Truth and other lies: online foreign image management in Iran during the Rouhani Era

ABSTRACT

States’ communication with foreign audiences is commonly conceptualized as either propaganda (by autocracies), public diplomacy (by democracies), or PR work (by public relations agencies). This article argues that strict separation between these areas of foreign policy communication hinders more than helps our understanding of how states attempt to garner support among a global audience. Theorizing Iran’s ex-foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s communication on Twitter as a fusion of PR, public diplomacy, and propaganda with emotionally evocative performances of nationalism, this article shows how foreign policy communication develops in tandem with, but also in contrast to audience reactions and discussions.

Introduction

thanks for warm welcome to twitter. hope to be able to #interact & stay in touch.¹

Thus reads the first tweet that Iran’s ex-foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif sent shortly after his confirmation in 2013 as the country’s official spokesperson to the world. He did not exaggerate: out of ninety-five replies, only four were explicitly negative, with the overwhelming majority welcoming him to Twitter² and expressing their hope for improved relations between Iran and the world. During his eight years in office, Zarif sent out a total of 1207 tweets, generating around 3.6 million likes and retweets and finding his way into countless news articles that spread his messages even further. Nonetheless, scholarly interest in Iran’s communications to the world via social media has been curiously low.³ This paper aims to fill that gap by situating Zarif’s Twitter account in a wider context of propaganda and public diplomacy studies and providing a foray into questions both concerning Zarif’s representation of Iran on the global stage as well as responses to his overtures. It focuses on Zarif specifically not only because of his office, but also because he had the widest reach in terms of media appearances among Iran’s foreign policy makers of the time. It focuses on Zarif’s Twitter account because this platform, more than Instagram or Facebook, has established itself as an accessible place where the world learns about important updates posted by important people in real-time.

As will be discussed below, Zarif rarely outright lied. Instead, he cherry-picked those aspects of reality that shed a positive light on him, his government, and his country while conveniently omitting incriminating information. Evaluating his sort-of-not-really-lies becomes more complicated by the fact that he disseminated his thoughts via Twitter, which with its limit of 280 characters, trends-based user experience, and extreme pace does not exactly lend itself to balanced opinions.⁴ Switching between different roles both for himself and for his country, I argue that he instead tailored his messaging to address different target audiences at once, alternating between embellishing Iran’s actions in the world and denigrating those of its enemies. In addition, my analysis will also show that while responses to his tweets were far from unanimously favourable, he also garnered more positive reactions than one would expect from the public face of a regime that regularly makes headlines by sponsoring foreign militias and executing domestic protesters.

Zarif’s mastery in the art of rhetorical warfare is not surprising, considering that he has represented his country internationally in one function or another since 1982, when he joined the Iranian delegation to the United Nations. From then on, he rose through the ranks and became Iran’s UN representative in 2002, a position that he held until 2007 when he was reportedly squeezed out by then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.⁵ Following his nomination as foreign minister by Ahmadinejad’s successor, Hassan Rouhani, Zarif served two consecutive terms until August 2021. As such, he oversaw both the negotiations for as well as the falling-apart of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, colloquially known as the Iran nuclear deal); remained silent during several waves of domestic protests which the government suppressed brutally; dealt with the fallout from the assassination of IRGC Major General Qasem Soleimani as well as the downing of a civilian airliner by IRGC rockets only days later; and managed many other ups and downs in Iran’s international reputation.

Through it all, he maintained an English-language Twitter account under the handle @jzarif as well as Persian-language Instagram and Facebook accounts, which he used to spread his views on current events, keep followers up to date on his activities, promote appearances in other media, and comment on the various wrongs he saw in the world. At the same time, he wrote prolifically, participated in (semi-)public international relations conferences, and gave interviews to a wide range of news outlets. He compiled a total of 23 op-eds in media such as the New York Times or the (Arabic) al-Sharq al-Awsat; 27 videos of speeches at events like the Munich Security Conference or on his YouTube channel⁶; 29 interviews with broadcast or print media like CBS or the New Yorker; and 29 excerpts from his diplomatic communiqués. To extend his reach, he promoted these appearances in other media via his Twitter account. In other words, almost one out of every ten tweets referred to his media appearances outside of Twitter, and from even a cursory Google search one can learn that these do not comprise the entirety of his outreach.

To give a few examples: in the run-up to the concluding negotiations for the JCPOA in mid-2014, Zarif published an op-ed in Foreign Affairs titled ‘What Iran Really Wants’, in which he set out to explain his country’s views on international relations, Iran’s place in it, and the role the Rouhani administration planned to take. Arguing for Iran’s right to play a pre-eminent role in the region, he outlined Iran’s many cultural, political, and civilizational accomplishments, lambasted the influence of the United States on the region and contrasted it with Iran’s desire to engage with other countries ‘on an equal footing, with mutual respect, and in the service of shared interests’.⁷ Four years later, when the US plan to withdraw from the JCPOA became apparent, he appeared on the political talk show ‘Face the Nation’, produced by US broadcasting network CBS, and explained to host Margaret Brennan that by withdrawing, the US would only hurt itself instead of Iran.⁸ And another two years later, shortly after a US drone had assassinated Major General Qasem Soleimani and Iran had shot down a civilian airliner in January 2020, he gave a speech at the Raisina Dialogue, an Indian geopolitics conference bringing together IR practitioners, academics, and media professionals. Contrasting his own country’s interest in multilateralism and international law with the US disregard for other countries’ sovereignty, he repeatedly referred the audience to his Twitter account where he had posted documents to verify his claims, confirming the importance of Twitter as a prime source on Zarif’s thinking. Generally speaking, and notwithstanding the variations in audience and affordances that come with such different media as print news, TV, conferences, or diplomatic communiqués, his rhetoric on Twitter is very consistent with his statements in other media. Twitter constitutes a microcosm of Zarif’s outreach efforts, rendering it an ideal source on Iran’s foreign policy communication with the outside world during the Rouhani era.

