Framing war on social media: Digital diplomacy in the 2026 US/Israel–Iran war

This study examined how digital diplomacy and information warfare became intertwined during the 2026 US/Israel–Iran war. Drawing on framing theory, the study comparatively analyzed 1,682 war-related posts shared on the official English-language X accounts of the three belligerent states’ foreign ministries (@StateDept, @IsraelMFA, @IRIMFA_EN) during the first 62 days of the war. The posts were subjected to a two-tier content analysis based on Entman’s four framing functions: problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and treatment recommendation. The findings revealed that the three states framed the same conflict through distinct dominant legitimacy frames, deterrence for the United States, violation of international law for Iran, and counter-terrorism for Israel, and systematically attributed responsibility to the other side. The parties also diverged in discursive tone, counter-narrative use, and audience targeting, while delegitimizing elements were pervasive across all accounts. Within-account engagement analysis showed that officially toned posts were consistently associated with lower visibility than each account's typical post, whereas emotional, aggressive, and ironic registers were associated with greater visibility, and that visibility was largely decoupled from content volume and audience size. The study concluded that wartime digital diplomacy operates as a multilayered discursive war in which the boundary between diplomacy and information warfare becomes increasingly blurred.