Using Twitter as political communication channel by Iraqi and Kurdistan region officials

Twitter as a micro-blog becomes a channel for political communication as well as an online platform for political debates regarding political issues and expressing support for or rebuffing political groups and parties. The properties of twitter that allows tweeting with 280 characters, enforce politicians to write down tweets carefully and choose terms and words skillfully in a way that convey messages to their supporters and fans adding to those whom following them on twitter. Like politicians throughout the world, Iraqi and Kurdistan regions’ politicians are using twitter to tweet daily activities and their stands towards internal and outer situations with the three languages of Kurdish, Arabic and English. Survey method is used in this study for surveying within two month tweets of four high rank politicians in Iraq and Kurdistan region including Barham Salih Iraqi president, Mustafa Al-kadhimi Iraqi Prime Minister, Nechirvan Barzani Iraqi Kurdistan region president and Masrour Barzani Kurdistan regional government prime minister. According to the study, despite a huge amount of replays on the politicians’ tweets, there is not any political debates occurred between the Iraqi and Kurdistan regional officials and their followers on twitter. In other word, using twitter by officials lack on interactivity and the directions of messages take one side. In addition, news and information posted by officials on twitter are a mixture of texts, photos and videos as well as due to limitation of tweets in terms of size, part of tweets are shorten-linked to other social media such Facebook and Youtube.