The art of (rhetorical) warfare

There are many ways to explain the strategies that Zarif used, in his capacity as Iran’s top diplomat, to engage with the outside world in a manner that furthered his country’s foreign policy interests. Considering that he acted as an advocate for a government known primarily for its poor human rights record, dubious stances towards nuclear non-proliferation, and alleged religious fanaticism, it is no surprise that one of the first frames that comes to mind is propaganda. Propaganda is a vague and often loaded term: its meaning differs markedly both within and between colloquial and scholarly usage, leaving it unclear, for example, whether it falls into the same category of directed communication as PR or whether it is something that ‘good’ democracies (as opposed to ‘evil’ autocracies) do as well.⁹ Another option that is tailored for analysing a country’s communication with foreign audiences is framing Zarif’s activity on Twitter and elsewhere as public diplomacy, i.e. ‘an instrument that mobilizes a country’s soft power resources’.¹⁰ Probably the most well-known option to understand Zarif’s online activity is to frame it as an attempt at building soft power. The term connotes a type of influencing another actor’s decision-making process that does not rely on threats or bribery, but on attraction—the ability to make other actors adopt one’s own preferences.¹¹ One common issue with all of these approaches is that they leave unclear, however, how something as vague as ‘attraction’ would even manifest in a group as heterogeneous as a foreign nation (let alone more than one) and how this would translate into policy change.¹²

Another question left open by these lines of research is earnest engagement with the question whether what actors such as Zarif say is actually true. If framed as propaganda, Zarif’s tweets must be lies; if framed as public diplomacy or an attempt to build soft power, they must be true since otherwise people would see straight through them. As we will see later on, the picture is not that simple. Truth and lies do not really describe Zarif’s relationship to observable reality; instead, it might be described more accurately as bullshitting. According to philosopher Harry Frankfurt, bullshit is characterized by a ‘lack of connection to a concern with truth – [an] indifference to how things really are’.¹³ Rather than trying to falsify specific aspects of reality so as to better fit an existing narrative (otherwise) made up of truths, a bullshitter invents their own narrative from scratch, which might include some truth only incidentally. Considering that Zarif was a seasoned politician with a rather difficult job—making the world look favourably upon a country that has produced nothing but negative headlines for decades—this is not surprising. As Arendt explains,

the politician deals with human affairs that owe their existence to man’s capacity for action, and that means to man’s relative freedom from things as they are. Men who act, to the extent that they feel themselves to be masters of their own futures, will forever be tempted to make themselves masters of the past, too.¹⁴

What Arendt means by claiming that politicians (and not just those representing authoritarian states such as Iran) are tempted to change the past according to their needs is that individuals engaging in politics do not deal in veracity, but in utility: because they act towards a future goal, they use whatever the past (and the present) can give them and shape it to serve this goal. This comes with a certain degree of indifference to such lowly concerns as truth or lies, which is integral to Zarif’s behaviour on Twitter.

This is problematic because while some things are provable in foreign relations—one can count the number of tanks an enemy country has, for example—the narratives that build on these things are not; in that sense, it is impossible to confirm the truth value of certain claims when dealing with a world in which purporting to tell the truth lends an actor authority.¹⁵ Narratives spun on the basis of material conditions can have just as much impact as the material conditions themselves, but it is hard to disprove their truthfulness, and harder still to counteract their normative pull when one cannot fully reject them. On the other hand, for politicians engaged with foreign relations, such as Zarif, this makes strategically circulated narratives very useful. Such narratives ‘explain the world and set constraints on the imaginable and actionable, and shape perceived interests’,¹⁶ which makes propagating them a foreign policy priority.

Explaining how actors can translate a strategic narrative into favourable foreign policy in other countries, Bially Mattern proposes the concept of ‘representational force’. She argues that since realities and subjectivities are constructed in communication with others, it is possible to attack a target by convincing them of a strategic narrative. Such a narrative draws on inconsistencies and contradictions within the target’s subjectivity and forces them to either submit to the actor’s wishes or act in contradiction to their own sense of self, risking ontological destabilization.¹⁷ A good example of this is Zarif’s frequent pointing out that the US, which styles itself as a champion of human rights worldwide, is directly and indirectly responsible for multiple human rights crises in the West Asia/North Africa region. While such ‘verbal fighting via representational force’¹⁸ might not convince the US government to change course, it undermines their credibility in the eyes of the region’s people and (to a certain extent) governments, who are arguably the main target audience of Iran’s foreign policy initiatives.¹⁹

Representational force is also involved in two out of four mechanisms of authoritarian image management. Theorized by Dukalskis, authoritarian image management describes ‘efforts by the state or its proxies to enhance or protect the legitimacy of the state’s political system for audiences outside its borders’,²⁰ which can include media campaigns as well as organized press tours, targeted lobbying, or politically motivated violence. Dukalskis classifies foreign image management methods along two spectra: one spanning between the poles of obstructive and promotional methods, and one between diffuse and specific. Consequently, promotional/diffuse image management would encompass things like Iran’s foreign-language news broadcasts or social media accounts, which spread the country’s strategic narratives, try to frame events in a favourable way, and generally raise Iran’s international profile as a force of good in world politics. Obstructive/diffuse methods may use the same channels, but instead of positive messaging, they attempt to block negative news, for example by distracting the public with other issues or engaging in victim-blaming or ‘whataboutism’. Promotional/specific methods, which groom influential individuals to act as multipliers or lobbyists to intervene in favour of (in this case) Iran with relevant decision-makers, often follow a quid pro quo logic; and obstructive/specific methods raise the cost of being an oppositional actor by threatening their reputation, freedom, or safety in order to keep damaging information from reaching the public or disrupt oppositional networks. All of these methods work best when deployed together: ‘Promotional and obstructive forms of authoritarian image management are meant to work together insofar as the latter shields the former from criticism […] [while] if obstructive tactics like repression are exposed, […] promotional tactics are required to repair the damage’.²¹

Operationalizing this categorization for use on social media material, one could rephrase the distinction between the mechanisms as follows: promotional methods proudly make statements about who ‘we’ are (as in, who the Iranian government and/or the Iranian nation is), proclaiming achievements, claiming values, and drawing on history to stabilize a shared national narrative. In contrast, obstructive methods reveal who ‘they’ are (as in, Iran’s or the nation’s enemies), exposing weaknesses, condemning evil deeds, and drawing on history to lay bare the enemy’s inherently wicked nature. As two sides of the same coin, promotional and obstructive approaches work best in tandem, for example by contrasting one’s own glories with the other side’s losses, one’s righteousness with the other side’s hypocrisy. Since history is a large field to choose reference points from, there is necessarily quite a lot of cherry-picking involved in assembling these narratives, meaning that their relationship to truth can be rather sketchy. Who these narratives are directed to, whether it be the general public or hand-picked stakeholders, depends on whether these efforts fall into the specific or the diffuse category of foreign image management mechanisms. With regard to Twitter, this means that messages directed at a diffuse public do not have a clear addressee, whereas messages directed at a specific ‘other’ would usually mention them by name (and Twitter handle). This is not to say that the latter category of tweets, which often only summarize what was being said behind closed doors, can give us a detailed idea about Zarif’s lobbying efforts, as they are still repackaged for public consumption. However, since everyone—including Zarif’s conversation partners—can read what he wrote, he could not stray too far from the agreed-upon line, thus allowing us to interpret these tweets as evidence of promotional-specific foreign image management activity.

