  Iran, along with China, South Korea, and Italy was among the countries that
were hit hard in the first wave of the COVID-19 spread. Twitter is one of the
widely-used online platforms by Iranians inside and abroad for sharing their
opinion, thoughts, and feelings about a wide range of issues. In this study,
using more than 530,000 original tweets in Persian/Farsi on COVID-19, we
analyzed the topics discussed among users, who are mainly Iranians, to gauge
and track the response to the pandemic and how it evolved over time. We applied
a combination of manual annotation of a random sample of tweets and topic
modeling tools to classify the contents and frequency of each category of
topics. We identified the top 25 topics among which living experience under
home quarantine emerged as a major talking point. We additionally categorized
broader content of tweets that shows satire, followed by news, is the dominant
tweet type among the Iranian users. While this framework and methodology can be
used to track public response to ongoing developments related to COVID-19, a
generalization of this framework can become a useful framework to gauge Iranian
public reaction to ongoing policy measures or events locally and
internationally.
