New Media and Public Diplomacy: Political Communication in India, the United States and China 9780367278311, 9780367278328, 9780429298141

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NEW MEDIA AND PUBLIC DIPLOMACY

This book examines the role of new media and digital technologies in public diplomacy and political communication. Exploring political communication in India as well as in the US and China, it highlights the fundamental changes that new technology has brought about in public diplomacy. While facilitating direct engagement with constituents and tapping into territories and audiences which were harder to reach before, the new media’s power to influence perceptions has revolutionised public diplomacy and engagement like never before. While managing national brands utilizing digital tools has emerged imperative for contemporary nation states, they are equally engaged in online disinformation and influence campaigns. This book analyzes these activities and also emphasizes the critical role of social media in defining and shaping political attitudes while empowering the ordinary public and the leadership alike. The author, through examples from India, the US, and China, also examines the challenges of using digital tools in diplomacy and its effects on democracies across the world. Lucid and engaging, this book will be an essential read for students and scholars of communication studies, political studies, diplomacy and foreign policy, defence and strategic analysis, media and culture studies, and international relations. Parama Sinha Palit is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. She was a Cooperative Monitoring Center (CMC) Fellow with the Sandia National Laboratories (US Department of Energy) in 2021. She was also a consultant with CRDF Global (US) in 2022. A specialist on foreign policy and public diplomacy, she is the author of Analyzing China’s Soft Power Strategy and Comparative Indian Initiatives (2017). While in India, she was a researcher at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) as well as the United Services Institution (USI).

NEW MEDIA AND PUBLIC DIPLOMACY Political Communication in India, the United States and China

Parama Sinha Palit

Designed cover image: © Getty Images First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN, UK and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business. © 2023 Parama Sinha Palit The right of Parama Sinha Palit to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-0-367-27831-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-27832-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-29814-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429298141 Typeset in Bembo by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

To the loving memory of My mother Sanghamitra (Swapna) Sinha Her fond memories live in my heart

CONTENTS

Prefaceix Acknowledgementsxii List of Abbreviations xiv 1 Introduction 2 Evolving Contours of New Media: Public Diplomacy and Political Communication in the Global Context

1 17

3 New Media: Global Trends in Political Communication and Diplomacy 32 4 The US Leadership: New Media–driven Diplomacy and Political Communication Since 9/11

48

5 China: New Media, Public Diplomacy, and Political Communication 63 6 India’s Digital Public Diplomacy and Political Communication: The Evolution (Pre-2014)

79

7 India’s Digital Diplomacy and Political Communication (2014 Onward)

93

viii  Contents

8 Disinformation, Extreme Content, and Public Response: India, the US, and China

109

9 Concluding Thoughts: Digital Diplomacy in the Post-COVID-19 New Normal

126

Appendix I: India’s Adoption of New Media Platforms for Public Diplomacy 133 References136 Index174

PREFACE

Writing this book has been a long and arduous journey – more for personal reasons. I started to conceptualize the book during the pre-COVID-19 days when we were blissfully unaware of the existence of such a virus. We had no idea how the world would change or how a new normal would define and shape our everyday lives. I did not realize then, sometime around the 2019, that my mother would be diagnosed with advanced breast cancer and would not live to see the published book. I still had no idea then that I would not be able to visit her like I used to, given the restrictions on travel between Singapore and India, while she battled the disease bravely. During those difficult times, the social media platform WhatsApp kept us together and connected. We shared, laughed, and chatted together, and then, around April last year, I also witnessed her sharp decline, which she bore with fortitude. Finally, when I did visit her in April 2021, she was already in her last days but conscious enough to recognize me. She passed away in ten days’ time, and I realize that life will never be the same again. I will miss sharing this book with her. I remember her joy and pride when I had shared my first book with her back in 2017. I hope she is watching me all the time from wherever she is! My earlier work, Analyzing China’s Soft Power Strategy and comparative Indian Initiatives (SAGE; 2017), produced ideas that needed to be explored in greater depth as situations around us and the world evolved fast. One of the strongest impacts arose from the extensive use of technology in communication through new media. Over time, the role of social media in shaping diplomacy and global political communication became pervasive. However, along with such a role, other issues and dimensions have arisen that have aroused the interest of policymakers, academics, experts, and ordinary people in comprehending the wider impact of mass media on communication. These include the spread of disinformation and tendencies on the part of state and non-state actors to manipulate opinions.

x  Preface

The varied use of new media in public diplomacy and political communication became an intriguing pursuit for me as a variety of country experiences, including from India, unfolded on the subject. At the same time, I felt the growth of new media and its outreach beginning to affect individual preferences, as it did for me. I was limited to being an occasional Facebook user and stayed away from Instagram, Tinder, and Twitter – perhaps in line with my status of not being a millennial. But over time, I realized how much traction all these mediums have, individually, gained in diplomacy and contributed to it in its own distinct style. The realization is best reflected in my deciding to own a Twitter handle since I began working on the book. Digital mediums like Twitter have revolutionized communication while becoming critical in diplomacy and foreign policy as leaderships around the world co-opt them to engage and communicate with digital publics. The transformative impact of new media on diplomacy and political communication has been a forceful academic inspiration for me, and I expect to it remain so in the future. It is early 2022, and I’m savagely working to wrap up my book. As I write this preface, the pandemic looks less formidable with countries gradually opening to the outside world, including the small island country of Singapore, where I have been living for the past 15 years. The COVID-19, as it challenged habits, behaviours, and communication around the world, also exposed unknown vulnerabilities of humankind in an enormous stress test for globalization. This, in fact, compelled me to revisit some ideas and add fresh inputs and perspectives to the chapters. My attention was piqued by many new developments, including the new media platform’s more disruptive role. Although I had dealt with it earlier, I was forced to reflect on and review tendencies more meticulously given the enormous wave of digital fake news that the pandemic produced. Disinformation proliferated even more viciously when Russia invaded Ukraine early this year. While COVID-19 was responsible for destabilizing the entire human race in an unprecedented manner, the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict now casts a new shadow. The latter has brought international attention back to imperialism, invasion, and colonization once again, replacing terms like symptoms, cases, vaccines, and quarantine, which remain a part of our existence. With respect to this book, both the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict have been critical in shaping new perceptions. They have brought in their wake the extensive and aggressive use of technologies for diplomacy and communication which the book has extensively dealt with. Both developments have effectively underscored the contours of digital diplomacy around the world which compelled me, yet again, to dwell on insights in the book that seemed unavoidable for the study of the digital media in contemporary diplomacy and political communication. By offering new opportunities and presenting new challenges, the developments have set the stage for a new kind of simultaneous engagement and disengagement by modern states and governments. Significant deployment of digital tools like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Weibo, WeChat, and similar platforms by state and non-state actors in the current scenario

Preface  xi

should make this book a relevant and good read for academics, practitioners and students. While attempting to adequately highlight the underside of modernity and contemporary liberal democracies, along with vulnerabilities of the newly technologically empowered citizens, including political leaderships and the dynamic public sphere, I have tried to fill the academic gap that exists with respect to India’s ‘digitalization of diplomacy’ and social media–driven political communication.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My mother Sanghamitra passed away during the writing of this book. She will live through this book for me, as much as she will in all other work that I do in future. I thank my father, Dr PC Sinha for his support and encouragement all my life. I’m what I’m today because of him. He urged me to persist with my higher studies and research despite adversities. Although he is ailing, I know his blessings would always be with me. Writing this book has been a challenging and occasionally a frustrating journey. Several unexpected hardships arose during the journey, largely due to conditions created by COVID-19, and the critical illness of my mother. The tenuous circumstances begun affecting my work and writing. My husband, Amitendu, was an enormous source of support during these trying times. While being there for me always, he engaged with me extensively on the book, including going patiently through the drafts. The conversations that we had on the book – and we had many due to home-bound work rules – benefitted me enormously. The book is as much mine as his because without him this book would have never happened. As I finish this work, I fondly reflect on the support of my aunt, Saswati Sen, and my cousin, Sohini. Both were unflinching in their support towards my ailing mother as I lived through the terrible distress of being afar and not knowing when travel would commence. Their presence in Kolkata was the only source of comfort and assurance that I could bank on. They are my own and I do not wish to belittle their efforts by thanking them. Had they not been around, I wouldn’t have been able to carry on with this work. I also thank my cousin Dr Aniruddha Deb (Buron da) and Zena for their support, especially after my mom passed away. My colleagues at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) – Professor Rajesh Basrur, Dr Sinderpal Singh and Dr Irene Chan – offered valuable insights in discussing several aspects of the book with me. I’m grateful to them, as

Acknowledgements  xiii

I’m to my former colleagues and friends – Ajey Lele, Pradeep Taneja and Neeta Prasad – for their input and perspectives. I also benefited a great deal from my conversations with senior diplomats and friends working with the Government of India for providing nuanced understanding of a variety of sensitive and complex issues. I also thank Professor Ian Hall of the Griffith University in Australia for his critique of my early work on digital media and India’s public diplomacy that shaped my thoughts for the book. I’m grateful to my publisher, Routledge, for being patient and perseverant throughout this project. My very sincere thanks to the anonymous reviewer of the first draft for the objective critique that has contributed much to improving the academic depth of the work. I also take this opportunity to thank friends who have always been around to support. Jennifer Angella Rabel, Lora Krishnamurthy Prabhu, Ruchira Joshi, Saurabh, Sharmistha Chatterjee, Ramanendu Chatterjee, Debakshi Law Sen, Shanta Samaddar, Asha Bhattacharya, Debarshi Bhattacharya, Nivedita Saha and Swapna Kar have all in their own way made me persist with the challenging journey. I also thank Evelyn Dagang, Cheenu Adhikari, and Swapna Das, our companions in Singapore and India, who are as much family as family can be, and who have always been around to share burden and comfort. All errors and shortcomings in this work are entirely mine.

