digital diplomacy
Bercovici may be relatively new to Twitter, but she has quickly come to appreciate its value and utility. “It is especially useful at a time of crisis such as we are in now, when the appetite for information is insatiable.”
The lethal military confrontation between Israel and Hamas is being mirrored in a bitter clash on the battlefield of social media. Each side has taken to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to denounce the other, and to present accounts that are at best partial and often blatantly distorted. The propaganda war between Israel and the Palestinians is not new, but this battle-round is being fought with unprecedented ferocity.
As The Jerusalem Post reports, the effort to make Israel’s case is being spearheaded by 400 college students posting comments, memes, video clips, images and explanatory graphics on Facebook and Twitter from dozens of computers in a “Hasbara war room” at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv.
As Hillary Rodham Clinton's first senior adviser for innovation, Alec Ross was one of the State Department's biggest champions of digital diplomacy, an advocate for a style of statecraft that capitalized on the technology and culture of the social networking era to reach people around the globe. Now Ross is betting on a San Francisco startup as an agent for change in developing nations: He recently joined the board of Telerivet, a company that has developed a cloud-based, short message service (SMS) to allow people in the world's most remote corners to communicate with basic cell phones.
As of yet, no Israelis have been killed during the latest Gaza offensive. 174-0 is a tough ratio to explain. Especially for an operation that Israel claims is being taken in self-defense against terrorists in Gaza. But the Israeli Prime Minister’s office may have found an answer to this minor public-diplomacy challenge: Tinder, a popular online smartphone dating/hookup app.
The current UNO publication, Numero 17, La Nueva Diplomacia, features articles focusing on new diplomacy and international relations, and includes a piece by CPD Director, Jay Wang titled Nation Branding Revisited. Other articles cover topics ranging from Soft Power and Digital Diplomacy to Economic Diplomacy and the role of non-state actors in diplomatic relations.
It took more than 120 minutes and a goal in extra time, but Germany emerged as the World Cup champion with a 1-0 win over Argentina on Saturday. Once the game ended, the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro was illuminated in German colors, and Twitter was abuzz with responses to the tournament’s final game.
In 2011 Achref Aouadi and his friends, who fought for “Bread, freedom and human dignity!” during the revolution, established I Watch, a youth watchdog fighting against corruption on all levels of society. “We declared Sunday 13 July as National Voter Registration Day, and it has been really viral across social media,” explains Aouadi.