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.
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