Twitter Diplomacy: Comparison of the Performance of the Chinese Ambassador Account in Tehran and the Persian Account of the US State Department in the Field of Networking

The growth and development of communication technologies in recent years has caused social networks to become an integral part of everyday life and the use of these networks in the direction of public diplomacy and cyber diplomacy has dramatically increased. Meanwhile, Twitter, as one of the most influential social networks, has become an important platform for public diplomacy.This study seeks to introduce two indicators of proximity to the horizontal structure of social networks and the use of the capacity of social networks for networking to review and compare the performance of the two accounts of the Chinese Ambassador in Tehran and the account of the Persian US State Department, towards the Islamic Republic of Iran based on defined indicators and analyze data collected from the social network Twitter. The findings of this study show that the account of the Chinese ambassador in Tehran in terms of the above indicators has been more successful than the Persian account of the US State Department.