An additional complication to consider specifically for the case of Iran is that the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy makers are not one monolithic bloc. There are various offices and institutions involved in decision-making processes that do not always (or even usually) act in concert. Broadly speaking, one can cluster the relevant actors into three blocs: the executive branch, which includes the president and his foreign minister; the military bloc, primarily the IRGC and its liaisons to foreign militias; and the Supreme Leader’s bloc, including the heads of the big bonyads (charitable foundations that play an important role in Iran’s economy), which for constitutional as well as customary law reasons towers over and oversees the other blocs.²² Whereas during the Rouhani administration (2013–2021), the executive bloc was mostly concerned with smoothing over diplomatic relations, the military and the Supreme Leader’s bloc were more cautious, not least because their power rests in part on hostile relations with the outside world.²³ It is therefore reasonable to assume that during those years Iran would have not one, but (at least) two strategic narratives, which its proponents attempt to translate into representational force according to their capabilities. Furthermore, since these capabilities differ considerably between the blocs, it would follow that each bloc’s focus lies on the authoritarian image management mechanisms best suited to its means and needs.

Zarif’s position as head of the foreign ministry was more suited to Dukalskis’ promotional mechanisms, both specific and diffuse: through his travels, he was able to establish connections with key individuals, and he could use his Twitter account (and other outreach-oriented media, like op-eds in foreign newspapers) to spread his bloc’s strategic narrative to a wider audience. To a certain extent, obstructive/diffuse methods lay within his capabilities as well, even though the other two blocs presumably had the upper hand in this; this is even more true for obstructive/specific methods tied to military, economic, or intelligence capabilities, which are under the IRCG’s and ultimately the Supreme Leader’s purview. I will therefore concentrate my analysis on the first three mechanisms and leave the fourth aside with the note that, as events such as the abduction and subsequent execution of oppositional journalist Ruhollah Zam in 2019/2020 show, obstructive/specific methods very much form part of Iran’s authoritarian image management as well.

As mentioned, during his time in office Zarif sent out 1207 tweets, some of them accumulating several thousand comments, which is too large a corpus for a single person to perform a qualitative analysis on. I therefore ranked his tweets according to the number of likes and retweets they attracted, with retweets counted twice.²⁴ The 50 highest-ranked tweets plus the ten first comments underneath form the core of my corpus. Additionally, in order to gain a better understanding of people’s reactions to potentially controversial tweets, I selected additional tweets with the keywords ‘Ramadan’, ‘nuclear’, ‘nation’, ‘missile’, ‘democracy’, and ‘human rights’, chosen based on my experience of which of the Top 50 tweets sparked the liveliest discussions in the comments. I then eliminated the ones that were repetitive regarding content, and again added the first ten comments to the rest. This resulted in a corpus of 93 tweets plus 866 comments,²⁵ which I then coded according to the original tweet’s tone and topic as well as the comments’ tone and topic. Out of these 959 items, around 66% were in English, 23% in Persian, 5% in Arabic, and the remaining in other languages; in addition, most commenters also left clues regarding their religious and/or national affiliation through pronoun use or flag emojis. Contrary to my own assumptions, replies even to very controversial statements are far from unanimously negative; on the whole, there were 420 positive comments (i.e. applauding Zarif and/or agreeing with his statement) matching 539 negative ones, meaning that 43.8% of the people who cared enough to retweet with a comment did so because Zarif convinced them.

However, we cannot take this to mean that 43.8% of comments on all his tweets are positive, much less that 43.8% of his followers generally agree with what Zarif says. First, the overwhelming majority of Zarif’s 1.6 million. followers do not react in any measurable way to his tweets, and neither do the people who come across them in other spaces. Second, the order in which I see comments is not reproducible. Hard facts like chronology and engagement do play into the display of comments, but the algorithm also takes into account my entire search and interaction history on Twitter even though I use my Twitter profile only for research. These are just some of the problems that scholars face when doing qualitative research on Twitter conversations (or other websites). But while I cannot claim that my sample or the exact figures I calculated from it are representative, I do think that it opens up a window into how people worldwide interact with Iranian authoritarian image management.

In the trenches of the twitterverse: the many masks of Mohammad Javad Zarif

Statesman

Throughout his tenure, Zarif travelled a lot, and followers of his Twitter account were right there with him. In these tweets, which form 14% of my sample, he talked about whom he meets and the issues on his agenda, usually illustrated with photos of him and foreign representatives shaking hands in stately rooms. These tweets therefore provide an opportunity to watch Zarif’s promotional/specific authoritarian image management efforts in action. In one particularly illustrative example, he wrote:

Grateful to PM @ImranKhanPTI for his efforts toward peace in the #PersianGulf. Reiterating #HOPE (Hormuz Peace Endeavour) I again invite colleagues in the leaderships of other regional states to join Iran in forging a blueprint for peace, security, stability & prosperity.²⁶

Grateful to PM @ImranKhanPTI for his efforts toward peace in the #PersianGulf. Reiterating #HOPE (Hormuz Peace Endeavour) I again invite colleagues in the leaderships of other regional states to join Iran in forging a blueprint for peace, security, stability & prosperity The tweet is accompanied by official photos from the meeting showing Khan together with Khamenei, Rouhani, Zarif, and other high-ranking Iranian officials. Both the phrasing—Zarif inviting Pakistan’s leader to join Iran—and the images—Khan travelling to Zarif’s home turf to receive this invitation—position Iran as the senior partner in this proposed HOPE initiative, who is leading the way towards a better future that other statesmen have not discovered yet. In this dynamic, Iran stands for a future that looks attractive primarily from an economic perspective—stability is good for business, after all—while making no mention of its supposedly democratic political system which, in a region populated by autocratic regimes,²⁷ would do more to repulse rather than attract potential allies. The narrative is thus tailored to a very specific target group that is interested in economic growth as an antidote to democracy-inspired unrest.

