Over the past few weeks, several reports and publications have suggested that social media is entering a new era. The reason being that social media is increasingly becoming less social. During the early days of social media, millions of users would publish updates from their daily lives. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram were used to document routine functions such as commutes to work, birthday celebrations, travels, shopping and even coffee rituals. Over time, social media morphed into platforms of self-surveillance and mass surveillance. Self-surveillance in the sense that users increasingly documented and shared private moments including weddings, divorces, promotions, demotions, diets, struggles with depression and romantic entanglements. Every moment no matter how private or personal was but a Selfie waiting to be posted online. Social media became platforms for mass-surveillance once users engaged in reciprocal following. The basic creed of Facebook was Follow me and I will Follow you, Like me and I shall Like you, Share me and I shall share you.
At its height, social media facilitated the transition from the I to the iBrand. Platforms such as Instagram and LinkedIn motivated individuals to create a self-image of success and opulence. LinkedIn posts and Instagram photos became a succession of workplace achievements and day t day jubilees, a never ending series of exclusive parties, champagne infused dinners, members only gatherings in recently renovated factories and self-aggrandizing lists of workplace accomplishments such as
I wasn’t planning to post today, but sometimes greatness refuses to stay silent.
This morning, I achieved something extraordinary:
I successfully opened my email inbox… and didn’t immediately close it in fear.
Some call it bravery. I call it leadership.
While doing so, I also:
• Demonstrated resilience by answering 3 emails before my coffee kicked in
• Showcased strategic thinking by ignoring 17 others
• Practiced radical transparency by telling my team “I’ll circle back” (I won’t)
Soon, the self was substituted by the Selfie, and the “I” made way for the “iBrand”. The actual connection between one’s offline and online personas was severed, and one’s online persona eclipsed the offline one. Social media was home to carefully crafted self-images that ignored the hardships of life unless users uploaded personal videos documenting their FOMO.
Yet now social media is becoming less social. Users across age groups have stopped sharing daily updates, images from parties or videos from graduation day. In fact, most users across age groups only publish visuals to small groups of select followers be it through WhatsApp groups or Instagram stories shared with a few close friends. Moreover, individuals across the world are spending more and more time conversing with AI applications be it LLMs such as ChatGPT, bots such as the Psychologist or AI agents that specialize in sophist Philosophy. These digital interactions are inherently different from the old world of social media given that AI is asocial. AI users engage only with lines of code instead of communities. There is nothing social or public about such interactions.
The question that soon follows is what will digital diplomacy look like in an asocial world? If social media is no longer used to manage social life but to search for new clothing items on Facebook market, will diplomats lose their ability to engage with foreign populations? What will happen to the thousands of accounts opened by diplomats, MFAs and Embassies on YouTube, Blue Sky, Twitter and more? And how can diplomats deliver messages to AI users cloistered in an asocial digital eco-system that does not allow outside messaging?
Had this transition occurred in 2012 or even in 2018 MFAs may have been scrambling for solutions. Yet the truth is that study after study has revealed that diplomats never truly used social media for engagement with users. While social media was inherently social, and built on reciprocal ties and reciprocal surveillance, most diplomats used social media for strategic messaging, real time narration of world events and countering the messaging of other states. Within the realm of diplomacy, social media was a tool for issue management and reality contestation whereby different diplomats tried to circulate and validate their definition of reality or interpretation of local and global events. The result was that social media became a minefield of different realities, each emanating from an official, government account. The original allure of engagement and digital relationship building proved to be unrealistic, as diplomats had neither the time nor the resources necessary to manage global conversations about contentious policies while outspoken social media users were always viewed as trolls spamming MFA profiles.
Social media did impact the way nations created and disseminated their self-image. Much like individual users, nations created a carefully constructed online brand. And much like individual users, national brands were filled with accomplishments. Russia’s iBrand, for example, rarely dealt with human rights violations, arrests of opposition leaders and state attempts to curtail freedom of speech. But Russia’s iBrand did celebrate the achievements of Yuri Gagarin and his contribution to mankind, or Russia’s Covid vaccine aptly called “Sputnik” or even commemorate the great battles of World War 2 when Russia liberated Europe from the yoke of Nazism.
The new, asocial, nature of social media may thus be a blessing in disguise. If social media is no longer social, then the pretense of engagement may be abandoned. Crucially, diplomats may also find it easier to refocus their efforts on the traditional publics of diplomacy – elites. While it is true that social media offered diplomats the opportunity to bypass the newsroom elite, most MFAs remain on social media because they do target the newsroom elite. Because they do aim to shape the perceptions and beliefs of journalists, editors and important columnists.
As for state images, these are increasingly being managed by AIs and Chatbots through which people learn about the world. To influence these, diplomats will need a new toolkit and a massive budget. State attempts to influence the outputs of ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude would require a colossal project of state-led publication of online materials that glorify the state, online materials that would eventually be integrated into AI applications that are trained on vast swarms of readily available online materials. Yet this is a long-term endeavor that will take time and effort to bear fruit.
What will remain the same is diplomats’ use of social media to contest reality. The MFAs of Ukraine, Russia, the UK, France, Germany, and Hungary will all continue to offer their framing of events from the Russia-Ukraine War, and these frames will differ substantially further fracturing reality. It is in this sense that digital diplomacy itself is already asocial as it prevents people from sharing a single and coherent definition of reality. The multitude of realities now shared in real time online creates a world that cannot be fathomed and a world that must be abandoned. Social media users clamoring for sense making thus find refuge in those parties and leaders that promise to resurrect the world of old, a world that made sense, a world in which America is Great Again. Yet such parties and leaders preach estrangement from the world. They withdraw from international accords; they leave international bodies; they rail against the international community creating an asocial world.
A world that fits in perfectly with social media’s new asocial nature.
Exploring Digital Diplomacy 
Leave a comment