ABBREVIATIONS

AAP BBC BRI BJP BLM CNN CM CAA CAB CAG (INDIA) CBI (INDIA) CVC (INDIA) CCP CAC (CHINA) EC (INDIA) (EU) FB IAC IT ICT IRs J&K LEP MBFC (US) MFA (INDIA) MOFA (CHINA)

Aam Aadmi Party British Broadcasting Corporation Belt and Road Initiative Bharatiya Janata Party Black Lives Matter Cable News Network Chief Minister Citizenship Amendment Act Citizenship Amendment Bill Comptroller and Auditor-General Central Bureau of Investigation Central Vigilance Commission Chinese Communist Party Cyberspace Administration of China Election Commission European Union Facebook India Against Corruption Information Technology Information and Communication Technology International Relations Jammu and Kashmir Look East Policy Media Bias/Fact Check Ministry of Foreign Affairs Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Abbreviations  xv NAM NATO NRC NRI OIC OCI OFBJP POK PIO PM PD PDD (INDIA) PO PR RSS (INDIA) SAARC SU TAM UFWD (CHINA) UPA (INDIA) US VOA XPD (INDIA)

Non-Aligned Movement North Atlantic Treaty Organization National Register of Citizens Non-Resident Indians Organization of Islamic Cooperation Overseas Citizenship of India Overseas Friends of BJP Pakistan Occupied Kashmir Persons of Indian Origin Prime Minister Public Diplomacy Public Diplomacy Division Public Opinion Public Relations Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation Soviet Union Television Audience Measurement United Front Work Department United Progressive Alliance United States Voice of America External Publicity Division

1 INTRODUCTION

The global telecommunications revolution has given rise to new media technologies (or digital technology) – often referred to as Web 2.0 – encompassing a wide variety of web-related communication technologies, such as blogs, wikis, online social networking (like Facebook [FB] and Twitter), virtual worlds (like the Second Life), and other social media forms (Friedman & Friedman 2008). These technologies not only have ushered in a new age of virtual, networked performance1 (Kosnik & Feldman 2019) but have transformed the very nature of contemporary Public Diplomacy (PD), which, simply put, is the use of digital information communication technologies, such as the internet, to achieve diplomatic objectives (Holmes 2020), pushing further the boundaries of traditional PD.2 While PD does carry the ‘label of diplomacy’, it is in reality an ‘intentional tool of foreign policy to achieve certain objectives’ (Sevin 2018). Political communication, which is an integral part of PD and which denotes the ‘communication of political ideologies by the political communicator to the audience who happen to be the electorates’ (Oparaugo 2021), has also witnessed some key fundamental changes in the wake of new PD.3 For example, in the digital media ecology, political communication no longer targets the domestic electorate alone for influence and manipulation. In fact, with new PD becoming critical for developing soft power4 (Somasundram 2012), political communication has now started to target foreign audience as well whose perceptions have become significant in the contemporary context. By facilitating two-way communication and direct engagement (Dahlberg 2011; Henderson & Bowley 2010), ‘digitalization of diplomacy’ (Manor 2019) seeks to manage relationships while emphasizing the relational dimensions5 of PD (Zaharna & Uysal 2015). With digital platforms altering the structure and roots of modern political communication (Tenhunen & Karvelyte 2015), technology is reshaping the culture DOI: 10.4324/9780429298141-1

2  Introduction

of politics by bringing millions into open conversation spaces. Monopolies over information, enjoyed by a few, have given way to democratization of accessing information by anybody, anywhere in the world, making it imperative for the modern state to engage with the new digital public – ‘vocal, opinionated, volatile and yearning to be heard’ (Manor 2019). Scholars like Abbasov (2007) have underlined this dimension of digital platforms whereby there have been gradual shifts from telegrams to mobile phones and more recently to Skype, from postal letters to e-mails, from short messages (Short Message Service, or SMS) to Twitter posts, from hardcopy invitations to FB events, from TV announcements to YouTube channels, from costly meetings to web-conferences, and even from physical Embassies to net-based virtual missions which are increasingly focused on direct engagement involving the domestic and the foreign public, including the diaspora. New media tools, whether FB or YouTube, are also mobilizing and reshaping citizen attitudes about governments while redefining participation. There is little doubt that digital technology has enormously benefited both PD and political communication by helping to establish a participatory new media environment – characterized by a continuous flow of information within and between networks of connected individuals (Manor 2019). The new political environment brought in by the Web 2.0 – emphasizing dialogue, cooperation, negotiation, and (most importantly) ‘the need to listen’6 – as a result has accentuated the role of political leaders in diplomacy while compelling diplomats and embassies to embrace online platforms for enhanced communication and for coordinating efforts for influencing decision-makers and behaviours of various actors, including foreign governments and people. This has fundamentally transformed the conduct of ‘new media’-driven PD, which increasingly deploys popular social media7 applications for making diplomacy both public-based and public-centred (Zaharna & Uysal 2015). At a time when elites are no longer the only influencers of government policies, the new technology, unrestricted by space, time, or national borders (Manor 2019), has fortified global political interaction by connecting people in an unprecedented scale, spearheading PD as a significant instrument of statecraft (Hayden 2018), predicated on interactions. While the digital media–driven communication landscape has bolstered democracy by placing people within the communication network, it has equally undermined democracies around the world. Its ability to multiply and amplify voices and interests involved in international policy-making through network diplomacy has become a major concern (Sotiriu 2015), with the public often ‘losing sight of the liberal components of modern democracies’ (Reinemann et al. 2017). With more noise in the opinion space, citizens are often unable to discern truth from fiction, benefiting political actors in framing preferred events (Baum & Potter 2019). Several Realists8 highlight the multiple voices that complicate the international decision-making, even reducing the exclusive control of states in the process (Westcott 2008). The fragmented and polarized information environment has equally removed the democratic constraint on elected leaders, with foreign policies and diplomacy often out of step with the public (Bjola dna). Others point

Introduction  3

out that digital diplomacy runs the risk of becoming de-coupled from foreign policy given that they are likely to be without an overarching strategy of how they should be used in support of certain foreign policy objectives (Bjola 2016). Questions also persist about the extent to which digital diplomacy makes a significant difference in how states pursue their foreign policy and diplomatic objectives and how they manage the relationships between them (Bjola 2016). The complex globalized new media ecology has indeed created a different paradigm of foreign policy, with some countries able to mount significant campaigns on social media9 while others are left behind in shaping global narratives (Melissen & de Keulenaar 2017), thereby urging policy-makers and scholars to call for a ‘critical digital diplomacy’ (Melissen & de Keulenaar 2017). Despite the inequality in digital affordances, PD 2.0 has provided opportunities to countries to get noticed and be heard, making engagement more affordable irrespective of size, strength, or power.10 In fact, several scholars believe that digital diplomacy particularly enables smaller states to engage in effective communication by turning soft power resources into actual influence (Martin 2013), often helping them to brand themselves. Rising Powers11 like India, Brazil, and South Africa – long denied prominence at the global high table despite their considerable economic and social progress – have enthusiastically adopted new media tools given their reach and power to influence and manipulate global perceptions, amongst its other priorities. With the international order lacking new mechanisms for accommodating Rising Powers (Holsti 1991), these countries, striving for greater acceptance in the global hierarchy, regard new media tools as more equal and effective facilitators.12 With political communication in the digitial world remaining an uneven turf and yielding variously distinct outcomes, examining the new media–enabled diplomacy and political communication from a Rising Power perspective for understanding its nuances, development, and challenges is essential. Also, while the role of new media in India is understudied and is only recently gaining prominence within policy circles, studying major powers like the United States (US) and China in this regard provides important reference points given their attributes and distinct institutionalization of the new media technology in their PD. This book examines the evolving role of new media in refashioning PD and political communication in India, the US, and China and highlights the specific challenges revealed by their experiences. While many scholars continue to use different terms for the ‘utilization of digital technologies in diplomacy’, Manor proposes ‘digitalization of diplomacy’ for scholars and practitioners while expressing his reservations for terms like ‘net diplomacy’ or cyber-diplomacy’ and the like (2016). Given that the subject is still evolving, scholarship continues to focus on finding an appropriate term for the ‘utilization of digital tools in diplomacy’ which should ideally capture all of its attributes and help it to be better conceptualized and understood (Manor 2016). This book, while using the term ‘digitalization of diplomacy’ (Manor 2019), will also use terms like digital diplomacy (DuPont 2010; Lichtenstein 2010), PD 2.013 (Morozov 2009), and e-diplomacy (Hanson 2012) interchangeably for examining the new media–driven PD.

4  Introduction

The institutionalization of digital media for directing political communication with both domestic and external audiences through PD has focused on achieving several objectives. These objectives vary among countries in terms of the priorities they receive from national governments. For example, digital media and its use in PD in both India and China have been partly geared for cultivating their diaspora, while in the US, its focus has been to strengthen its diplomacy campaign for generating international goodwill, particularly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. However, new media platforms have also been aggressively deployed for power projection, whether in the US, India, or China. In the case of China, the projection of power was highlighted during the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) centenary celebrations in 2021. The Twitter handle of the Global Times had drawn attention to China’s military might for the international community – typical of a less-liberal (or authoritarian) state for power projection targeting the overseas audience. This book primarily studies the experiences of India, the US, and China and the distinct ways in which they have employed new media for shaping diplomacy and communication. It also examines how social networking has been deployed by other liberal and less-liberal states for engagement, assessing the extent to which countries have been able to pursue their regional and global PD objectives. Overall, the book tries to address some fundamental questions arising from the context discussed. a) How have new media platforms revolutionized and shaped PD and political communication? b) How do new media tools help nation-branding and image-building of leaders and set agendas while facilitating state control? c) How does digital media make borders obsolete, and what are the repercussions for states and leaderships? d) Do social media platforms help Rising Powers like India to shape narratives and set domestic and global agendas? e) How do India, the US, and China co-opt new media tools to direct conversations with the foreign public? f ) How has digital media strengthened the Indian state’s relationship with its diaspora? g) Is employment of digital tools perpetuating centralization of power by states? Are these trends visible only in less-liberal states like China? h) Has technology-driven communication helped countries like India to cultivate soft power? i) Has digital technology been able to diminish the elite’s control over the media content and in turn strengthened democracies in India and the US? j) How has disinformation/fake news derailed the objectives of PD and political communication in India, and how have they impacted the US and China?