In his role as statesman, Zarif also congratulated other nations on festive occasions and expressed sympathy after calamities. After the explosion in Beirut’s harbour in August 2020, he wrote in Arabic: ‘Our hearts are with the Lebanese people in this great catastrophe. God’s mercy to the martyrs, patience and solace to the victims’ families, and recovery to the wounded. May God’s mercy and peace be upon this proud country’.²⁸ Accompanying the tweet is an image of a smoke cloud over Beirut that has the words ‘from my heart peace to Beirut’ (in Arabic) written upon it. Here, his choice of language and phrasing points to Iran and Lebanon/the Arab world’s shared cultural/religious heritage and speaks of an effort to ingratiate himself with his Arab audience. This tweet (and others like it) thus forms part of a charm offensive towards Arab publics that can be classified as promotional-diffuse: It emphasizes Iran’s solidarity with a people with whom Iran shares a long history of entanglement, reaching from centuries of scholarly exchange to the Islamic Republic’s close ties with Hizballah. Moreover, it emphasizes that Iran cares, not about its geopolitical influence but about the Lebanese people who were hurt and traumatized by the explosion. It therefore aims to counteract the idea that Iran is interested in promoting its own (expansive, Shiʿa) agenda into Arab countries’ governments, while disregarding entirely the wishes and interests of Arab nations. Studiously avoiding sectarian language, Zarif instead phrased his condolences in a way that expresses Muslim (or even generally Abrahamic) fellow feeling, but did not single out Lebanon’s Shiʿa community as more worthy of empathy than the Lebanese nation as a whole. He thus promoted a narrative of Iran as a compassionate, non-sectarian country interested in other peoples’ well-being to a fairly diffuse (Arab) public.

Champion of the Ummah

While Zarif congratulated practitioners of various religions on their religious holidays (6% of my sample), Islamic religious occasions played a dominant role. He regularly used them to call for cooperation among Muslim-majority nations, subtly positioning his country as a peacemaker in opposition to unnamed other countries’ (read: Saudi Arabia’s) sectarianism. At the same time, he had no qualms about attacking Saudi Arabia through references to shared Muslim holidays:

Israeli snipers shoot over 2,000 unarmed Palestinian protesters on a single day. Saudi response, on eve of #Ramadhan? Collaboration with its U.S. patron to sanction the first force to liberate Arab territory and shatter the myth of Israeli invincibility. Shame upon shame.²⁹

He therefore instrumentalized Muslim holidays to cast himself as the better Muslim, one who obeys religious principles and bravely speaks truth to power. This is another instance of speaking to followers’ (in this case, religious) sentiments and trying to build on a shared heritage, as well as an expression of Iran’s strategic narrative of resistance against Israel/the US and defender of Muslim/Palestinian rights. Classifiable as obstructive/diffuse, this tweet primarily makes a statement about who the enemy is: Israel, which allegedly places no importance whatsoever in Palestinian lives; the US, which lets Israel get away with it; and Saudi-Arabia, which should know whose side to take in this conflict and still chooses wrong. Implicitly, however, it also propagates an idea of who Iran is that centres on Muslim solidarity as well as basic decency. The things he accuses his enemies of are all verifiably true,³⁰ but they are also a way of distracting the world away from Iran, which demonstrably does not place any importance in its own citizens’ lives and has been letting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad get away with brutalizing the Syrian people for years. Tweets like this one thus demonstrate how Zarif claims for himself and his country to be champions of the Ummah by engaging in ‘whataboutism’ against the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, while drawing attention away from Iran’s own less-than-community-minded activities through obstructive/diffuse methods.

Interestingly, there are few references to specifically Shiʿi topics, and the few existing ones are phrased very carefully in order not to offend Sunni sensibilities. In one of the tweets that do touch upon Shiʿi particularities, Zarif wrote:

Honored to be in Najaf and Karbala: home of the Sacred Shrines. Moved by people’s sentiments. As brave Iranian youth stood with Iraqi brothers in fight against extremist terror, our private sectors will stand together in mutually beneficial endeavours to improve the lives of all.³¹

Honored to be in Najaf and Karbala: home of the Sacred Shrines. Moved by people’s sentiments. As brave Iranian youth stood with Iraqi brothers in fight against extremist terror, our private sectors will stand together in mutually beneficial endeavours to improve the lives of all He illustrated the tweet with photos taken at a conference venue that show Zarif speaking to a large group of men, smiling and shaking hands. As Iran’s most important neighbour, Zarif paid frequent visits to Iraq, including to the tombs of Imams ʿAli and Husayn. Considering that unlike many of his peers in the Iranian administration he neither has a seminary nor an IRGC/Basij background, it is not unreasonable to speculate that these publicized visits were meant to bolster his religious credentials. This, however, is not the tweet’s main focus; instead, he put the emphasis on the Iranian and Iraqi nations being bonded through their shared fight against ISIS and through their economic ties, which do not only benefit Iran but both sides. As with the tweet on Lebanon, Zarif made an effort to portray Iran and Iraq as equals who share a brother-like bond (regardless of whether the Iraqis happen to be Sunni or Shiʿa) instead of as a master and directing its puppet. It is therefore an attempt at promotional/diffuse image management, presenting Iran as peaceful, reliable, and non-threatening; at the same time, it is evidence of promotional/specific image management since Zarif most likely made the same point to the Iraqi stakeholders pictured in the photos.

Hawk

Zarif’s expressions of enmity towards Saudi Arabia, making up 11% of my sample, do not confine themselves only to the area of religion. While not being the only country at the pointy end of Zarif’s rhetorical attacks, the way he ridicules Saudi Arabia and its leadership has a different ring to it:

17 yrs after 9/11, Iran − 1st Muslim nation to condemn tragedy, mourn victims & take real action against AQ & its offshoots incl ISIS & Nusrah—has been fined $11bn and its citizens banned from US. All while WH auctions off FP to terror sponsors whose citizens perpetrated 9/11.³²

Accompanying the tweet is a photo of Iranian citizens lighting candles, statistics showing the 9/11 terrorists’ nationalities, and the global distribution of Twitter accounts tweeting in support of ISIS, with both attributing Saudi nationals a leading role. Tweets about Saudi Arabia’s misdeeds serve as another example for Zarif’s instrumental relationship with the truth: while his accusations against Saudi Arabia are true, Zarif conveniently forgot to mention the fact that his country is also implicated in terrorist attacks on foreign soil,³³ and an indirect party to the Yemeni war and other regional conflicts. The tweet is thus a good example of obstructive/diffuse foreign image management: its primary aim is to smear Saudi Arabia’s reputation and lead his audience to associate the country with religious extremism of the kind that can threaten people any place, any time. Secondarily, it also undermines the US ‘War on Terror’ narrative that underpins both US foreign policy in the West Asia/North Africa region as well as—to a certain extent—the US conception of itself as the archenemy of Islamist terrorism. By accusing the US of (intentionally!) misdirecting its foreign policy out of baseless hatred against Iran, Zarif therefore built up representational force. To help this process along, he also sprinkled in some promotional/diffuse rhetoric: By castigating Saudi Arabia (instead of Iran) as a terror sponsor, he simultaneously tried to remove that same stigma from Iran’s reputation and push his narrative of Iran as the ‘good’, (i.e. peaceful) kind of Muslim country.

