  2018 started with massive protests in Iran, bringing back the impressions of
the so called "Arab Spring" and it's revolutionary impact for the Maghreb
states, Syria and Egypt. Many reports and scientific examinations considered
online social networks (OSN's) such as Twitter or Facebook to play a critical
role in the opinion making of people behind those protests. Beside that, there
is also evidence for directed manipulation of opinion with the help of social
bots and fake accounts. So, it is obvious to ask, if there is an attempt to
manipulate the opinion-making process related to the Iranian protest in OSN by
employing social bots, and how such manipulations will affect the discourse as
a whole. Based on a sample of ca. 900,000 Tweets relating to the topic "Iran"
we show, that there are Twitter profiles, that have to be considered as social
bot accounts. By using text mining methods, we show that these social bots are
responsible for negative sentiment in the debate. Thereby, we would like to
illustrate a detectable effect of social bots on political discussions on
Twitter.