Theoretical Framework The deployment of digital tools by political actors, governments, and citizens has colossally transformed the political communication landscape, fascinating academics

Introduction  5

and practitioners alike. The social media logic (Kalsnes 2016) and its resultant enlargement of the public sphere or public space (Castells 2008) – defined by Habermas (1989) as ‘the sphere of private people come together as a public to engage [public authorities] in a debate governing relation in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labour’ – have expanded manifold post-globalization. In fact, globalization, by shifting the debate on public affairs from the local to the global (rendering it glocal ), has increasingly constructed the debate around global communication networks, enhancing the space of the original debate on public affairs (Castells 2008). However, a ‘largely unfulfilled potential for a more participatory public space’ has also been identified by scholars and practitioners (Lukamto & Carson 2016). While new media has been hailed for its ability to push bilateral dialogues between states and their public, evidence from around the world often reflects otherwise, with monologues still dominating PD activities (Manor 2019). Several studies indicate that the networked and interactive nature of new media platforms has played a limited role in democratizing the online media ecosystem by neither diminishing the elite’s control over the media content nor reigning in partisan polarization (Yousuf et al. 2018). Arguably, these findings reflect a phenomenon described as the normalization of the internet (Resnick 1998), confirming not only that digital platforms have overtaken the old mainstream media as leading communication channels but that even communication practices remain largely unchanged (Resnick 1998). There has also been a ‘Constructivist turn in International Relation theory’ with an increasing prominence of ‘soft power’ in the academic discourse. The Constructivist argument – ‘the study of International Relations (IRs) must focus on the ideas and beliefs that inform the actors on the international scene as well as the shared understanding between them’ (Wendt 1999) – reflects nation-states’ emphasis on collaboration, cooperative social action, and the exchange of ideas and people. It also displays the resolve to build relationships and to touch a chord with the people, which pose as the ‘affiliation functions’ of binding others in relations (Fischer & Manstead 2008). Interestingly, this touching a chord dimension was first noticed during the US presidential election campaign in 2012. Barrack Obama had focused on stimulating online emotional messages (pathos) – an Aristotelian rhetorical strategy continuing to be valuable for understanding political action in contemporary settings (Martin 2013) – thereby guiding the electoral candidates’ communication with the public (Samuel-Azran et al. 2015). This attempt to touch a chord has been visible in the Indian case as well, as will be highlighted in Chapter 7. Subsequently, several leaders have deployed digital platforms for touching a chord with the public for influencing and manipulating both the domestic and the foreign public. In line with the Constructivist turn and the emerging emphasis on deep communication, this book tries to understand the new media–driven diplomacy from the perspective of soft power. Rooted in neoliberal and Constructivist visions of power,14 soft power’s currency in modern strategic discourse is courtesy of Joseph Nye, Jr, who expounded on it in his seminal works, Bound to Lead: The Changing

6  Introduction

Nature of American Power (1991) and The Paradox of American Power (2001). Nye later provided a structured conceptual paradigm in Soft Power: The Means to Success (2005), justifying the term by arguing that ‘when you can get others to admire your ideals and to want what you want, you do not have to spend as much on sticks and carrots to move them in your direction’. Negating the traditional hard power–driven realpolitik approach in the new Information Age, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, in 1999, had invented a related term: Noopolitik. Underpinning a network-based relation between states, Noopolitik emphasized the predominance of ideas, values, norms, laws, and ethics in foreign policy behaviour. Nye (2005) further proposed smart power, describing it as the ‘balance of hard and soft power’; with states enthusiastically applying the idea to IRs. More than a decade later, in 2017, the National Endowment for Democracy coined another new term, sharp power, for describing aggressive and destabilizing policies adopted by less-liberal states, focusing on ‘distraction’ and ‘manipulation’ to influence and manipulate internationally. This has been used extensively by scholars to examine authoritarian states like China and Russia (Freedom in the World 2019; Walker & Ludwig 2017). However, the tendency to manipulate and distract is not exclusive to the ‘not free’ (largely authoritarian) and ‘partially not free’ states15 alone but is visible among democracies too, as this book discovers. While technological developments have redefined engagement, it has also necessitated states to pursue a relational PD approach whose spotlight, it is argued, ‘should be about building relationships, starting from understanding other countries’ needs, cultures, and people and then looking for areas to make common cause’ (Leonard 2002). While this objective is in line with the Constructivist theory, the same technology has also reshaped power. The latter has assumed a new context in the new Digital Information Age by not only promoting ideas and norms of behaviour but projecting military might as well. In fact, the core struggle has been to project values, promote interests, and ultimately set the global agenda (Metzl 2001) – ­factors that are increasingly shaping contemporary new media–driven PD. Whereas scholars like Jackson and Sorensen (2007) emphasize ideas and beliefs that inform international actors about each other, and the shared understanding they strive to achieve between them (Wendt 1999), others like Olaniran and Williams (2020) highlight how the same digital tools have ‘hijacked democracy’. While this book studies the employment of new media tools in PD and political communication from an IR perspective, it also adopts a multidisciplinary perspective. Communication Studies, Public Relations (PR), Psychology, Marketing, and Sociology contribute significantly to the theoretical and empirical knowledge of technology-driven diplomacy and political communication. While Communication Studies examines the relationship between politics and the citizens, the Communication and Media Studies’ treatment of PD from a soft power angle is distinct. It’s particular focus on the relational dimension of communication and engagement (Zaharna 2018) mentioned earlier in this chapter is noteworthy. Scholars like Pamment (2014) argue that goal orientation is explicit in the definitions of PD and soft power while being implicit in the assumptions of influence and control.

Introduction  7

Similarly, foreign policy and PD have been viewed through sociological and PR prisms by scholars for deciphering the role of the new media in shaping PD. Whereas Sociology studies interactions between states and non-state actors that make engagement both dynamic and dialogic (Dolea 2017), scholars examining PD from a PR and advertising perspective assert that ‘PD [public diplomacy]and PR-marketing are merging’ (Ham 2001). Psychology, on the other hand, attempts to understand the relationship between individual psychology of contemporary digitized leaders – who have also emerged as key players and therefore will be subsequently examined in the book from a PD prism – and their social networking skills. Partly drawing on these different fields of study, this book examines the role of new media platforms in transforming modern PD while impacting political communication.

Literature Review The influence and impact of the internet on PD and political communication have generated intense academic interest. This literature review, while not claiming to be comprehensive, reflects on the main strands of the emerging literature gaining prominence in IR, Communication Studies, and other related fields mentioned in the preceding section. Whether major or Rising Powers, both are harnessing new technology in diplomatic communication ‘to influence public opinion in foreign societies’ (Gilboa 2008) and leverage it equally for new forms of public engagement, commerce, and warfare (Hayden 2018). The continuous evolution of technologies is making the political landscape more complex and volatile as academics and practitioners struggle to interpret, define, and understand e-diplomacy in ‘different yet similar ways’ (Sotiriu 2015). With academic work on digital diplomacy gradually picking up, many highlight its inadequacy, particularly the absence of a reliable conceptual framework, for assessing the effectiveness of new media technology for public diplomatic purposes (Bjola & Jiang 2015). A careful analysis of the literature on ‘digitalization of diplomacy’ and political communication also reveals a predominantly Western perspective and the traction it has had in Western foreign policy and diplomacy narratives (Brasset & Browning 2018; Hanson 2012; Hayden 2011; Manor 2019; Metzl 2001; Sevin & Ingenhoff 2018; Wanjiru 2014; Zaharna & Rugh 2012). Studies also indicate the extent to which the US has dominated the ‘international flow of information and entertainment’ as even non-Western networks follow the news agendas set by the US and other countries in the West (Thussu 2007). This dominance of the information flow by the US has led a country like China to push its own narrative, deploying digital tools like Twitter, for influence and manipulation, targeting the international community (Sinha Palit 2022). The rapid rise of India and other emerging powers and their enthusiastic deployment of new media in PD are drawing considerable academic attention to an alternative perspective for studying digitalization of diplomacy, in which political communication – premised less on the Western approach and narrative – is critical.

8  Introduction

Scholars across disciplines are struck by the role of technology in countries like India, China, South Africa, and others where new media platforms have proliferated and are shaping PD discourse in a different way given their peculiarities and challenges (Bandurski 2008; Hall 2012; Gries et al. 2016; deLisle et al. 2016; Jie 2016; Kangliang 2011; Lee 2011; Luo 2014; Manor 2019; McConnell & Huba 2007; Natarajan 2014; Shirk 2011; Suri 2011; Thakur 2012; Wang et al. 2009; Zhou & Xiao 2018). China is particularly interesting given its increasing application of the new media platforms (Walker & Ludwig 2017) for directing its communication – both within and across borders. Looked at through a new prism of sharp power (Nye 2018), Beijing’s systematic suppression of online political pluralism, on one hand, and online free expression for maintaining and consolidating power at home, on the other, has drawn considerable academic attention. As mentioned in the last section, social media platforms have also enabled smaller countries to overcome challenges of distance and financial constraints by allowing them to participate in overseas events and occasions, making interaction possible between them and their counterparts elsewhere (Ritto 2014). While this argument holds ground, one is also struck by its similar and aggressive use by major powers for managing or seeking to manipulate regional and international environment. In fact, the digital platforms’ ability to facilitate contemporary agenda-setting practices, like their traditional counterparts (e.g., radio broadcasts) – but only more efficacious and potent – has compelled modern states to exploit the advantageous role of the digital media in setting particular agendas aligned with their political ambitions. Apart from states, populist leaders – claiming to speak for ‘true people’ abused by a ‘predatory elite’ – are also engaged in digital communication for successfully nurturing victimhood among their constituency (Plagemann & Destradi 2019), an aspect distinctly visible and prominent around the world. The genesis of the practice can be traced back to 1922, when Walter Lippmann, an American media critic, expressed his concern regarding the vital role of the media in influencing the setting of images in the public mind (1922; McCombs & Shaw 1993). With social media effectively churning populist sentiments and emotions, politicians enthusiastically adopt these since ‘emotion and affect are central in the creation of nationalistic discourses, especially when they engage physical or symbolic actions against a certain group’ (Ahmed 2014). These elements, defining the current global political communication landscape, witness political actors engaging in agenda-setting practices – the most influential and scientifically prolific paradigms in media and Communication Studies in recent decades (Walgrave 2006: 88) – for manipulating foreign policy and making tactical choices on when to emphasize foreign or domestic policy issues in advancing policy preferences. This is expected given that foreign policy is also an interplay between diplomacy and domestic policies (Putnam 1988). While elite opinions, particularly those of key leaders, traditionally enjoyed more latitude during the early stages of foreign policy events, the hyper-fragmented new media environment has constrained their capacities to control framing of events. Consequently, aggressive deployment of Webbased platforms to communicate nationalism16 to targeted audiences for exploiting