In a remarkable show of flexibility, another tweet sent three weeks later switched the roles of hapless puppet and evil mastermind. Writing in Arabic, Zarif tweeted:

President Trump insists on repeatedly insulting Saudis by saying that they’re not capable of lasting for two weeks without his support. This is the reward for the illusion that one can outsource security. We’re once again extending our hands to our neighbours and telling them: let’s build a ‘strong region’ and stop this haughty arrogance.³⁴

The tweet is illustrated with a clip from al-Jazeera Arabic that shows Trump claiming that the Saudi monarchy would be helpless without US support. Smearing the US and ingratiating Iran at the same time, Zarif again combined promotional/diffuse and obstructive/diffuse approaches, demonstrating that both work best when deployed together. By decrying US arrogance, Zarif is positioned all the better to argue for an alliance between Arabs and Iranians which would not be based on a Western sense of superiority, but mutual respect and shared prosperity. Reaching out to Arab audiences in their own language, Zarif attempted to remove the sense of otherness standing between Arabs and Persians and associated fears of foreign domination. He thus redirected his hawkish rhetoric towards the US alone and tried to grip Arab audiences—especially Saudis—by their hurt patriotic pride while at the same time showing them the way to redemption: an alliance with Iran.

Democrat/multilateralist

This category of tweets, wherein Zarif performs the role of human rights advocate, flawless democrat, and defender of the rule of law, is another good example of Zarif’s instrumental relationship with the truth and forms around 12% of my sample. In tweets like these, he took great care to demonstrate his country’s moral and intellectual superiority as compared to other states’ arrogance/stupidity (the US), violence (Israel), brutishness (Saudi Arabia), and spinelessness (Europe). The phrasing of these tweets is usually at least slightly joking, which made Zarif appear superior and distanced. To give an example, during a visit by ex-US President Donald Trump to Saudi Arabia, he tweeted:

Iran—fresh from real elections—attacked by @POTUS in that bastion of democracy & moderation. Foreign Policy or simply milking KSA of $480B?³⁵

To contextualize his tweet, he illustrated it with an excerpt from Trump’s speech at a conference with Arab leaders held in Riyadh. In the speech, Trump thanked the Saudi King Salman for buying 480 Billion dollars’ worth of weapons from the US as well as the need to counter the Iranian threat to the region—and asked them to ‘pray for the day when the Iranian people have the just and righteous government they deserve’.³⁶ In a prime example of what Bially Mattern characterizes as verbal fighting, Zarif used the time and place of Trump’s remarks to both boast Iran’s democratic credentials (= promotional/diffuse) and attack those of Trump and his host (= obstructive/diffuse). Since Saudi Arabia has never even pretended at democracy above the municipal level, it is more likely that Zarif’s jibes here were directed against the US, which prides itself on supporting democracy and fighting extremism. It is still quite a stretch to criticize US democracy from the standpoint of Iran’s political system that pre-sorts all candidates running for higher offices, but again, there is a kernel of truth to Zarif’s comment about the US being neither perfectly democratic nor particularly reluctant to partner with autocratic countries. Among circles that tend to magnify US flaws and relativize those forces conceptualizing themselves as anti-imperialist (such as Iran), this reading is likely to gain traction, if only because seeing proof of US hypocrisy makes it easier to believe Zarif’s claims about Iranian democracy.

Proof also plays an important role in Zarif’s claims to Iran being a multilaterally oriented, law-abiding member of the international community, in contrast to (again) the US. In one out of many tweets concerning the future of the JCPOA, he wrote: ‘The int’l community in general—and UN Security Council in particular—face an important decision: Do we maintain respect for the rule of law, or do we return to the law of the jungle?’³⁷ The tweet is illustrated with a photo of Zarif participating in a UN Security Council (UNSC) session and contains links to transcripts of Zarif’s speech before that body in English and Persian. In his address, Zarif clearly states his government’s frustration with US behaviour after their withdrawal from the treaty as well as the European parties’ unwillingness to go against their US partners. Referring to numerous UNSC resolutions, the JCPOA text, and external sources, he justifies Iran’s decision to scale back its compliance with the JCPOA by using legal vocabulary, leaving readers with the impression that the US is indeed proceeding according to the ‘law of the jungle’. Allowing his audience on Twitter to read the speech he delivered to members of the UNSC combines all three foreign image management methods: promotional/diffuse (Iran as a champion of the rule of law), obstructive/diffuse (the US as a threat to it), and promotional/specific (addressed to powerful world leaders). Reading this tweet as the latter, however, is especially interesting because a) it is evidence that Zarif used the same talking points and even language behind closed doors as he did on Twitter, and b) he attempted to sway foreign leaders through the ‘unforced force of the better argument’,³⁸ as Habermas would put it, thus moving Iran away from its image of an irrational rogue. At the same time, he portrayed himself as a seasoned diplomat fluent in the language of international law, adding to his credibility in the eyes of his colleagues and thereby strengthening his negotiating position. This demonstrates that foreign image management can apply not only to a country’s image, but also to that of its representatives if it places them in a better position to act on behalf of their state.

Armed pacifist

With this role (11% of my sample), Zarif refined the trope of Iran as a ‘besieged fortress’³⁹ to emphasize that Iran’s military arsenal and nuclear ambitions are not a threat to anyone, but that other countries would do well to re-think their plans regarding Iran. The JCPOA and associated discussions about Iran’s missile programme played a prominent part in this facet of Zarif’s persona, as do references to past attacks on Iran. In a series of tweets, he shared a video in which he described in very emotional terms the feeling of helplessness that pervaded the Iranian political elite during Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iran and summarizes:

Iran unmoved by threats as we derive security from our people. We’ll never initiate war, but we can only rely on our own means of defense. We will never use our weapons against anyone, except in self-defense. Let us see if any of those who complain can make the same statement.⁴⁰

In a show of promotional/diffuse foreign image management, he therefore used his country’s past to give credence to his representation of Iran as a peaceful but well-fortified actor, while questioning his enemies’ (in this case Israel) representation of its own military capabilities. Referring to the war, which started with Iraq disregarding a border treaty and during which Iran mostly had to defend itself alone, helped him to make the point that Iran learned the hard way what happens when a country relies on promises alone.⁴¹ On first glance, this sounds like a reasonable argument in a world where the vast majority of countries still possess armed forces instead of relying on international law alone. What it does not do is define where self-defence ends—whether that includes supporting the Assad regime in Syria or elevating a pro-Iran politician to the prime minister’s office in Iraq (both of these are a yes).⁴² As often happens, the image of Iran promoted by Zarif as peaceful but fortified is only part of the truth.

