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Drawing on linguistic impoliteness, this paper examines offence giving and taking in Twitter Diplomacy in the Middle East, explicating how Twitter affordances shape the context in which offence can be employed strategically in diplomatic communication. The dataset includes all the tweets posted by the Iranian Foreign Minister over a period of 10 years (totaling 659 tweets). The argument expounded in this paper is based on two assumptions. First, impoliteness notions can be effective in analyzing and theorizing diplomatic Tweeting in the times of crisis. Second, diplomatic offence can be employed to manage conflicts and legitimize foreign policies. The results show that diplomatic offence is characteristically explicit, which is vital to index the offender’s disaffiliation from the target’s values. Offence giving is used to present self-image through attacking the adversary’s identity or values, whereas offence taking is utilized to moralize international politics through foregrounding the adversary’s moral idiosyncrasies or legal violations. In effect, diplomatic offence is used to do impression management that aims at gaining moral capital. Twitter affordances allow the affective and moral stances associated with offence giving and taking to be publicized to online and offline audience, encouraging them to align with the producer’s values and political standing.

The paper investigates how (de)legitimization and impoliteness are interconnected in the ethno-sectarian conflicts that take place in online news response threads. (De)legitimization is conceptualized as a micro argumentative practice that can index the interlocutors’ sociopolitical stances and position them in relation to each other in inter-group contestations. Using multi-tiered positioning analysis, a distinction was made between exogenous and endogenous impoliteness assessments each of which occurred at a different spatiotemporal level of the interactions. This distinction elucidates how impoliteness assessments can trigger and be triggered by (de)legitimization. To understand how (de)legitimization might trigger impoliteness assessments, I differentiate between face-related and identity-related impoliteness, which were both used strategically to deepen the ethno-sectarian divisions in this online context. In the online conflicts in question, collective impoliteness was sometimes motivated by legitimization, rather than delegitimization, even though legitimization involves no violation of the genre-sanctioned interactional norms or the moral order. That was because legitimization functioned in binary oppositions, and, as such, was perceived by out-group members as provocative impingement on their ethno-sectarian communities’ sociopolitical rights.

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