Comparative Twiplomacy of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America; Case study of the martyrdom of General Qassem Soleimani

Cyberspace today is more than just technology.Social networks and messengers are slowly but steadily entering all areas of human life and affect various areas,including politics and culture. Due to some of its unique features, the social network "Twitter" has been able to find a large audience among politicians in cyberspace; In a way, a new term has been coined, called"Twiplomacy"or "Twitter-diplomacy"; Politicians have reached out to a wide audience in various countries via Twitter and expanded the boundaries of their public diplomacy.This study seeks to make a comparative study of how Iranian and American politicians use the Twitter tool; The subject of this study is the martyrdom of General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The time period in the study of the twiplomacy of the two countries has been ten days from the day of General Soleimani's martyrdom (from3to13January2020). Data collection was done by purposive method and due to the limited volume of data, the counting method was used instead of sampling.At the end of the study, confirming the hypothesis of maximum use of the right-wing Twitter compared to the Democratic current, it was found that US twiplomacy mainly sought to convince public opinion about the legitimacy of its assassination of General Soleimani and the need for domestic political unity against Iran.While Iran's twiplomacy has been mainly based on emotional discourse and around the expression of General Soleimani's personality traits and the certainty of taking revenge on the perpetrators of his assassination.