While tweets like the previous one largely targeted international actors and audiences, some tweets in this category were also meant to incite patriotic pride in Iranians. In one of these, Zarif writes:

Iranians forced the US client [Mohammad Reza Pahlavi] to leave 40 years ago today. 3 years ago today, JCPOA entered into force, ending yrs of securitization of Iran. In spite of US machinations v. Iran for the past 40 years - & its withdrawal from JCPOA – Iranians have shattered the myth of US omnipotence.⁴³

Tweets like this one can also be sorted into the promotional/diffuse category as they make a statement about who Iran is—strong, independent-minded, resourceful—but they also show that ‘diffuse’ does not necessarily mean lacking a target audience altogether. At the same time, while statements like this one probably resonate more (in a positive or negative way) with Iranians than they do with, say, an Estonian, the medium of Twitter makes it quite likely that some Estonian people saw this tweet as well, and had some sort of reaction to it. ‘diffuse’, then, should rather be taken to mean that while an actor might have a particular target audience in mind, they also account for the likelihood that other people can see the message, too, and ideally still draw favourable conclusions from it. For example, an Estonian might feel reminded of their own country’s experience with Soviet imperialism and therefore empathize with Iran’s tribulations. In combination with the tweet’s obstructive/diffuse undertones—messaging about who the US is, namely meddlesome, underhanded, and weak—this produces a black-and-white picture that is very typical of Zarif’s tweets: using the supposed misdeeds of the US as the most extreme comparison case possible to promote an image of his country’s morality and righteousness

Nationalist/anti-imperialist

I discuss these two roles together because in practice they are almost impossible to disentangle: anti-imperialist attacks are accompanied by boasts about Iran’s sense of morals, and nationalist grandstanding shines all the brighter when compared to the West’s decadence. In tweets that touch upon these topics (46% of my sample), Zarif often emphasized the Iranian people’s resilience and called upon the same dyadic discourse of victimhood and strength that permeates his armed-pacifist tweets:

A reminder to those hallucinating about emulating ISIS war crimes by targeting our cultural heritage: Through MILLENNIA of history, barbarians have come and ravaged our cities, razed our monuments and burnt our libraries. Where are they now? We’re still here, & standing tall.⁴⁴

Here, Iran’s status as one of the world’s early civilizations again served to underpin his representation of Iran as superior and therefore unfazed by threats from ‘barbarian’ states. In this example of promotional/diffuse messaging, Iran’s long history therefore serves as a way to play on Iranian people’s identities and put out a statement that even those who oppose him and the regime he serves can hardly disagree with. Messaging like this, which is seen by and resonates with people in and outside Iran (albeit in different ways), again shows that it is not possible—or even desirable for practitioners—to isolate domestic and foreign audiences from each other: even though Zarif’s job as foreign minister consisted mainly of communicating with the world outside Iran, his social media messages also found audiences inside the country.⁴⁵ Making use of this fact, he strengthened the ‘home front’ by playing on Iran’s longevity as a nation that has weathered worse storms before, as well as on people’s fear and/or abhorrence of ISIS. At the same time, describing the US as ISIS copycats follows Dukalskis’ obstructive/diffuse approach: if the US displays as much disregard for international law and ethical codes of conduct as ISIS, if they position themselves this far outside the pale of civilized conflict resolution, there is no use in looking for a diplomatic solution. Framing the conflict as Iran vs. quasi-ISIS thus makes calls for mediation appear unreasonable and justifies whatever escalation of violence might follow, while placing the blame straight onto the US.

The same framing appeared in many other tweets of this category, drawing a picture of a world divided between the forces of chaos and violence (the US) vs. stability and noble sacrifice (Iran). In one such tweet, Zarif wrote:

Honored to meet top cmdrs of #IRGC. Our armed forces sacrificed to defend our nation, region & the world against Saddam & ISIS. We’ll never forget their sacrifice-nor will we allow outlaw bullies to destroy their legacy by fuelling insecurity & instability. Nor should the world.⁴⁶

Accompanying the tweet is a photo of Zarif and some other (civil) officials in a meeting with high-ranking IRGC personnel, among them Soleimani and then-IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jaʿfari. The timing of this shot, and Zarif’s unusually warm words about the IRGC, are significant because Zarif had tried to resign from his office only one and a half months prior, reportedly out of frustration of being excluded from a visit to Tehran by Bashar al-Assad in favour of IRGC representatives (specifically Soleimani).⁴⁷ While these rumours were never officially confirmed (and Rouhani rejected Zarif’s resignation), they shed unwelcome light on the divisions within Iranian political circles. One can therefore read this tweet, and its performative show of unity, as a promotional/specific image management effort directed both at IRGC top brass and at foreign leaders waiting to exploit the gaps within Iran’s armour.

Meanwhile, the tweet also does promotional/diffuse work, showing that image management communication can fulfil several functions at once. Putting forward a very positive interpretation of the IRGC’s role in Iran and the wider region, Zarif obfuscated the brutality with which IRGC members often act against the Iranian population by redirecting the gaze onto how the IRGC protects Iran (and others) from brutality from outside the borders. By using the term ‘sacrifice’ as well as two bogeymen (Saddam Hussein and ISIS) whose evil is almost undisputed globally, he devalued Iranians’ and other people’s suffering from the IRGC’s misdeeds to negligible side effects of a noble cause. With more than a touch of hubris, he construed the IRGC as a deeply misunderstood force of good acting on behalf of the entire world, which makes it all the more despicable for the world to lash out against it. This narrative is thus designed to counter the US narrative of the IRGC, which had designated the IRGC a foreign terrorist organization two days earlier, and define the ‘real enemy’ for people both inside and outside Iran.

The hit ratio: does this actually work?

The short answer: Somewhat, yes. The longer answer: Somewhat, but. As explained above, my approach to gauging the positive-to-negative-ratio of reactions to Zarif’s most high-engagement tweets by looking into the number of likes plus tone and content of the comments posted below has two major limits. First, it only registers reactions that translated into some sort of interaction with the tweet, such as liking or retweeting it, as opposed to scrolling along indifferently, nodding in agreement, or throwing one’s phone against the wall in anger. Second, Twitter’s proprietary algorithm, fed by my search history, displays comments to me in a non-reproducible order, further skewing the numbers. While this means that the numbers themselves should be taken with a grain of salt (or several), I believe that the fact that they proved to represent stable trends across my sample indicates that they can give us an idea of how Zarif’s audience received his foreign image management campaigns.

