The expansion of social media in recent years has significantly transformed the ways in which social and political events are narrated and represented. Among these platforms, Instagram—one of the most widely used social media platforms—has provided a space for the emergence of popular narratives about crisis events. The present study aims to identify and analyze the semantic patterns present in users’ narratives of the “Twelve‑Day War” on Instagram.

This research adopts a qualitative approach and employs netnography as its methodological framework. The data were collected from Instagram user captions published with hashtags such as “Homeland,” “Iran,” and “War.” After data collection, the captions were examined through a process of coding and thematic analysis, and the results were organized into identified patterns, main themes, conceptual codes, and analytical axes.

The findings indicate that users’ narratives are mainly centered around themes such as the representation of national identity, feelings of belonging to the homeland, social solidarity, the expression of collective emotions, and the redefinition of the experience of war within a digital environment. The results also show that through hashtags and captions, users construct a form of collective narrative about the war, in which emotional elements, national symbols, and the discourse of resistance play a prominent role.

Overall, the study demonstrates that Instagram has become a platform for the formation of digital narratives about war and the representation of national identity in virtual spaces. A netnographic examination of this platform can therefore contribute to a deeper understanding of how meaning and narratives are produced within social media environments.