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

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 ۲۰۲۲ 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 ۱,۴۶۷ Persian tweets posted by ۱,۳۸۵ accounts between February ۲۰۲۱ and May ۲۰۲۵ 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 ۳۱.۶% of all posts. The ۲۰۲۲ blocking contracted the discourse by ۳۸% before it recovered above baseline; the children-in-protest frame briefly saturated the corpus and then evaporated. Concern is sharply gendered, ۹۶% of sexualization posts and ۸۸% of child-influencer posts are girl-marked, the influencer economy is the only growing frame, and state child-protection vocabulary appears in ۰.۵% 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.

کلیدواژه ها:

child influencers ، children and the internet ، computational communication ، digital natives ، Framing ، gender ، lateral family surveillance ، Persian social media ، topic modeling