Tweeting until the end of the world
This week I look at Twitter as a form of public diplomacy and the use of online platforms for bilateral relations and public perceptions.
Hi besties,
Welcome to the second edition of National Security Cowgirl. Really cool and fun to see so many friends and internet friends slide into the dms and tell me you like it, thank you!! Sorry it’s a day late, it’s the long weekend and I have no idea what day it is.
This week in Melbourne the sun was shining and I could wear my MUNA jumper. It was truly giving English summer, in that despite the sun it was 23 and raining.
This substack I was going to talk for a little bit about Twitter diplomacy and then the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre launch. But then I got down a research rabbit hole on Twitter diplomacy, totally overthinking and over-reading on that topic so now it’s all Twitter diplomacy. Enjoy!
Beer of the week (gonna make this a thing because I want the girlies to start drinking good beers) - One Drop Raspberry & Strawberry Fairy Floss Sour
Things I liked this week
New York Times Popcast episodes on the Era’s Tour and new boygenuis
Normal Gossip (the best podcast ever) is back. If you love gossip (which literally everyone does), this opodcast is for you. Watch me re-tell the stories as if their my own friends
Every fortnight I make a batch of pickled onions. I use this Bon Appetit recipe but swap the sugar with a teaspoon-ish of maple syrup
Thank God You’re Hear will be back this year, and hosted by Celia Pacquola.
Liam and I have been watching Shrinking on AppleTV. Very funny. And this scene of Jason Segel’s character listening to I Know The End
Chunks hair accessories are literally so cute
This video of Jemima Kirke dancing with her kids’ baggu lunch boxes
Things I didn’t like this week
We got Henri (can’t believe I didn’t even talk about my son/little french bulldog in the first newsletter) this pet cube for the winter and he barely leaves it and doesn’t hang out with us as much anymore. How rude.
In the Sydney Morning Herald today ‘Ardern and the hot Finnish PM: The female leaders we loved (to look at)
The Barbie film meme. Literally already over it
(shout out to Ben Felton for the offshore vessel investigation, defence journo icon)
Tweeting until the end of the world
This week, Australia’s Ambassador to Japan Singo Yamagami left his posting early, returning to Tokyo after about two and a half years in the role. Yamagami will be remembered for his engaged and charismatic style of public diplomacy, where he was proactive in Australia’s media and business scenes. He spoke to the Australian Financial Review in February this year, defending his diplomatic legacy and style, amid speculation that he was too hawkish on China, his own brand of world warrior diplomacy, and leaving his Australia early.
Yamagami maintained an active Twitter presence, sharing his favourite places in Australia and photos from dinners with Australia’s elite. His Twitter profile was a warm and welcoming place where his love for Australia seemed to go beyond the standard diplomatic postings. Particularly wholesome was his live-tweeting of a trip across Australia on the Indian Pacific railway this past summer. Twitter was also the place where he cheekily commented on early rumours about his departure. His News From Under the Southern Cross newsletters were another personal touch to his form of digital diplomacy. But importantly, thank you, Ambassador, for your role in bringing the Uniqlo Round Mini Shoulder Bag to our shores. The bag has united the girls and the gays globally.
One of the leaders in twitter, and online diplomacy more generally in Australia, is the US Embassy in Canberra. More historical highlights include this trailer for Charge D’Affairs James Caruso’s ‘Ambassador Roadshow’ where he’s riding on a gulf buggie with dramatic/American music playing in the background (Top Gun who?). Caroline’s Kennedy posting as Ambassador has seen her take a particularly fun and #auscore approach to the role, including eating a sausage in bread at Bunnings. When she attended the Sydney Swans football match (yes, the same one as Sydney Sweeney), she did so with the very cool team at The Daily Aus (check out their great interview with Kennedy here), and the Embassy’s social media team were particularly active in the Twitter comments. Easily though, my favourite US Embassy moment was when Deputy Chief of Mission Mike Goldman was asked what a goon bag is.
Radhika Chhabra states that-
“Twitter and other social media platforms allow government officials to broadcast their views on pertinent issues and developments in the public domain without the need for formal diplomatic channels or jargon. It also allows people to reach out to government officials more easily. Indeed, Twiplomacy breaks through the limitations of traditional diplomacy, which is hinged on a top-down bureaucratic approach when it comes to negotiation and the dissemination of information.”
Whilst academic research on Twitter diplomacy is still emerging, it’s important to note that much of the analysis of Twitter Diplomacy is on the US and China. One of these states being the founding home of Twitter, and the other has banned Twitter. Yet, both see it as important to their public diplomacy efforts. Over the past few years (as is the case with research and media more broadly) academic research on Twitter diplomacy often centres China, the pandemic, or both. The era of ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy was facilitated by lockdowns and especially reactionary Twitter, as people were bored in their homes with nothing to do but doom scroll. The Journal of Contemporary China even had a special section earlier this year on China’s Twitter diplomacy. In an article released this week, Tran assesses Chinese diplomatic accounts in France to explore social power in France-China relations. Tran’s research “shows that China’s social power consists of mainly place branding, while some of its communication attempts to frame certain issues and set the agenda in China–France relations and global affairs, by undermining, frustrating and delegitimizing, that is soft-balancing, the French and the West at large.”
