Photographs purportedly showing more than 40 UN peacekeepers seized by Islamist militants on Syria’s side of the Golan Heights – along with their identity cards – have been posted on social media.  The al-Qaeda linked Nusra Front says the captives, all from Fiji, were detained on Thursday because their UN mission was helping Syria’s government and had ignored the suffering of its people. It says they are being treated well.

This may be the best Ice Bucket Challenge to combine the viral video craze with what’s in the news right now.  Militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have been mocked by one social media user who has imitated what an ISIS member would look like if he were to accept the challenge.

Russian officials have responded to a mocking tweet from Canadian delegates over the escalating Ukraine crisis. Diplomatic relations between the two countries have been in the spotlight since Canadian officials posted a snarky map to help Russian soldiers who keep “getting lost in Ukraine”. Moscow officials have hit back with their own map, with the disputed Crimea region clearly marked as Russian territory.

Why? Because it’s becoming pretty obvious that Isis’s most effective weapon is the smartphone. The group has been using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to great effect, to create a digital broth that has both panicked and fascinated us. Their graphic videos make front page news and their deranged tweets sway international diplomacy. Social media strategists round the world must be watching in awe.

The ruling party has told all 86.6 million of its members to engage with its first foray into social media with a public account launched this month on massively popular mobile social media platform WeChat, which boasts 438 million monthly active users. The account, called “gong chan dang yuan”, or Communist Party member, is managed by the Organisation Department of the party’s highest organ of power, the Central Committee. The department has told all members of the world’s largest political party to follow the account.

Google “Kosovo”, and Petrit Selimi knows exactly what you’re going to see: dry, diplo-speak scouting reports at best, and depressing references to past conflicts at worst. It’s not exactly the promotional buzz a fledgling country with sights set on global integration would hope for*. To Selimi, Kosovo’s Deputy Foreign Secretary and a pioneer in Digital Diplomacy, this is a major problem.

Wikipedia is often seen as a great equalizer. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people collaborate on a seemingly endless range of topics by writing, editing and discussing articles, and uploading images and video content.