Offline: Women, life, freedom—and Twitter – The Lancet

Sahar Khodayari, a 29-year-old Iranian woman, died on Sept 9, 2019, after setting herself on fire in protest at the threat of a prison term for attending a football match—an activity prohibited by Iranian authorities. She had disguised herself as a man to enter the Azadi Stadium in Tehran to watch her favourite football team. Security guards arrested her and an Islamic Revolutionary Court subsequently declared that she must face imprisonment. After leaving the court, she poured petrol over her body and set herself alight. She died a week later in the intensive care unit of Tehran’s Motahari Hospital. She became known on social media as #BlueGirl, after the colours of her football team, Esteghlal. Zahra Abtahi and colleagues, from Florida International University, Miami, studied the public reaction to Khodayari’s suicide as an example of collective or cultural trauma among Farsi-speaking Twitter users. They reviewed a random sample of over 8000 tweets sent in September, 2019, and hundreds of further posts made a year later. They identified three main themes—calls for greater awareness about her death; advocacy for social justice, through protests against the government; and the processing of public experiences and feelings. In the Journal of Traumatic Stress, they…
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