Introduction  9

emotions of the public is on the rise. In fact, often, subjects with distinct nationalist undertones are seen circulating and trending too, whether it be in India, the US, or China. Hashtags are being created for collective conversations in times of crisis, conflicts, and controversies while marking and declaring identities in distinction to other groups and opinions (Giglietto & Lee 2017). Examining the new political communication strategy, in the context of technology influencing it, has therefore emerged as a major challenge for scholars and practitioners alike. The contemporary media ecology, apart from being intricate, has also fundamentally transformed diplomacy and power politics as citizens gain more traction in politics. The rapid rise of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) – simplifying word of mouth for easing collaboration (McConnell & Huba 2007) – has equally revolutionized political communication strategies of contemporary leaders while undermining media’s traditional role, often leading to the reduction of public confidence in the veracity of media reporting (Baum & Potter 2019). This has led Communications Studies scholars to note how better understanding of public ‘not only at the rational but also the emotional level’ (Wang 2006: 94; Graham 2014) is an imperative in the Digital Age. This dimension has particularly pushed populist leaders to widely circumvent traditional mainstream media gatekeepers and embrace new media for conducting day-to-day affairs around diplomacy. The digital media landscape has also impacted soft power and expanded its scope and role. Geens (2013) distinguishes between ‘soft power’ and ‘collaborative power’ by defining the former as more resource-intensive and the latter as relationship-­ intensive. Hill (2003) points out that the rationale of the soft power paradigm is that people are targets of foreign policy, making engagement of foreign publics, and responding to international opinions by modern states, a new diplomatic necessity. In fact, in the contemporary world, national image has become an important concept as it provides states with soft power, enabling them to achieve positive outcomes through attraction rather than the traditional coercion of military power (Nye 2008). In this backdrop, the technological revolution and resultant new forms of communication have facilitated conversation of cultures while pushing cross-cultural dialogues and collaboration (Cowan & Cull 2008), which have emerged as necessary conditions for success in diplomacy (Melissen 2011). With soft power gaining momentum in IR, PD, while becoming fundamental to the goal of promoting soft power (Melissen 2005a; Nye 2008) – especially now with digital technologies driving political communication – has also come to occupy centre-stage in external engagement (Cull 2009; Melissen 2005a; Senem & Seib 2015). It flows from the assumption that if public opinion (PO) in the target society is persuaded to accept a favourable image, it will exert pressure on its government to alter existing hostile attitudes and policies (Gilboa 2008). In a technology-driven world, PO has gained new traction with citizens no longer passive consumers of political party propaganda, government spin, or mass media news but influential actors enabled to challenge discourses, share alternative perspectives, and declare their own opinions (Loader & Mercea 2011). Scholars like Zaharna (2018) have further argued that the public ‘has seized upon the power of the social media and

10  Introduction

have become parallel players in defining and re-defining relations’. This digital public has cast social media central to ‘Now Media’ – location-independent and combining both old and new media – in providing a new fillip to PD efforts that seek ‘to build a public sphere in which diverse voices can be heard in spite of their various origins, distinct values, and often, contradictory interests’ (Castells 2008). Cultivating the diaspora, given their emotional attachment to their parent country, has also been central in the practice of PD. Diaspora diplomacy – ‘engaging a country’s overseas community to contribute to building relationships with foreign countries’ (Manor 2017) – facilitated by new media, has gained traction in India. With the internet and other new communication technologies offering ‘unprecedented opportunities for promoting cross-national collaborations, as well as dialogue and monologic communications’ (Cowan et al. 2008; Dolea 2017), the diaspora is increasingly being seen as important actors who not only can help their political leaders back home to set agendas in the host country but also can be leveraged for diplomatic purposes given its strategic value. This, in turn, has transformed the diaspora into a potential diplomatic asset given that many of the members are willing to support their home country in achieving foreign policy goals, thereby changing the community from ‘saboteurs to entrepreneurs’. During crises, the engagement of the diasporic communities by diplomats and Embassies using dedicated platforms becomes even more imminent since the overarching objective is to communicate to them that modern governments are concerned about their welfare in difficult times. Digital tools are widely employed for apprising them of the government’s goals and achievements, thereby setting selective agendas. Technology is also being harnessed to offer digital solutions to deliver consular aid, be it through smartphone applications or e-government services (Bjola 2016), and to highlight attempts to engage with the diaspora. These tendencies and efforts have been discussed later in the book in the Indian and the Chinese contexts. It is not the Foreign Ministries alone that seek to practice diplomacy deploying digital media. Leaders, who have become parallel players in directing diplomacy, are equally keen to enhance visibility and popularity with respect to the public stationed overseas. Leaders find digital tools effective for setting off key messages for international consumption. By aggressively employing the tools, contemporary digital leaders are seen setting agendas on the one hand, and initiating collaboration on the other, as variously witnessed during the pandemic and otherwise. Maintaining a global reputation in tandem with economic growth is also an imperative with nation-states striving to counterbalance historical rivalries (Lee & Melissen 2011). This is particularly salient in the Digital Age as countries compete to influence the ‘global information environment’ for improving brand images for attracting tourists, trade, and investment ( Javier 2006). PR scholars examining PD argue that without branding, it is almost impossible to attract investments, tourists, and companies; expand exports; and reach higher standards of living (Ham 2001). Treating nation-states as products, they emphasize that branding gives products and services an emotional dimension that people (including the diaspora) can identify with, making states ‘brand states’, as geography and politics become trivial compared with the

Introduction  11

brand’s emotional resonance among a global audience of consumers (Ham 2001). Nation brand-building (place branding) has therefore become a national priority, and Simon Anholt (2010) argues that ‘competitive identity’ is better suited to describe the current governments’ nation brand-building exercise. The concept has also moved further towards PD, and relationship has gradually emerged as the central paradigm of both (Szondi 2008). The ‘intent’ for building a positive image targeting the global public dominates the global PD narrative in the new Information Age, predicated on soft power, as democracies like India (Sinha 2018a) and the US and even less-liberal states like China (Sinha 2017) strive to achieve the objective employing new media tools. While relying on social media to address concerns of ‘social instability’ (Hassid 2015), China has equally engaged in brand-building itself deploying digital tools. This book examines national brand-building essentially from a PD angle. Cognizant of this linkage, political leaders in countries like India consider the diaspora as ‘ambassadors’ and deploy social media extensively for stimulating diaspora mobilization. This rebranding effort through PD (Cooper 2009) is witnessing a major escalation in academic interest as they assume enormous traction in the new Information Age (Ham 2001) and as new actors demand greater recognition and global understanding (Brown 2011). Closely connected to brand-building exercise is management of ‘the international environment by making cultural resources and achievements known overseas, and/or facilitating cultural transmission abroad’ (Cowan et al. 2008; Nye 2005), enabled by digital technologies and in line with soft power objectives. While cultivating favourable international and regional environments are priorities for all nation-states, new media has afforded enthusiastic and informed debates of international issues by the domestic public, and domestic issues by the international public, effectively blurring borders (Batora 2005; Huijgh 2011; Slaughter 2004; Zaharna 2018) and making the exchange of ideas across borders easy and simple. Blurring of borders, enabled by the digital media, demonstrates how domestic incidents influence foreign perceptions and can damage nation brands. Even a major power like the US has been helpless, as far as its image and global reputation is concerned, following various domestic catastrophic incidents. For example, a video of a police officer abusing and killing African American George Floyd in May 2020 (Haass 2020) in the US city of Minneapolis not only spurred global protests but also damaged America’s global reputation and image significantly. The outcome was augmented by easy information flow across physical borders. Such flows and their impact on global image have become particularly noticeable for India, where overt nationalist expressions have partly affected its external image during the last few years (Sanghvi 2018; Udupa 2018). Global instances show that messages designed for domestic or private consumption reach international publics in no time; the latter interprets (or misinterprets) these according to their own experiences, cultures, and political needs (Cowan & Arsenault 2008), sometimes to the detriment of a nation’s national and foreign interest. While digitalization is predominant in the soft power narrative, traditional media, legacy media, or ‘stable platforms’ (Gandour 2016) are also seen playing a

12  Introduction

supporting role in the new media Age. In fact, scholars like Ross (2011) describe 21st-­century statecraft as an agenda that ‘complements traditional foreign policy tools with newly innovated and adapted instruments that fully leverage the networks, technologies, and demographics of our networked world’. This fusion of the traditional with the new media and online and offline communication – or, as Chadwick (2013) calls it, a ‘hybrid’ communication system – not only is conspicuous in modern-day political communication but helps condition PD as well. This new paradigm also highlights that many characteristics of the new media platforms, like manipulation of POs and their disruptive dimensions, are hardly new and can be traced back to the time when traditional media was dominating the key lines of communication. These issues are briefly discussed in the next chapter. Research on digital communication cannot afford to overlook the purported role of new media to ‘disinform’ – often deliberately encouraged by a variety of state and non-state actors – to secure predetermined agendas. The new world of the internet, where ‘authority [is] being evenly distributed to everyone with a voice or a podcast, no one believes anybody, or (it is the same thing) everyone believes anybody’ (Stanley 2018), has led to manipulation of information and the spread of fake news around the world. Social media algorithms,17 which are proliferating globally, are not only impacting political communication and bilateral relationships by narrowing the online public’s worldviews but are also creating situations ripe for manipulation and deception. In fact, the role of disinformation18 has increasingly derailed the objectives of PD in India, the US, and China. The weaponization and militarism of new media tools around the world have equally given way to trepidation. The policy brief, Assessing meaning construction on social media: a case of normalizing militarism, identifies an extraordinary volume of social media content celebrating war and militarism by its users (SIPRI 2017). While the interactive potential of new media platforms and their promise to exploit it intensively for communicating with the public has been glorified by leaders, scholars have described this as cyber-rhetoric ( Jungherr 2016). In fact, leaders are noted to employ Web 2.0 platforms for disseminating information in a Web 1.0 style, in what has been labelled a ‘Web 1.5’ way of using these platforms ( Jackson & Lilleker 2009). Whether the new technology has indeed been able to perpetuate democracy is debatable; a country like India is blamed for perpetuating the ‘digital divide’ between public members with access to the internet (haves) and others without such access (have nots) (DiMaggio 2001). The aspect of digital (il)literacy, typical in countries like India, and its impact on bilateral relationships also lack adequate focus. While many might not be able to afford smartphones in India, digital literacy is almost non-existent among more than 90 per cent of India’s population (Digital Empowerment Foundation dna). Impressionable and vulnerable, they then direct a political narrative utilizing social media, often with a communal undertone, usually forced upon them by the political elite. Making little effort to verify the original source for what they share, a BBC study indicated the extent to which the ‘common man’ in India (and in several others like Nigeria and Kenya) is perpetuating the country’s fake news crises (Thomas 2018). This aspect of the new media culture has

Introduction  13

also emerged as a global phenomenon. A fake news crisis has witnessed unverified information inundating the blogosphere, eventually compelling governments and fact checkers to fight it as a priority.

