The US digital diplomacy toward Iran during the presidency of Obama

Abstract

AbstractThe United States of America has always used public diplomacy as a "strategic" tool in its foreign policy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran. During Barack Obama’s presidency, "digital diplomacy" and "social networks”, for some reasons, including the lack of traditional diplomatic relationship with Iran & the necessity of having a tool for managing the public opinion and collecting information from inside Iran, had been paid special attention. Therefor during Hillary Clinton's term as secretary of state, using digital diplomacy and, in particular, twitter diplomacy (twiplomacy) as an effective tool for the US foreign policy, was significantly intensified, in a wayTwitter, Facebook and YouTube played very effective roles in the protests against the 2009 Iranian presidential election results. Hence, the main question of the present research is how the US State Department usede digital diplomacy to affect Iran during the Obama administration. Using the explanatory method, the hypothesis is investigated that the US Department of State, in the frame work of digital diplomacy, has managed a soft war against Iran through using Twitter and its capabilities to bring people on the streets, organize the protesters, collect information from within Iran, and publish targeted analyses, and disseminate a wave of Iran-phobia across the world.

Keywords

• key words: digital diplomacy
• social networks
• twitter diplomacy (twiplomacy)
• the us foreign policy
• iran – us relationships