How do political, social, and religious figures employ social media to affect online public discourse? Using the June 2017 Gulf diplomatic crisis as a case study, this paper examines the use of social media as a tool of diplomacy and disruption in contemporary international affairs, presenting research results of an interdisciplinary, multimethod grant project. Political scientists are increasingly recognizing the relevance of the online public sphere as a venue for communication and manipulation of information and preferences (Chadwick 2017; Karpf 2016). In regimes where physical public space is tightly controlled and/or inaccessible, the internet can serve as an alternative public square for societal engagement, discourse, and networking (Abdul Ghaffar 2014; Zayani 2015). But trolls and bots, often encouraged or hired by political authorities, can hijack the online public sphere and drown out alternative and anti-establishment voices through targeted and purposeful campaigns of disinformation (Forestal 2017; Gunitsky 2015; King, Pan, and Roberts 2017). Further, social media influencers have begun to use political, cultural, and especially religious “cues” to engage and coopt the general public sentiment around important issues and thereby influence conversation and attitudes, a crucial area of research that is understudied in the non-Western world (Penney 2017). How is the digital landscape of the Gulf changing in response to the Gulf diplomatic crisis? This research project looks both top-down and bottom-up to answer this question, investigating how Gulf government entities are using digital tools for image-building, reputation, and crisis management, and how society—both influential Twitter users and ordinary people exert implicit or explicit pressure on each other to think and act in a certain way. We explore Twitter discourse in the Gulf through network, content, and discourse analysis, in order to analyze the origin, spread, and response of tweets, code the content and discover patterns, and analyze the discursive and rhetorical strategies of particular key words related to religious authority. The findings are useful and timely, bringing insights from the fields of political science, communication, and digital media studies to understand and analyze the increased politicization of the online public sphere in the region.