About this Book The primary objective of this book is to examine India’s institutionalization of new media in its diplomatic praxis and political communication. A Rising Power with its own challenges and peculiarities, India has been aggressively employing new media platforms to reach out and engage with the digital public and leaders far and wide. In fact, digital platforms have indeed assumed phenomenal traction in India’s PD efforts and political communication since Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi took office in 2014. Many argue that the ‘Modi phenomenon’ marks the adoption of a Western political model selectively and strategically utilizes the media and entertainment industries to configure the political sphere into public subjectivity (Rai 2019b). Other pressing priorities like India’s expanding world vision and great power ambitions, emanating from its rapid economic growth, have also instilled a newfound confidence in its external communication (Sinha 2019d). With technology reshaping India’s power status and empowering the common man and leaders alike, the latter19 have been encouraged to create their own personal brands ‘with an amazing mix of personal feelings, nationalist pride and smart positioning’ (Ramalingegowda 2014). They are equally eager to communicate and share these feelings with the online audience overseas. Notwithstanding the state’s increased co-option of digital platforms for communication, political bots20 and algorithms manipulating PO and spreading disinformation, significantly characterize India’s new media political environment as well, giving rise to doubts over whether new media has at all been able to transform its already complex political landscape. The following chapters examine the role of the new media in shaping India’s PD and political communication while discussing the experiences of the US and China. While much work has been done on the US, which has a longer experience and record of e-diplomacy, the literature on India and China is limited. The book is an attempt to partly fill the academic gap. While the next chapter discusses the key concepts that are used and analyzed in the book, the section below sifts through some recurring themes of the digital media ecology that appear in the following chapters with respect to all of the countries under study: New Media encourage powerful one-way (uni-directional) communication21: The new media technology is increasingly being deployed to disseminate information in a Web 1.0 style and therefore is being labelled as the ‘Web 1.5’. Chapters 3–5, and 7 particularly underline this trend in countries where these platforms have emerged as broadcasting tools. By inhibiting dialogue and interaction of ideas, they are showcasing authoritarian tendencies in India and the US while perpetuating authoritarianism further in China (Bulovsky 2018) – antithetical to digital diplomacy’s objective of entrenching democracy (Howard 2010; Nisbet et al. 2012).

14  Introduction

Networked public exploited by states: Chapters 4 and 7 highlight this dimension of the new media technology with respect to the US and India – two major democracies where overt nationalistic postures occasionally direct online conversations and, in turn, rupture the objectives of PD. Chapter 5, which discusses China, points towards its authoritarianism and its repressive use of social media platforms. Compelled by public activism that is facilitated by technology, the Party has been forced to educate its citizens regarding the international environment, external relations, and foreign policy concerns, in order to shape their opinions in line with the state’s national interests ‘as defined by the regime’ ( Jie 2016). This aspect of manipulating the online public, who have emerged as parallel players in the new Information Age, often overlaps in both liberal and less-liberal states. Digital platforms foster a composite space of support for leaders: This dimension is visible in all the three countries (India, the US, and China) under study. In fact, Chapters 4 and 7, while reflecting on the digital media’s role in preaching, also highlight how critical it is for leaders to expand their support base as digital tools prove to be major enablers by cultivating emotions. Chapter 4 discusses how the former US President Donald Trump’s tweets, which apart from disseminating information about his policies targeting the domestic public, enabled him to manipulate his supporters, thereby helping him to set national and foreign agendas aligned with his ideology and belief. Chapter 7 discusses similar tendencies in India. Electoral campaigns in India, which have come to involve the diaspora significantly, have acquired a strong flavour of nationalism and religious sentiments, often strategized for their emotional content. These not only have gone mainstream (Kazmin 2019) but are influencing domestic and external public perceptions, often to favour the leadership. Technology has blurred international borders: Notwithstanding the notion that digital platforms were originally meant for communicating with foreign publics (Manor 2019), the Web 2.0’s value as a tool in domestic politics (Harris 2013) has been gaining immense traction as technology makes international borders fluid. This dimension of new media runs through all the chapters in the book. With international borders becoming obsolete in the Digital Age, technology has afforded an enthusiastic and informed debate of international issues by the domestic public and of domestic issues by the international public. While this has led parts of the online public in countries like Hong Kong to rally international support against mainland China, in the case of India, the abrogation of Article 37022 by the Modi government in 2019 whipped up a storm on social media, drawing international attention to a domestic issue. Similarly, in the US, a video on the brutal killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 led to massive Black Lives Matter (BLM) movements around the world, condemning racism. New Media and power projection: The cyber-optimists’ argument that the internet offers citizens more control over the political future of their country (Bulovsky 2018) and is aimed at perpetuating democracies, limits its potential disadvantages. Instead, what gets highlighted are the state’s efforts to perpetuate authoritarian tendencies, whether they are liberal or less-liberal countries. Both project power and authority

Introduction  15

harnessing digital platforms. Chapters 4, 5, and 7 discuss these paradigms of power extensively, highlighting the social media–driven hostile media environment which not only divides the people but fans religious and social tensions in the states. Contemporary networked leaders consider themselves more accountable to domestic audiences: While Twitter and FB engagement has perpetuated strongman politics and centralization of power, to an extent which the book focuses upon with respect to India, the US, and China, it has equally reinforced that networked leaders also feel the pressure to carry out the threats that they make in the domestic and international systems as they care about their reputation. They also appear more likely to follow through on promises that they have made during their election campaigns, for example, as they also have their domestic audiences to cater to who would hold them to account if they failed to do so, often with foreign policy repercussions. These tendencies have been highlighted in Chapters 4, 5, and 7 with respect to all the three countries discussed in this book.

Notes 1 Kosnik and Feldman identify internet platforms as performance spaces, and of online participation as performance in line with Erving Goffman’s argument about performance (2019: 20). 2 Traditional PD is a vital tool for nations in changing and shaping public perceptions and cutting across the cultural range of the global public (Zaharna 2018). 3 According to many scholars, the instigators of ‘new’ PD were the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US, the emergence of global media ecology and the rise of the digital society (Manor 2019). 4 In simple words, soft power, coined by Joseph Nye, is the ability of nation-states to co-opt rather than coerce. The term is mentioned in a little more detail later in the chapter. 5 Political communication has gained enormous prominence with the shift in PD to a more relational orientation toward publics brought about in a new media–enabled political environment with advanced technologies emphasizing participation. While Fitzpatrick (2007) called relationship management the core of PD, Cowan and Arsenault (2008) suggested a three-layered vision of PD that moved from monologue to dialogue and finally to collaboration. 6 Communication Studies and other related disciplinary fields highlight the key elements of listening, also called the ‘seven Canons of listening’ (Macnamara 2018). It’s a two-way dialogue, listening and speaking, focusing on interaction. 7 Social media, a subset of the new media, is more participative and interactive, and include platforms like FB, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter and the likes which individuals use for sharing, co-creating, discussing, participating, and modifying user-generated or self-­ curated content posted online. 8 Realist scholars like Hans J. Morgenthau and E.H. Carr emphasize power and its exercise by states. 9 During Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine early 2022, Russia waged its information war on social media platforms. The networks, controlled by sources linked to Russia and Belarus, comprised of fabricated accounts, disguised with fake names and AI-generated profile images or hacked accounts, shared anti-Ukraine talking points and other related disinformation (Bushwick 2022). 10 During the Russia–Ukraine tension in 2022, both sides attempted to control and shape the conflict narrative. While a big and powerful country, Russia strategized the digital media to spread fake news, Ukraine, a much smaller country, employed social media to humiliate the Russians and galvanize global support (Harwell & Lerman 2022).

16  Introduction

11 The rise and fall of great powers have long been at the core of International Relations. However, the rise of new powers has also emerged a focus of the discipline. According to Professor Andre Gerrits, an emerging power (or a Rising Power) has a rapidly growing economy of a substantial scale, commands an increasing political weight, apart from harbouring ambitions to change the existing power relations (a revisionist). The latter is crucial in IRs (the author had attended a Coursera online course, The Changing Global Order, offered by the University of Leiden, for 6 weeks in January 2021). 12 Like India, a Rising Power like Brazil, has also employed digital media extensively in its PD. For example, Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been diversifying its online presence both through the launching of new profiles on social media platforms and through establishment of channels in different languages (Twiplomacy 2016). These dimensions are discussed in Chapter 3 with respect to countries like South Africa and Sri Lanka which practice digital diplomacy for nation-branding purposes, thereby individualizing the nation state. 13 Public Diplomacy 2.0 is essentially a new approach in PD which has emerged because of the Web 2.0 or social networking technologies (Glassman 2008). 14 Both have been viewed largely as antithetical to the idea of power-seeking. 15 Freedom in the World is an annual survey conducted by the US-based Freedom House launched in 1973. It measures the degree of political rights and civil liberties in every nation and produces annual scores representing the levels of political rights and civil liberties in each state and territory on a scale from 1 (most free) to 7 (least free). Depending on the ratings, the nations are then classified as ‘Free’, ‘Partially Free’, or ‘Not Free’. 16 According to the Merriam-Webster definition, nationalism is a reference to ‘loyalty’ and ‘devotion’ tending to imply the placing of nation above others. Some scholars argue the Hindu nationalist surge in India has been largely divisive (Gettleman et al. 2019; Griswold 2019). 17 Algorithms are defined by Lupton (2015) as a sequence of computer code commands that tells a computer how to process through a series of instructions to arrive at a specific endpoint. Simply put, they are mechanisms that ‘choose’ which content a given viewer will see. 18 Disinformation (or fake news) is false, unverified information or manufactured stories spread on the internet, aiming to influence political views and for deceiving the people. 19 The digital media, in fact, was partly responsible for the rise of Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in 2012. AAP’s anti-establishment online narrative, targeting the diaspora (Webb 2019), won the Party a strong foothold in Indian politics while Mamata Banerjee, the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader in an eastern state, West Bengal, focused on building an arsenal of ‘digital warriors’ to garner more support for the TMC. Akhilesh Yadav, the Samajwadi Party (SP) leader, whose stronghold is in the big northern central state of Uttar Pradesh, is also an ardent Twitter user. Even a ‘Grand Old Party’ like the Communist Party of India-Marxist [CPI (M)] has increased its digital presence for reconnecting with the people at the grassroots. In Andhra Pradesh, the new media is said to have propelled the YSR Congress of Jagan Mohan Reddy to power, defeating ‘tech man’ incumbent Chandrababu Naidu in 2019. With over 95 per cent of YouTube’s video consumption in India in regional languages, regional political Parties like the YSR Congress leveraged the platform for connecting with the people during elections. Their Ravali Jagan, Kavali Jagan (‘We want Jagan, Jagan should come’) campaign song became the most watched political campaign song on YouTube (Sinha Palit 2019c) during the time. One could identify two factors which might have pushed the Indian regional political leaders to co-opt the tools for engaging with the public: one, disrupting practices of international and national actors which were affecting the working of traditional communication, and two, leaders like PM Modi who effectively showcased the power of technology in branding themselves. 20 Bots serve as networked gatekeepers who facilitate the flow of disinformation from the government of one nation to the population of another (Manor 2019). 21 Uni-directional (or monologues) communication involves the projection of opinions with little to no interaction in the other direction (Kedzie 1997). 22 Article 370 of the Indian Constitution granted local autonomy to the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