From looking through the comments, one can draw several conclusions. First, Zarif’s tweets seemed to give the world an opportunity to engage in a sort of Trump-bashing that often expands into a critique of the United States’ policy in the Middle East, which suits very well the role that Iran envisions for itself. Whenever he put on the hawk or the armed pacifist mask, which tend to be especially critical of the US, the responses he garnered were more positive than the average, with 46% and 49% affirmative replies respectively. Moreover, from the way that people phrased their opposition to US foreign policy/support for Iran, one can gather that it is a specific section of US society that seemed to respond especially well to Zarif’s anti-Trump rhetoric, namely people wanting to appear progressive, cosmopolitan, and open-minded. To give an example, when Zarif tweeted that European leaders should encourage Trump to stay in the JCPOA, somebody commented: ‘As a #woke and fair-minded US citizen, I’ve always admired Iran’s diplomatic negotiations regarding the matter of de-nuclearization […] & I would like that to continue […] @realDonaldTrump’.⁴⁸ By emphasizing that they were opposed to Trump, they aligned themselves with Zarif’s obstructive/diffuse rhetoric about the US being the only cause of continuing conflict in the West Asia/North Africa region while buying into his promotional/diffuse messaging of Iran as multilateralist and respectful of other nations’ sovereignty.

Second, when it comes to aggressive rhetoric about Saudi Arabia, one can often watch nationalistic verbal fighting flare up between supporters of Iranian and Saudi foreign policy. Many commenters engaging in this back-and-forth behaviour adopted Zarif’s perspectives and even phrasing, demonstrating that the nationalistic narrative that Zarif offered his followers had the desired effect of seeping into their worldviews. After a 2018 terrorist attack on a military parade in Ahvaz, one commenter asked their followers upon whom Iran should take revenge: the US, as the one who had provided the weapons; Saudi Arabia as the one who had financed the attack; or Israel as the one who had agitated against Iran?⁴⁹ Some comments also devolved into open racism against Arabs, demonstrating that obstructive/diffuse messaging can only ever be an offer, not control what the intended audience does with it. However, this worked only on people who already leaned towards his framing, as can be seen in the replies to his tweets in Arabic (i.e. to an audience that may be predisposed as wary of Iran), where the affirmative response rate lies well below average at 38%. This can be seen, for example, in the comments below Zarif’s expression of condolences after the Beirut port explosion in 2020, with one person calling Iran a ‘cancerous, deadly entity that destroys everything it reaches’ and that is ‘no different from the Israeli entity’.⁵⁰ Generally speaking, people from both sides of the front employed highly nationalist language and ‘whataboutism’ when confronted with their own side’s misdeeds, carrying further both their own governments’ promotional/diffuse messaging about the Self and their obstructive/diffuse messaging about the Other.

Third, putting on the nationalist/anti-imperialist mask produced the most divided responses, which do, however, share one common tenet: that Iran is exceptional, and in some sense superior, to other countries both in the region and in the West because its civilization reaches back millennia. Divisions came in over the question of what to do with this heritage, or more precisely who the better patriot is: those who oppose the Islamic Republic, those who support it fully, or those who support it principally, but dislike the Rouhani administration. As heated as the arguments in the comments could get, it is still interesting to see that there was a degree of ideological alignment between a representative of the Islamic Republic and its sworn enemies.⁵¹ After the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in 2020, one commenter adopted Zarif’s framing, threatening a ‘decisive response from the Iranian nation’, while another cursed Zarif as a dishonourable traitor who ‘with your negotiation-oriented thinking are the main reason for these assassinations’.⁵² Both commenters thus took offence that a foreign power would dare to assassinate an Iranian national on Iranian soil, but disagreed firmly on whether the government was to be supported or blamed. Additionally, ideological alignment seems to weigh heavier than observable reality, since tweets that included proof of Zarif’s points (like screenshotted documents or statistics) did not shift the positive-to-negative ratio in the replies. We can take this to signify that both promotional/diffuse and obstructive/diffuse messaging can consolidate or even radicalize pre-existing biases, but not brainwash people into adopting perspectives that run contrary to their ideological positions or value systems.

Finally, as we have seen in the course of this paper, authoritarian image management is not a magic wand that anyone can wave who wants to influence how people perceive the world. Successful authoritarian image management takes knowledge of one’s target audience(s), most importantly which narratives form the basis of their worldview regarding international politics; it takes a clear perspective on the messages one wants to convey, as well as coherent framing; it takes flexibility in dealing with current events and audience responses; and it takes institutional backing that ensures the necessary exposure and resources. When these conditions are met, authoritarian image management works in a (frankly surprisingly) high number of cases. By playing on (self-identified) US users’ desire to be ‘the good guys’, Muslim users’ wish for intra-ummah solidarity, and Iranian users’ sense of Iranian superiority, Zarif managed to convince many—so much so that he generated an average of 2384 likes and 556 retweets per tweet. It will be up to further research to clarify questions pertaining, for example, to the specificity of the medium, the choice of language, differences regarding the political systems under which image management actors operate, or the role of discursive events as well as institutional changes in shaping authoritarian image management.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the editors of this special issue and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Mohammad J. Zarif, ‘Twitter Account’, https://twitter.com/JZarif (accessed April 4, 2022). Some notes on the citation of tweets and comments: I will use the format @[Twitter handle] + date to indicate the source of the quoted tweet (in this case @jzarif September 4, 2013). All translations of Persian or Arabic content are my own. I am leaving the content of the English tweets in its original form, including spelling and grammar deviations. This approach also protects stylistic choices, such as deliberately incorrect grammar, and retains the genre’s peculiarity as consisting of written text that mirrors spoken language. See Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019).

² In July 2023, its owner Elon Musk changed the platform’s name to X. However, since it was still called Twitter during the timeframe investigated in this study, I will keep referring to it as such.

³ For notable exceptions see Constance Duncombe, ‘Twitter and Transformative Diplomacy: Social Media and Iran—US Relations’, International Affairs 93, no. 3 (2017); and Kaye D. Sweetser and Charles W. Brown, ‘An Exploration of Iranian Communication to Multiple Target Audiences’, Public Relations Review 36, no. 3 (2010).

⁴ Johannes Paßmann, ‘Kurz & souverän: Twittern als sozioliterarische Praxis’, in Kurz & knapp: Zur Mediengeschichte kleiner Formen vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Michael Gamper and Ruth Mayer (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017).

⁵ Ali Alfoneh and Reuel Marc Gerecht, ‘An Iranian Moderate Exposed’, The New Republic, January 24, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/116167/mohammad-javad-zarif-irans-foreign-minister-religious-zealot (accessed May 29, 2023).

⁶ On his YouTube channel one can find mainly Nawruz addresses or messages to Iran’s JCPOA interlocutors, often subtitled in five or six languages.

⁷ Mohammad Javad Zarif, ‘What Iran Really Wants: Iranian Foreign Policy in the Rouhani Era’, Foreign Affairs 93, no. 3 (2014): 56.

