From Daley Plaza, Chicagoans will be able to chat and share performances with people in other parts of the world, via a tricked-out shipping container. It's called Portals, a global art installation that's placed identical gold containers, outfitted with live-streaming technology, in cities around the world.

Social media has empowered isis recruiting, helping the group draw at least 30,000 foreign fighters, from some 100 countries, to the battlefields of Syria and Iraq. It has aided the seeding of new franchises in places ranging from Libya and Afghanistan to Nigeria and Bangladesh. It was the vehicle isis used to declare war on the United States...

Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi has emphasized the importance of social media as a tool for diplomats to obtain timely information and to represent Indonesia abroad. "It is impossible for diplomats not to take advantage of social media in this [digital] era," Retno said in her opening speech at the Kompasianival event in South Jakarta on Saturday (08/10).

One socially conscious company is making your emoji keyboard a little less perfect in an effort to tackle food waste. Hungry Harvest, a startup service that delivers "recovered produce" to consumers' doorsteps, has created a series of "ugly" fruit and vegetable emoji meant to get people thinking — and typing — about our preoccupation with aesthetically pleasing food.

One example of this new method of advocacy is the Global Citizen Festival, a concert held in New York City each September to promote awareness of extreme poverty. The festival’s model is a digital facelift of the 1980s movement-building efforts of Amnesty International and an indirect descendant of Bono’s ONE campaign, which pioneered online advocacy for the development sector in 2004. 

Over the last two years, journalistic stories and charitable causes have been translated into VR films to raise awareness. In particular, the United Nations Virtual Reality initiative has been using the medium as an advocacy tool for vulnerable communities across the world. And now with the recent launch of a mobile app that introduces a "take action" button for the viewers to engage with the social issues...

While cyber and Internet issues were once seen as technical issues solely reserved for computer geeks, today they are increasingly being seen around the world as inextricably linked to national security, economic growth, social development, and human rights. Therefore, these issues are increasingly a core aspect of our foreign policy.