2 EVOLVING CONTOURS OF NEW MEDIA Public Diplomacy and Political Communication in the Global Context

The advent of the internet and proliferation of new media tools have positioned Public Diplomacy (PD) closer in the domain of global communications than other modes of diplomacy (Melissen 2011). The emergence of the digital society has compelled diplomats to shift their gaze from elites and opinion makers to ordinary citizens. Not only do foreign ministers have their personal blogs or write daily tweets for their followers (Melissen 2011), but governments and their diplomats have become increasingly keen to reach out to the foreign civil society. Technology has forced the traditionally closed sphere of accredited practitioners to open up and made diplomats and politicians more visible than ever before. It has also replaced the ‘traditional’ mode of the legacy media with a networked system by engaging the public in diplomatic affairs. The blurring of borders enabled by new technology, mentioned in the previous chapter, has compelled governments and political leaders to engage with both the domestic and foreign public. This dimension of new media – generating a ‘process of forming opinions that transcends borders and affects a new concept of citizenship, relatively oblivious to matters of purely national public interest’ (Omar 2014) – has indeed been revolutionary as the domestic and international get intertwined with one another, flowing freely and constantly within and between the networks. This enlargement of the public space has equally forced the contemporary governments to value public input not only because it informs their decisions, connects them to the people and ‘tests’ advice from other sources (Hendriks & Lees-Marshment 2018) but also because it assists the political leaders in building their support bases and in setting particular agendas in line with their ideologies, beliefs, and values. With PD increasingly becoming what sociologist Manuel Castells (2008) calls ‘diplomacy of the public’, the mechanism has yet to robustly respond to international opinions, considered central to diplomacy. In the meantime, online negative DOI: 10.4324/9780429298141-2

18  Evolving Contours of New Media

engagement – more visible and ubiquitous compared with traditional channels of communication (Lievonen 2020) – continues to undermine public confidence while frequently compromising traditional foreign relations, disrupting the objectives of PD. Several scholars reject the democratic potential of the new technology by pointing to its capacity to undermine serious rational deliberation through negative campaigning and encouraging populist rhetoric, and even extremism, for sensationalizing the public sphere and to foster celebrity politics (Loader & Mercea 2011), specifically noticeable in India and the US. The Digital Age, by redefining the public and the public space, has equally transformed political communication between the leaders and the people. In fact, with glocal public opinion (PO) being recalibrated in the new digital media landscape, countries like India, the US, and China are all struggling to shape national and foreign perspectives. After all, online platforms, while emerging an equalizer, have equally facilitated states – weak or strong, major or Rising – to harness new technology in diplomatic communication ‘to influence public opinion in foreign societies’ (Gilboa 2005) while leveraging it for new forms of public engagement, commerce, and also warfare (Hayden 2018). Technology has helped political leaders to inform, engage, and influence public audiences and thereby assisted them in shaping the narratives in line with their Party agendas while constructing a regional and a global order that is most likely to advantage their country’s national interests. However, while new media has gained phenomenal traction in the 21st century, the legacy media, keen on retaining relevance, has also been adjusting itself to the new media environment, trying to shape the modern political narrative in conjunction with digital platforms. This chapter begins by introducing some of the key concepts of the new media platforms and their impact on PD and political communication with respect to India, the US, and China. While new media has altered communication between leaders, diplomats, and the public in the new Information Age, the proliferation of these has also relegated the traditional media to the background (Gandour 2016). However, the role of traditional media in directing PD and political communication, before the advent of digital technology, cannot be treated as peripheral. This chapter, therefore, briefly examines the role that traditional media has played in shaping political communication and in setting agendas in the past. It also draws attention to the fact that many features that we associate with the new media landscape – i­nfluence and manipulation of POs, their disruptive dimensions together with their engagement of the foreign publics – can hardly be deemed novel; their origins can be traced back to the time when traditional forms of media dominated the media landscape. The study of the role of the traditional media will help our understanding of the current media landscape, where the former continues to coexist with new media platforms on the one hand while experiencing marginalization on the other.

Digitalization of Diplomacy: Some Key Concepts The technological revolution not only has transformed the media landscape but has altered the rules of PD as well. In the early days of its emergence and evolution,

Evolving Contours of New Media  19

new media technology was visualized as a democratic advance holding promise for a more informed and engaged public (Baum & Potter 2019), especially with respect to PD and political communication. In fact, the advent of the digital media and the pronounced shift in space for discussion on digital platforms have not only undermined regulated debates in parliaments but also minimized the traditional media’s role in influencing POs, paving the way instead for a more enhanced direct communication between the state and the digital public. The latter has emerged as new actors in the new media landscape and is actively directing diplomacy and foreign policy, apart from posing as parallel players in producing and disseminating information within and beyond borders. Thus, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook (FB) not only have revolutionized public political communication by bringing the state closer to the public but also have set new rules of engagement with the public no longer placed at the periphery of diplomacy. With audience engagement emerging as the main focus in diplomacy, the Council on Foreign Relations also tied the term ‘engagement’ to the process of relationship-building (Manor 2019). In 2008, the State Department defined four goals of PD activities delivered via digital technologies: understanding, informing, engaging, and influencing foreign publics (Manor 2019), once again placing the public at the centre of global diplomacy and making PD more responsive. Governments, for their part, have enthusiastically co-opted the digital platforms as well for engaging with the digital public since they have long understood that ‘power comes from attraction’ (Nye 2005). This kind of engagement and relationship-building between the government and the public is a major focus of this book. Digital technology has also fundamentally changed the character of International Relations (IRs) in the 21st century by pushing new trends, such as making the image of a country’s political leader even more critical in the international arena. As Snow (2009) argues, ‘a national leader may direct his or her nation’s reputation abroad and therefore also serves as a principal agent’. Technological revolution has made leaders around the world discover the significance of adopting social media in their communication with people – both domestic and foreign. From personalizing messages to communicating targeted messages, networked leaders are aggressively deploying digital platforms for connecting with the online public. This new media–driven political communication is deemed important by both liberal and less-liberal leaders alike as the global media ecology gets characterized by the continuous flow of information within and between networks of connected individuals (Manor 2019). Both groups of leaders demonstrate a willingness and an urgency to embrace new media technology for public interaction, realizing that the public is no longer the passive audience that it used to be, relying on the traditional media alone. The advent of new technology and their social networks not only offers more real-time news sources in which they can actively participate but also empowers them to change the way power has been shaped historically.1 The digital public is also questioning official lines and is involved in offering alternate perspectives on issues of national and international significance which cannot be overlooked by governments and leaders any longer.

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Given social media’s extensive reach, these digital platforms have emerged as necessary campaign tools for political leaders and political parties in democracies like India and the US for carrying targeted political messages that would facilitate their rise to power. Regarded as mediums that could level the playing field in politics by removing barriers of money and access to formal communication channels (Yildirim 2020), these platforms have been particularly useful in developing countries like India, where politicians find it easy to reach out to their electorates in cities, towns, and villages while connecting with the diaspora. The Indian Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) (‘Party of the Common Man’) digital outreach, the year it was founded in 2012, urged the Indian diaspora to join an international network of groups that would provide support to the Party – a dimension discussed in Chapter 6. Inspired by its anti-establishment narrative with a positive agenda for change (Webb 2019), the digital media played a significant role in the formation of intense individual attachments to AAP. Technology has also helped leaders to brand themselves – in line with Charlene Li’s (2010) concept of ‘open leadership in time of social technologies’ (2010). It was then-US President Barack Obama and his team who were first responsible for harnessing technology for brand-building exercise while spearheading communication with the electorate. Efforts to build images are discussed at length in Chapters 4 and 7 with respect to the US and India. Interestingly, many leaders in authoritarian regimes have equally employed social media to brand-build themselves. In fact, the visual content offered by new media technology has pushed authoritarians in countries like Syria to focus on building their images and design their persona in a way that would communicate their affability and accessibility to their constituencies. These fascinating dimensions are discussed in the next chapter with respect to leaders in less-liberal countries. The same digital tools have equally led leaders to control content. These tendencies are clearly visible in ‘not free’ countries like Turkey and China and are discussed in Chapters 3 and 5. What is fascinating is that this supervision and control of the digital platforms are also noticeable in India and the US – vibrant democracies taking pride in their free speech and expression. New technology has also perpetuated centralization of power and produced ‘strongman politics’ (Walker 2018). Leaders have discovered that social media offers opportunities to states to become an even more ‘dominant player in how information is spread and how the state can use data to tighten political control’ (Walker 2018). Interestingly, a significant body of research has also found that the parties’ and politicians’ extensive use of online communication is often ‘timid’ – spreading information about themselves, replicating messages from other platforms, and conveying issue positions (Silva & Proksch 2021). These dimensions are also contextually discussed in the book, highlighting the complicated contemporary media environment. By utilizing new media tools, countries can manipulate information in accordance with their goals and encourage communication to thrive through these platforms while using them extensively in their own distinct style. A careful examination of the employment of new media reveals their escalating use by countries

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for pushing their own perspectives for garnering support for their actions and to justify them, as witnessed during the ongoing Russian assault against Ukraine in 2022 when both exploited the social media for shaping a discourse to share with the outside world. While Russia circulated disinformation, Ukraine used technology as a useful weapon against its nuclear-armed neighbour in an asymmetric conflict. A similar tendency to push particular narratives has been witnessed in India, the US, and China too – discussed variously in their respective chapters. The pandemic has underscored how digital states have deployed social media for facilitating an ‘authoritarian-type’ engagement of the citizens while shaping the foreign policy discourse in their own perceptible way (Luo 2014) as local social media platforms help leaders to set agendas by regulating online content. This dimension is highlighted with respect to China in Chapter 5. Censoring digital media by blocking access to dissenting blogs and websites has been noticed in democracies as well. For example, during the abrogation of Article 370 in India, the Government requested that Twitter block accounts and tweets ‘propagating objectionable content’ on grounds of controlling terrorism, most specifically in Kashmir (The Wire 2017) – actions seen by many as reflecting contemporary governments’ attempt to curb free speech. The issue is discussed for India in Chapter 7. China has also used these platforms for global propaganda and a tool of repression, as discussed in Chapter 5. For engaging the diaspora, foreign ministries and diplomats not only are engaged in coordinating the provision of emergency consular aid by creating online groups (Bjola 2017) but are also positioning new media as a successful crisis communication tool. Countries like India and China are engaged in similar efforts, though in their own distinct style. Pushing across new media platforms to reach populations around the world and embodying an approach which draws together appeals to cultivate soft power with relationship-building and image management (Hayden 2018), India also reaches out to its people using broader social networks in targeted countries. With the Indian diaspora emerging as a powerful entity in the realm of PD and foreign policy, there are instances of India focusing on building relationships with the overseas community utilizing social media – making them seem closer than they physically are – but also as a tool for real-time crisis management. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had launched a Twitter handle for evacuating stranded Indians from Ukraine (The Tribune 2022) in 2022. This dimension is further discussed in Chapter 7. China, on the other hand, apart from spreading propaganda through social media for harvesting ‘flowers and applauses’ (Liu 2013), also effectively used Twitter as a ‘crisis messaging tool’ (Alden & Chan 2021) during the outbreak of COVID-19. As the world accused it of spreading the virus (Chang 2020), Beijing thought it imperative to employ Twitter to push out swift and targeted rebuttals in real time (Alden & Chan 2021), thereby attempting to shape a different, essentially non-Western, narrative on the pandemic. Plugged-in countries are widely deploying social media to manage national brands, a process in which national images constitute ‘cognitive mechanisms’, helping people to make sense of their worlds (Manor 2019). Manor prefers the term