⁸ Margaret Brennan, ‘Extended Interview: Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’, Face the Nation, April 24, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrA-pfPbzfg&t=2s (accessed May 29, 2023).

⁹ For an attempt at definition see Thymian Bussemer, Propaganda: Konzepte und Theorien (Wiesbaden: Springer Medien, 2005); for an interesting approach to classify propaganda into ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ methods see Haifeng Huang, ‘Propaganda as Signaling’, Comparative Politics 47, no. 4 (2015): 419–37; Haifeng Huang, ‘The Pathology of Hard Propaganda’, The Journal of Politics 80, no. 3 (2018): 1034–38; and Daniel C. Mattingly and Elaine Yao, ‘How Soft Propaganda Persuades’, Comparative Political Studies 55, no. 9 (2022): 1569–94.

¹⁰ Edward Wastnidge, ‘The Modalities of Iranian Soft Power: From Cultural Diplomacy to Soft War’, Politics 35, no. 3–4 (2015): 365.

¹¹ Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004), 11.

¹² There have been attempts at theorizing this connection, for example by Sevin (Efe Sevin, ‘Pathways of Connection: An Analytical Approach to the Impacts of Public Diplomacy’, Public Relations Review 41, no. 4 (2015): 562–8.), but they usually go no further than claiming that value-based attraction has an influence on foreign policy without explaining how this process might look like in detail.

¹³ Harry G. Frankfurt, Bullshit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013), 33–4.

¹⁴ Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, on Violence, Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 11–2. Notably, Arendt’s writing on lies in politics referred to the United States, a democracy, after the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

¹⁵ Carl Ciovacco,‘The Shaping of Threat Through Narration’, JSS (Journal of Strategic Security) 13, no. 2 (2020): 56.

¹⁶ Laura Roselle, Alister Miskimmon, and Ben O’Loughlin, ‘Strategic Narrative: A new means to understand soft power’, Media, War & Conflict 7, no. 1 (2014): 76.

¹⁷ Janice Bially Mattern, ‘Why “Soft Power” Isn’t So Soft: Representational Force and the Sociolinguistic Construction of Attraction in World Politics’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 33, no. 3 (2005): 583–612.

¹⁸ Ibid., 586.

¹⁹ Walter Posch, ‘Ideology and Strategy in the Middle East: The Case of Iran’, Survival 59, no. 5 (2017): 82.

²⁰ Alexander Dukalskis, Making the world safe for dictatorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 4.

²¹ Dukalskis, Making the world safe for dictatorship, 38.

²² See for example Nikolay Kozhanov, Iran’s Strategic Thinking (Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2018), 63ff; Behbod Negahban, ‘Who Makes Iran’s Foreign Policy? The Revolutionary Guard and Factional Politics in the Formulation of Iranian Foreign Policy’, Yale Journal of International Affairs 12, no. 1 (2017): 33–75; David E. Thaler, Mullahs, Guards, and Bonyads: An exploration of Iranian leadership dynamics (Santa Monica: RAND, 2010), chapters 3 and 4; Bayram Sinkaya, Revolutionary Guards in Iranian politics: Elites and shifting relations (Abingdon, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 78ff.

²³ Negahban, ‘Who Makes Iran’s Foreign Policy?’, 36.

²⁴ It is likely that the exact number of likes and comments is somewhat skewed by the intrusion of bots. While this fact should not be ignored, liking and retweeting still increases the reach of a tweet, even if a bot does it. This means that more people are exposed to it, which is the relevant part for this study.

²⁵ I skipped comments that repeated another comment verbatim, which is why there are a little less than 930 comments in my sample.

²⁶ @jzarif October 15, 2019. Imran Khan was Pakistan’s Prime Minister at the time.

²⁷ According to Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report, Pakistan was rated as partly free in 2019, making it one of the more open states in the region. See https://freedomhouse.org/country/pakistan/freedom-world/2019 (accessed May 29, 2023).

²⁸ @jzarif August 4, 2020.

²⁹ @jzarif May 17, 2018. The ‘first force to liberate Arab territory’ that he refers to is the Lebanese Hizballah.

³⁰ His phrasing, however, is misleading: Israeli forces did wound over 2000 Palestinians protesting at the border fences around Gaza, but ‘only’ 58 people were shot dead. See B.B.C. News. ‘Gaza begins to bury its dead after deadliest day in years’. B.B.C. News, May 15, 2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-44116340 (accessed May 29, 2023).

³¹ @jzarif January 17, 2019.

³² @jzarif September 11, 2018.

³³ Notable examples include the bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994, which killed 86 people, or the assassination of four Iranian-Kurdish opposition members in Berlin in 1992.

³⁴ @jzarif October 4, 2018.

³⁵ @jzarif May 21, 2017.

³⁶ You can find the full speech here: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/articles/president-trump-delivers-remarks-arab-islamic-american-summit/ (accessed May 29, 2023).

³⁷ @jzarif June 30, 2020.

³⁸ Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns: Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981), 47.

³⁹ Nikolay Kozhanov, Iran’s Strategic Thinking (Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2018), 1.

⁴⁰ @jzarif February 3, 2017.

⁴¹ One could say the same about Israel, but obviously Zarif does not.

⁴² Nikolay Kozhanov, Iran’s Strategic Thinking (Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2018), 1.

⁴³ @jzarif January 16, 2019.

⁴⁴ @jzarif January 5, 2020.

⁴⁵ Here it is important to note that the Iranian state restricts domestic users’ access to most social media sites, including Twitter (with varying degrees of success), and has done everything in its power to keep online dissent under tight control since the inception of Iran’s blog boom in the early 2000s. See David M. Faris, ‘Architectures of Control and Mobilization in Egypt and Iran’, in Social Media in Iran: Politics and Society After 2009, ed. David M. Faris and Babak Rahimi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015).

⁴⁶ @jzarif April 10, 2019.

⁴⁷ Parisa Hafezi, ‘Iran’s Foreign Minister Zarif, architect of nuclear deal, resigns’, Reuters, February 25, 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-zarif-resignation-idUSKCN1QE2G4 (accessed May 29, 2023)

⁴⁸ English-language comment on @jzarif April 23, 2018.

⁴⁹ Persian-language comment on @jzarif September 22, 2019.

⁵⁰ Arabic-language comment on @jzarif August 4, 2020.

⁵¹ This also matches Akhavan’s observation that nationalism functions as the glue that keeps the Iranian domestic and diasporic communities together. See Niki Akhavan, Electronic Iran: The Cultural Politics of an Online Evolution (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 110.

⁵² English- (first) and Persian- (second) language comments on @jzarif November 27, 2020. The second commenter probably also blames Zarif for the assassination of Qasem Soleymani in January 2020.