SummaryAs data fast become the ‘new oil’, the opportunities for public diplomacy to grow as a field of practice are real and game-changing. Drawing on social informatics research, this article seeks to advance our understanding of how digital technologies shape the context in which public diplomacy operates by reshaping the medium of public communication, blurring the boundary between foreign and domestic affairs and empowering new actors. Despite inevitable challenges, the future of public diplomacy in the digital age remains bright, as digital technologies create tremendous opportunities for public diplomacy to build stronger, more diverse and more enduring bridges between offline and online communities.
Since the Ukraine conflict began in 2014, there has been an increased awareness of the threat to EU interests posed by Russia. In early 2015, the EEAS created the East StratCom Team to respond by promoting the EU's soft power, strengthen media resilience, and catalogue disinformation. This article categorizes several examples of Russian disinformation in order to conceptualize the conduct of digital warfare and suggest how it might be contained. We argue that Russian disinformation earns its effectiveness by focusing upon efforts to exploit differences between EU media systems (strategic asymmetry), the targeting of disenfranchised or vulnerable audiences (tactical flexibility), and the ability to mask the sources of disinformation (plausible deniability). We argue that the EU and NATO's response should be informed by a strategy of digital containment based on the tenets of supporting media literacy and source criticism, encouraging institutional resilience, and promoting a clear and coherent strategic narrative capable of containing the threat from inconsistent counter-messaging.
Summary
The corona crisis is also a disinformation crisis for the global community in general, and for the European Union (EU) in particular. What is less clear is how adequate the EU’s response to the ‘infodemic’ has been. This essay exposes the dangers of disinformation for the EU, which have intensified in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and reviews relevant EU responses. It then zooms in on two challenges exacerbated by the corona crisis: one internal, revolving around the toxic effect of conspiracy theories, particularly the corona-5G hoax; and one external, relating to the public diplomacy campaigns of competing geopolitical actors, especially China. The essay argues that the future of European stability will rest not only on ensuring societal resilience to disinformation and conspiracy theories but also on designing ethically guided pre-emptive mechanisms and confronting external sources of disinformation which jeopardise European health provisions, economic recovery and geoeconomic strength.
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