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selfie diplomacy to denote national branding purposes using social media: ‘these activities individualize the nation state, which has a profile page, a profile picture and can like and share content’ (Manor 2019). He further suggests that selfie diplomacy reduces the distance between the people and the nation, thereby not only creating a favourable image of the nation but the concept of a nation as just a physical entity also ceases to exist. After all, individuals reckon different countries in different ways, and certain images and associations immediately come to mind when they think about a particular country. As Fan (2010) writes, ‘the image relates to what citizens regard as most distinctive, enduring and central about their nation’. While this pertains to the domestic population, there is a foreign audience and commercial dimension as well. With nation-branding also rooted in the logic of globalization, the goal of every nation-branding is also to improve or enhance national images since better reputations attract more foreign investment (Fan 2010), apart from attracting tourists and trade ( Javier 2006). Given that social media facilitates the presentation of the state in everyday life (Goffman 1990), governments and diplomats around the world are all engaging in selfie diplomacy. Diplomats, encountering the ‘paradox of plenty’, are forced to be digitally active to gain attention in a world with an abundance of information (Nye 2004) as they have to focus on presenting their countries as the best brands while competing against others. The next chapter discusses the practise of nation-branding by countries, including Russia, which wants to challenge its Evil Empire2 global image. Similarly, South Africa and Sri Lanka – both young and vibrant democracies – are equally enthused to present their distinct images, pushing to create a positive and compelling brand image for global consumption. These efforts demonstrate the connection of brand-building with soft power, targeting the foreign public. Even a less liberal country like China has been compelled to adopt new media to brand itself while facing ‘significant pressure from the international community over its political and business practices’ in dealing with its domestic issues (Buckley 2019), which has become even more prominent with borders becoming obsolete in the new media landscape. Nation-branding is contextually discussed in the next two chapters. National images also facilitate diplomatic achievements (Aronczyk 2013) as nation-branding creates an image of legitimacy and authority, which in turn helps countries to find a seat at the high table of global diplomacy. This partly pushes governments to work on their national images for articulating values and norms that they adhere to and for demonstrating how such norms guide their foreign policies (Natarajan 2014) for projecting themselves as responsible and constructive global players. This partly explains why Rising Powers like India are extensively deploying the new communication platforms as a PD tool to portray themselves as responsible players keen to play a major power role, evident during the ongoing pandemic (see Chapters 7 and 9). Interestingly, China’s deployment of the web is more distinct. Beijing is equally active in pushing national images through microblogging sites like Twitter, which is otherwise banned in China, for engaging with the foreign

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public. While following a most restrictive media environment internally ‘to avoid potential subversion of its authority’ (Xu & Albert 2017), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) claims that foreign media outlets are biased and are trying to damage China’s global reputation (Pen America 2016) – a rationale for justifying the policy of internal restrictions combined with the use of Western social media platforms to connect with the international community and convey targeted messages. Beijing also uses social media to promote alternative perspectives on global issues, including the notion that its own ideas and systems are more efficient, thereby not only projecting indigenous systems and narratives vis-à-vis the West but also challenging the Western-led ideas and systems, as discussed further in Chapter 5. As digital platforms have evolved, their propensity to spread deception has become discernible. This feature is often taken advantage of by politicians, and some even blur the line between their personal and professional life as they disseminate disinformation dictated by their own agendas, often hurting PD. This was evident in the US under President Donald Trump. In fact, the disruptive role of new technologies in spearheading the propagation of fake news while demonstrating the vulnerability of the digital nation-states highlighted how these led to a weakening of IRs during his presidency. Not only is an imperfect communication infrastructure altering the character of PD while redefining political communication but bots and algorithms are overshadowing serious discussions on diplomatic and foreign policy matters, adversely impacting political communication. These attributes of the new media platforms are discussed and highlighted in the following chapters. While this section reflected on a few of the key concepts of the new media and its role in transforming PD and political communication – and will be further discussed later) – the next section seeks to briefly examine the critical role of traditional media in directing diplomacy and communication. After all, it was the traditional media or the legacy media (namely print media, radio, and television) which, despite posing as gatekeepers, had interconnected the world by delivering information to the public and facilitating indirect interactions between governments and ordinary citizens, including the foreign public, almost until the end of the previous century. Traditional media was also responsible for shaping national discourses on diplomacy while perpetuating democracy. It is fascinating to note that several elements associated with new media platforms – spread of propaganda, shaping and manipulating domestic and foreign perspectives, and setting of agendas, including its disruptive dimensions – can all be traced in their applications to the traditional media when it dominated the media ecology. The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) revolution has only strengthened these tendencies, and public inputs are gathering more momentum in the 21st century. Over time, the contemporary media system, both global and local at the same time (glocal) – consisting of the television, radio, and the print, on the one hand, and a variety of multimedia and communication systems like the internet and horizontal networks3 of communication (Castells 2008), on the other – has begun playing a decisive role in the conduct of new PD.

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Traditional Media and Diplomacy This section, while assuming the salience of public perceptions in diplomacy, also assumes that leaders and policy-makers follow media reports on Public Opinions (POs). It further assumes that the media is the chief source of both domestic and international news and information for the public, including policies fashioned by national and foreign governments from time to time. There is evidence to suggest that the changing prominence of diplomacy for the public is in large part reflective of media content and that mass media has continued to play an important role in determining the relationship between PO and foreign policy (Soroka 2003). The traditional media, especially the print media, while dominating the key lines of communication during the early 19th century, was also a bedrock of democracy. Cohen’s (1963) statement that the press ‘may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about’ remains the clearest annunciation of the public ­agenda-setting hypothesis to this day. A free press and media, enabling public deliberations, have served democracies well. Mainstream traditional media has historically shaped and influenced POs for generations ( Jordan & Page 1992). Quoting Cohen (1963) again: For most of the foreign policy audience, the really effective political map of the world – that is to say, their operational map of the world – is drawn by the reporter and the editor, not by the cartographer. In fact, the proliferation of newspapers in the 19th century was simultaneously accompanied by one of the most active phases of political reforms in modern history. Newspapers like the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the historic Daily Herald apart from influencing PO and educating the public, also directed diplomacy and and tried power excesses. During the Second World War (1939– 45), Walter Lippman of the New York World tried to steer the American leadership towards a coherent statecraft while attempting to define national interest and the limits of power, offering a geopolitical expression to the role of the US as the core of an Atlantic strategic system (Porter 2011). In India, the print media was instrumental in shaping the national discourse on diplomacy after India’s independence in 1947. Subsequently, the shift from a public sphere anchored around national institutions of territorially bound societies to a public sphere constituted around the media system (Volkmer 1999) further bolstered the importance of PO across countries and vindicated the power of the media in diplomacy and communication. The role of the radio was not far behind. Whether during World Wars or armed conflicts, the legacy media – both print and radio during the early years – played a major role in the delivery of information. For example, during the Second World War, newspapers and radio broadcasts played a vital role in connecting the American people with the war, keeping them informed about developments overseas and their impact on their communities (PBS dna). Subsequently, their role expanded to

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include shaping public communication and influencing global public perceptions, apart from setting national agendas. The press played a pivotal role during major international events like the Non Aligned Conference in Belgrade in 1961, setting the stage for enhanced engagement and perhaps for manufacturing consent (Herman & Chomsky 1988) and support at home, such as in India, for calibrating a non-aligned foreign policy.4 The conference received wide attention from the print media; India’s leading newspapers – The Times of India, The Hindu, (then Madras), The Indian Express, The Patriot and America’s New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor – together published 177,265 words about the conference (Boskovska 2014). There have, however, been instances when the print media was criticized for egregious disservice to its audience as well. One of the much-discussed examples is the Kargil War5– also known as India’s first war on television – in 1999 when the press was criticised for being pliant and uncritical, refusing to question the ultra-nationalistic polemic dominating official discourses in both India and Pakistan (Dubey 2019), underlying the fact that propaganda campaigns might have begun to dominate the traditional media ecology – a tendency prominent in the digital media landscape. The radio was also greatly responsible for shaping global public discourses. It was an unquestionably important source of information for the public even before and during the two World Wars. While the British Broadcasting Communication (BBC) and the Voice of America (VOA) presented an opportunity to ascertain the importance and contribution of international radio broadcasting to the conduct of diplomacy, conflict resolution, and maintenance of alliance relationships in crisis conditions (Rawnsley 1996), Radio Moscow was used for a specific foreign policy purpose in 1929 by the Russian leadership to explain the Communist revolution to the world and ‘propagandize its accomplishments’ (Rawnsley 1996). The use of radio for reaching out to the foreign public with targeted messages was a revolutionary step. However, it was the Nazis who were particularly inventive in their use of the medium. By arranging 25,000 radio sets, tuned only to German frequencies, and freely distributing them in Austria, Nazi Germany monopolized information (Rawnsley 1996), thus influencing and manipulating public perceptions during its early days. Decades later, in South Asia, the radio tried to influence the war in 1965 between India and Pakistan. The war was ‘tactfully fought by the All India Radio (AIR) to counter the rabid enemy war propaganda’ as Radio Pakistan twisted facts and roused anti-India feelings amongst Kashmiris (The Tribune 2015). Local radio stations like the Radio Kashmir were equally active at the time, ‘boosting the morale of the Indian jawans (soldiers) and at the same time hitting the enemy hard through programmes like Zalim Khan’ (‘cruel’ Khan) – a name coined for Pakistan’s then military dictator Ayub Khan (The Tribune 2015). This was probably one of the early examples of weaponization of mass media during conflicts for propagating certain narratives – a tendency which has gained phenomenal traction during the Digital Age.

