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Introduction: Since committing a crime as a violation of the law has been condemned by public opinion throughout the history, the recourse of criminal systems to the repressive tool of punishment is a reflection of the public reaction to committing a crime. However, the dynamics of criminal processes has made the hero-anti-hero duality in the realms of delinquent phenomena to distance itself from its traditional patterns.
Method: Considering the role of public opinion in criminal policies and the necessity of a pathological study of the causes of public opinion’s tendency towards criminals, this research tries to use quantitative and qualitative content analysis to examine the comments on the pages of Ten Instagram villains.
Findings: The trend of public opinion towards criminals as a new approach in criminal sociology approaches confirms that part of the society’s structure not only does not condemn the commission of crime, but approves their behavior along with the criminals. The content in the comments proved that mythmaking, social support, role modeling, and making identical are the most important manifestations of public opinion’s tendency towards Instagram criminals. The findings of the quantitative content analysis showed that out of the total of two thousand eight hundred and eighty comments, 32.9% related to mythmaking, 25.3% supported social support, 22.3% corresponded to the approach of imitation and modeling, and 19.5% It is related to making identical.
Discussion: The process of the tendency of public opinion towards gangsters contains a process-oriented model in which, first, myth-making takes place, followed by social support for gangsters, then, criminal simulation takes place, and finally, the person enters the stage of identification with gangsters.
 

Keywords: Public Opinion, Villains, Identification, Modeling, Mythmaking

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