On U.S. Embassy social media accounts. Sobel, Riffe and Hester did a content analysis of eight US Embassy Twitter feeds, comparing more active Twitter accounts with quieter, and also instances where tweets and whole accounts might be deleted. They found that “Embassies’ use of Twitter largely for mentioning external individuals/organizations (versus internal State Department personnel) might reflect embassies’ efforts to use Twitter to promote, and, in turn, create a positive relationship with citizens and outside organizations, consistent with the State Department mission of improving international relationships.” Collins, DeWitt and LeFabvre also look at US Twitter diplomacy, specifically under the Obama administration where use of Twitter was “largely rational” and “the topic focus of tweets was proportional to stated U.S. foreign policy priorities”.
I can guess that Trump-era research would reveal something other. Something I’m sure many of us have observed casually, is the use of state agenda-setting on social media during state visits, O’Boyle unpacks this in an analysis of the US and India.
Research on Ministry of Foreign Affairs Twitter accounts from Israel, Russia and Turkey found that 52% of the topics tweeted by these states were on international relations, the next most popular topic was society and culture. Security ranged between 14-26% of tweets (Russia by the far highest at 26% of tweets). The authors concluded “that states see Twitter as a legitimate platform for acting within the international arena and not just a digital diplomacy tool”.
Twitter diplomacy can also increase tensions, with leader and embassy accounts alike engaging in trolling, as seen below with Iran and Israel (yes, this is real). Israel in particular has pushed a strong social media campaign in an attempt to generate broader global support.
Constance Duncombe emphasis that “one reason for the growing use of Twitter as a diplomatic tool is the ease through which political leaders and practitioners can not only reach both domestic and foreign publics in terms of conventional one-way information broadcast but also interact with their constituents through a two-way dialogue form of engagement.” Twitter diplomacy equals out their power in diplomatic communication, increasing the power of the audience. “The public nature of Twitter allows users, government-affiliated or not, to post highlight politicised images that can further undermine already fractious diplomatic relations between states, adding an unprecedented level of complexity to interstate relations.”
In the Australian context, nowhere was this more evident than when the Chinese government posted an edited photo of an Australian soldier with a blood-covered knife beside the throat of an Afghan child amid an Australian war crimes enquiry (the Afghanistan Inquiry concluded that Australian special forces had murdered 39 civilians and prisoners). Then Prime Minster Scott Morrison demanded an apology from the Chinese government.
This begs the question - who is the audience of Twitter diplomacy? Is it the nation home to the Embassy, citizens of the Embassy’s state or a broader international audience? I would argue that it’s a combination of all three. The audience of these public accounts can get confusing, but as Danziger and Schreiber find, “social media posts may be explicitly addressed to foreign audiences, but MFA tweets are occasionally implicitly designed for other actors in the international arena”. This blurs the lines between public diplomacy and bilateral diplomacy. Twitter diplomacy has to please global and national audiences.
The public nature of Twitter diplomacy and the need for online personalities to stay ‘relevant’ pushes states to meme-ify their diplomacy as a part of a broader soft power/cultural diplomacy tool. If you’re an Embassy tweeting a Mean Girls gif, which then goes viral and lands on the Buzfeed homepage, you’ve suddenly got millions of people positively interacting with your state’s diplomatic structure, cutting through any global human rights critiques of bombing Palestinian children.
Not all states need Twitter diplomacy equally. States such as Israel, the US and China, who seek to shape global narratives about their power, will put more resources towards digital diplomacy. Broadly speaking, Australia’s Twitter diplomacy until the election of the Labor government was relatively quiet. However, as the new government seeks to strengthen relations with Southeast Asia and the Pacific in particular, it has leant on Twitter diplomacy to reach audiences in those regions.
Branding is an important component of Twitter diplomacy, something which I touched on last week and will come up in a lot of my substacks. As someone who grew up on a diet of ‘what I do in a day’ videos, I am deeply nosy and must know what everyone is doing at all times, but specifically how they want people to perceive them.
Instagram has also risen as a key tool for public diplomacy – albeit less so than Twitter. At a glance, Instagram seems more public-orientated than state-focused in who the audience is, compared to Twitter. Policy Officers no longer need to be Twitter and caption experts, but increasingly Instagram reel experts. Instagram, an app known for constantly changing features and stealing ideas from other apps (*cough* bereal*cough*). Instagram diplomacy requires you to not just have a witty captions, but the visual media requires you to be likeable and stand out amongst the glossy accounts of reality tv stars-turned influencers. For those on Instagram, it’ll be hard for anyone to live up to Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi.
With the downfall of Twitter after Elon, it’ll be interesting to see what becomes of Twitter diplomacy. The increase of Embassy Instagram’s too also changes the face of this digital public diplomacy. But despite Twitter generally having bad energy these days, it remains a premiere tool for diplomats. Will governments place less effort on it, knowing that there’s less users and also less chances of post engagement as a new ‘For You’ page serves you algothrimcally charged content? For now at least, embassies will be tweeting until the end of the world.