Saudi Arabia's Cyber Diplomacy in Regards to Iran On Twitter; Case Study Of Iran’s January 2018 Riots
Document Type : Scientific-Research Article
Authors
1 Assistant Professor and Faculty Member, Faculty of Islamic Education, Culture and Communication, Imam Sadegh University
2 PhD student in Culture and Communication, Imam Sadegh University
3 Master student of Culture and Communication, Imam Sadegh University
Abstract
In recent years, Saudi Arabia, as one of the influential countries in the region of Southwest Asia, has started a lot of activities in the cyber field; Saudi Arabia is taking advantage of this space to compete with its regional rivals, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran. One of the most important areas of this confrontation was the riots in Iran in January 2018, in which the dimensions of transnational interventions were not very clear at the beginning. But after a while, the dimensions of other countries' involvement in these events became clear and led us to examine the role of one of the important countries in this field. In other words, this study seeks to uncover the general principles of Saudi cyber diplomacy during the January 2018 protests against the Islamic Republic of Iran. This study intends to investigate Saudi Arabia's cyber diplomacy towards Iran using a qualitative method and using the theme analysis method. The research community in this study is the tweets sent by important Saudi institutions and users in January 2018. For this research, more than 2000 tweets were selected and reviewed. After starting the coding process according to the standards of content analysis method, more than 180 basic themes, 17 organizing themes and finally 5 comprehensive themes were obtained, which in fact are the themes that form the main axes of Saudi cyber diplomacy; The results of this study show that the emphasis on ethnic and regional divergences, regional violations of Iranian activism, the destruction of the Revolutionary Guards and the destruction of the ruling system in Iran, are the main axes of Saudi cyber diplomacy against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
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