to hijab.

Advancing Social Media Studies
Hijab has always been a sensitive issue. Our survey confirms the existence of Twitter-based conversations
about hijab use among Arab and Persian users. Findings from Twitter suggest that the number of Arab users
were more than the number of Persian users in the use
of Twitter regarding hijab and this is not due to the large
population of Arabic speaking people. The most popular topics regarding hijab are hijab advocates' and antiextremists' tweets. A NodeXL graph implies that users
rarely retweet advertisements and fake hyperlinks.
Impression factors indicate that religious leaders, news
agencies, and journalists are the best known influencing agents in this area.
We believe that this work can be further expanded to
examine the outcome of tweeting or reading about
tweets regarding the hijab. Additionally, it can be
expanded, for example, to evaluate the effect of participating in Twitter conversations about other sensitive
cultural and religious issues in diverse languages. Our
hope is that our work helps advance social media studies to identify trends within groups of users, especially
for better understanding hijab customs and practices,
where further research might be needed.

Author Information
Mohsen Yoosefi Nejad is with the Department of Computer Engineering and Information Technology, Payame
Noor University, Iran. Email: m_yoosefi@pnu.ac.ir.
Mehdi Hosseinzadeh is with the Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran, and the Department of ComJUNE 2018

∕

Most anti-extremists retweeted a
strong objection to drawing hijab on
the picture of a Syrian refugee mother
with her child, who drowned at sea.
puter Science, University of Human Development, Sulaimaniyah, Iraq. Email: hosseinzadeh.m@iums.ac.ir.
Maryam Mohammadi is with the Department of Computer Engineering, Islamic Azad University, Science and
Research branch, Tehran, Iran. Email: mohammadi.maryam@srbiau.ac.ir.

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