Saudi Arabia's cyber diplomacy with Iran on Twitter; Case study of the riots in December 2017

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 field of cyber; 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 2017, 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 discover the general principles of Saudi cyber diplomacy during the protests against the Islamic Republic of Iran in January 1996.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 1996. 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 emphasis on ethnic and regional divergences, the violation of the activism of the regions of Iran, the destruction of the performance of the Revolutionary Guards and the destruction of the type of ruling system in Iran, The main pillars of Saudi cyber diplomacy against the Islamic Republic of Iran.