Jurnal Ilmu Sosial dan Ilmu Politik
Vol 30, No 1 (2026): July

Iranophobia in Trump’s Social Media: Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis

Ahmad Suhaili (Institut Agama Islam Al-Khairiyah, Indonesia)
Frans Sayogie (Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, Indonesia)
Muhammad Farkhan (Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, Indonesia)



Article Info

Publish Date
07 Oct 2026

Abstract

Strained diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States have historically been characterised by ongoing strife, involving sensitive issues like nuclear programs, economic penalties, and Middle Eastern power struggles. The tension intensified during Trump’s presidency. This study highlights the most favoured term used by the US President, Donald Trump, on social media to talk about Iran. It employs corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis (CACDA) combined with Fairclough's three-dimensional framework to examine Iranophobia in Trump's social media posts from 2016 to 2020 across X (formerly Twitter ), Facebook, and Instagram. The analysis was conducted at three levels: micro (keyword extraction, collocation, and concordance), meso (social media platform bias), and macro (global impact of Trump's Iran policies). Findings revealed Iranophobia across six categories: (1) war and conflict, (2) terrorism, (3) government and politics, (4) nuclear weapons, (5) economics, and (6) human rights. The meso- level analysis demonstrated that Trump's social media content was biased when depicting violence in the Middle East, which might explain why X blocked his account for inflammatory content with social impact in the US. The macro-level analysis indicated how Trump's harsh economic policies against Iran generated global Iranophobia. The research concludes that social media not only offers alternative discourse but can also recontextualise traditional media discourse in representing Iranophobia, albeit more aggressively and overtly.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

jsp

Publisher

Subject

Law, Crime, Criminology & Criminal Justice Social Sciences

Description

Jurnal Ilmu Sosial dan Ilmu Politik (JSP) is an open access, and peer-reviewed journal. Our main goal is to disseminate current and original articles from researchers and practitioners on various contemporary social and political issues: gender politics and identity, digital society and disruption, ...