The Challenges Foreign Ministries Face in Cyberspace: An Analysis of Different Communication Strategies and their Consequences

This paper is concerned with the challenges (and opportunities) national foreign ministries face in the new ‘social’ channels of communication - on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and their homepages. As digital diplomacy has become an integral part of foreign policy, it is necessary to better understand how different foreign ministries make use of the new tools and platforms for communication. The increasing popularity of social media, and the active use of these channels by foreign ministries and embassies across Europe and further afield make a systematic comparative analysis of capacities, strategies and impact now possible. During the past few years, national foreign ministries have increased their presence in social media platforms and generated a large volume of public material for analysis. While social media and open websites provide governments with new means of communicating with the general public and their diplomatic counterparts, the use of social media, in addition to their homepages, also present new challenges. The paper aims to map out different communication strategies and uses of these social media channels by a number of foreign ministries that display different features and strategies of communication. It will also try to present a tentative assessment of the impact of the different strategies used by governments that are consistently active on these platforms. It will use as an illustrative case study a hotly debated foreign policy issue that entered the public debate in late 2013: the confrontation between Russia and ‘the West’ over Ukraine. The analysis will focus on the strategies employed towards three different target groups: the domestic audience, foreign public and diplomatic counterparts. It will scrutinize governments with a particular stake in the issue and which make use of a range of communication strategies: Russia, Ukraine, Germany, France, UK, US and several very active smaller states: Sweden, Lithuania and Latvia.