Digital Legitimacy Under Pressure: State Narrative Strategies on Social Media in Democratic and Authoritarian Regimes

This thesis examines how democratic and authoritarian states employ social media platforms for narrative control during moments of political legitimacy crisis. Using a comparative critical discourse analysis (CDA) of official state social media content on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram, this project examines U.S. and Iranian responses to two parallel moments of political legitimacy crises: the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots, and the September 2022 Women, Life, Freedom (WLF) protests. Drawing on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model, Van Leeuwen’s legitimation framework, and scholarship on affective politics and platform affordances, this study argues that state narrative strategies converge to a greater extent than prevailing regime-based explanations suggest. Both regime types relied heavily on moral legitimation and adopted comparable securitized and criminalizing portrayals of dissent on X, while diverging substantially on Instagram, indicating that platform architecture may shape narrative convergence more strongly than regime type alone. At the same time, important differences persisted in patterns of audience address, institutional resilience framing, the attribution of foreign interference, and the specific legitimating register each state favored. This comparison of similar legitimacy crises on shared platforms challenges conventional regime-type binaries and advances debates on digital governance, platform accountability, and state communication practices.