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As technology progressed, visuals began occupying centre stage in diplomacy and IRs. The skilful presentation of images of the American President Richard Nixon arriving in Beijing in 1972 – in the first visit by an American president to build ties with Communist China – established television (TV) as a powerful medium in diplomatic history. The TV, by capturing various images, including Nixon raising toasts with Zhou En Lai to thousands of Chinese citizens shovelling snow on the streets in Beijing, was instrumental in changing the US–China diplomatic narrative (Zhang 2009), underscoring mainstream media’s role as both a ‘publicist’ and a ‘crucial observer’ (Thussu & Freedman 2003). Soon, mass media’s role in shaping and influencing PO gained momentum with collective opinions beginning to gain greater traction not only in the making of foreign policies ( Jordan & Page 1992) but also in pushing governments to provide humanitarian assistance in times of crisis. The BBC’s documentary, ‘The Unknown Famine’ in 1984, was transmitted by 425 TV stations worldwide, marking a watershed moment in crisis (Franks 2014). By showcasing the Ethiopian famine, the documentary not only succeeded in rousing massive public outcry but was also instrumental in transforming the indifferent US foreign policy to a more humane one by pulling in enormous donations and humanitarian assistance (Franks 2014). The TV’s ability to amplify and highlight emotions through visuals and images emerged as an important factor in influencing public perceptions while demonstrating its power to galvanize governments into action. Indeed, it was the live TV coverage of the Tiananmen crackdown6 in Beijing in 1989 that marked the ‘beginning of the “CNN effect”’ – as TV began playing an increasingly crucial role in determining behaviours of key players during major crises (Chinoy 2014). This perhaps was the earliest example of the media being deployed as a tool for activism and mobilization – a dimension which has become increasingly prominent in the new media landscape.7 The ‘CNN effect’ became popular by encapsulating the idea that real-time communication technology could provoke major responses from domestic audiences and political elites to global events (Robinson 1999). The subsequent advances in technology only made real-time communication faster and more effective.8 According to Chinoy (2014), the relay of the Tiananmen crackdown to audiences in the US ‘redefined the relationship between the press, PO, and foreign policy-making’ while eroding the trust and friendship successfully cultivated by the US with China in 1972. The media coverage of events like these has transformed significantly, as has the way people protest and rally around issues in the new media landscape, mentioned in the previous chapter with respect to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The dimension is once again highlighted later in Chapter 5 with respect to Hong Kong. Going back to live airplay and breaking news, they have equally been noted for their disruptive roles, such as during the demolition of the Babri Masjid in India in December 1992.9 Some local TV channels were noted to have aired provocative reports feeding into the frenzy (Agarwal 2019) surrounding the demolition, particularly the outpouring of Hindutva,10 and hurting India’s secular credentials. The Babri Masjid incident revealed how effectively TV could mobilize and exploit religious emotions – a dimension that has amplified in the new media landscape.

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At this point, it is pertinent to revisit the agenda-setting practices of the media to understand its relevance in shaping diplomacy and political communication which, once again, gets reflected in the contemporary digital media ecology. Apart from the TV’s ability to exploit emotions and manipulate public perceptions, its use by governments for setting agendas has been an important part of the media environment. Scholars have argued that the electronic media has the potential to act as agenda-setters: All too often, television is what actually determines what is a crisis. Television concluded the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the fighting in the Balkans was a crisis, and they began to cover it and cover it. And so, the Clinton administration (was left) to find a way to do something. (Yet) they didn’t do that in Rwanda where the excesses were every bit as bad, if not worse. (Livingston 1997) The agenda-setting practice of mainstream media is in line with the dominant argument that mass media influences audience thinking and directly or indirectly contributes to forming of audience’s opinions (McCombs & Shaw 1993). This has led governments and politicians to use communication media to promote policies (Zain & Razinah 2014) and build support bases. Madeleine Albright, the American diplomat, had enthusiastically embraced TV to promote the bombing of Serbia in 1999 (Seib 2000). According to the then Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee: Televised images quickly become a central part of the foreign policy debate. They affect which crises we decide to pay attention to and which we ignore. They affect how we think about these crises, and I have little doubt these televised pictures ultimately affect what we do about these problems. (Seib 2000) From a domestic political perspective, India’s Kargil War in 1999 can be argued to have served an agenda-setting strategy for the incumbent government. Plagued by rickety coalition, economic mismanagement, and poor governance (Dubey 2019), the war gave the government an opportunity to divert the attention of the public from the more critical and pressing domestic issues. After all, actions in dealing with (or creating) a foreign policy crisis, if successful and not contested by the political opposition, not only can produce a ‘rally’ in leadership popularity (Brody 1984) but can also alter policy preferences through media-transmitted reactions and interpretations by commentators and experts ( Jordan & Page 1992). This dimension gets highlighted even more in the new media environment, as will be explored in the later chapters. TV has been significant in helping politicians to overwhelm, diffuse tension, and engage with foreign publics. While US President Nixon’s visit in 1972 (mentioned above) was in line with these objectives, these events were repeated in South Asia in 1987 by then president of Pakistan, Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq. The Pakistani

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president visited Jaipur in India, watched some cricket, and captivated the media, including the BBC and the VOA (Singh 1987), demonstrating his willingness to communicate and connect with Pakistan’s adversary, India, while presenting an alternate narrative around their relationship targeting the international audience. In a similar vein, in 2000, when US President Bill Clinton visited India, more than two decades after the last US president had set foot in the country, the media went berserk. It carried stories about Clinton’s fascination for Indian mango ice cream and beamed his interaction with the rug merchant who sold him silk carpets at the Sheraton hotel, providing yet another example of how leaders employed mainstream media to ‘connect’ with the foreign public and communicate empathies. Clinton made ‘headway in convincing the Indians, both here in the capital and in the great television audience beyond, that the United States genuinely wants to befriend them’ (Dugger 2000). This kind of engagement with the foreign public, via platforms like Twitter and FB, has become much more discernible in the current context and is also more effective and occurs in real time. For example, PM Modi’s use of Weibo to connect with the Chinese during his visit to China in 2015 attracted widespread international attention and established him as a social media PM, keen on communicating with the networked foreign public. Governments have also employed traditional mass media for rapprochement and for stoking tensions. The bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo War in 1999 played directly into the hands of the CCP, which was eager to foment anti-American feeling a decade after the unfortunate incidents at Tiananmen Square. For several days, Chinese authorities prevented the staterun media from broadcasting news of President Clinton and representatives of the US State Department formally apologizing for the bombings; meanwhile, Chinese leadership encouraged local demonstrations to get stronger (Griffiths 2014) while fanning anti-American sentiments. However, in the Digital Age, China’s stepping up of its efforts to control online narratives and decide what counts as truth as opposed to falsehood has been far from easy as Chinese netizens increasingly turn to alternate social media platforms to get information and express themselves, as discussed more in Chapter 5.

Traditional Media Remains Relevant in the New Media Environment While the legacy media has historically played an important role in diplomacy and communication, it continues to be relevant in the Digital Age. Traditional media retains its power and influence over both politicians and the public, thereby continuing to shape and influence foreign policy decisions. While Dougharty (2015) argues that ‘for many readers, Twitter is a headline service that drives them to traditional news outlets for deeper coverage’, other analysts further clarify that ‘Twitter is good for announcements and pronouncements – for feuding even’ but it’s not optimal for selling a policy (Keith 2016). While the legacy media has had to make adjustments by going digital, it is surely more trusted and is a platform for deeper insights – reflecting more questions, prospects, and scenarios.11 This subsection

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discusses the extent to which traditional media has survived and is coexisting with new media platforms while competing to retain its old unfettered access to the public. New diplomacy, launched by countries around the world, has not been entirely successful in depriving traditional media of its agenda-setting function. This is best substantiated by a study that examined the role of the press (namely the New York Times, The Guardian, and the Dawn) in covering the killing of Osama bin Laden (the founder and first leader of the Islamist group Al-Qaeda, in May 2011 in Pakistan in Operation Neptune Spear) and how certain countries were better positioned to influence the coverage. The operation occurred when the digital platforms, though still in early days, had become popular and were being employed extensively by leaders and the public alike. This particular study revealed that the US was not only directing a particular narrative using the print but was also dominating the coverage of all three newspapers in Pakistan, the US, and the UK – The Dawn, The New York Times, and The Guardian – as compared with Pakistan, thus influencing the agenda of the coverage (Sultan et al. 2018). The study further highlighted that the US not only had more control over information related to the operation and post-operation scenarios but was also highly organized in its media and communication strategy (Sultan et al. 2018) – given its long experience of media-driven diplomacy. This US dominance, manifesting in its ‘style of presentation’, not only was aimed at sustaining the interest of the global audience (Thussu 2007) but also corroborated Washington’s preponderant role in setting the global media agenda through ‘advertising and telecommunication networks’. It is this ‘hegemony of discourse’12 and its own weakness of the ‘power of the word’ (hua yu quan) (Sinha Palit 2017, 2022) that the CCP is concerned about – a dimension that Chapter 5 discusses contextually. Along with the legacy media, social media platforms were equally active during the time, covering the momentous events; 80 per cent of the news links on blogs that week related to the incident, making it the biggest single-week news topic discussed in the blogosphere since the Pew Research Centre’s Project for Excellence in Journalism began tracking blogs from January 2009 (Hitlin & Tan 2011). While both FB and Twitter handles were abuzz with the Laden news, netizens rushed in to share their initial reactions on FB, and half of the news links on Twitter discussed Laden – one of the top ten Twitter stories in the past two years (Hitlin & Tan 2011). This once again highlighted the emerging role of the online public as parallel players in the communication network – an aspect not visible when traditional media alone dominated the key lines of communication. Despite the spectacular growth of the new media platforms, it is fascinating to observe how many liberal and less-liberal leaders continue to employ traditional media like the print to connect and engage with the public. The print, in particular, remains an important tool for political communication in the new communication landscape led by social media. In 2014, President Xi Jinping wrote an editorial for the leading Indian daily The Hindu, titled ‘Towards an Asian Century of Prosperity’, in an effort to de-escalate bilateral tensions and continue engagement. This was on the eve of his visit to India, and months after PM Modi’s entry in

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office, when both the Chinese and the Indian troops were locked eyeball-to-eyeball along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the Chumar sector of eastern Ladakh. On a different occasion, Obama wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post, a global newspaper – ‘The TPP [Trans Pacific Partnership] would let America, not China, lead the way on global trade’ in May 2016 – justifying the strategic importance of the TPP for the US and its people. The Japanese PM Shinzo Abe’s (2019) op-ed in Project Syndicate, a global media organization, in June 2019 – ‘The G-20 in Osaka’ – also underscores the relevance of the print in communicating cooperation and collaboration of government and leaders’ foreign policy targeting the foreign public: ‘working to maintain and ultimately strengthen the international order for free and fair trade’. The examples leave little doubt about the salience of traditional media as far as efforts by politicians to communicate messages on diplomacy and foreign policy are concerned. It also establishes the public at the centre stage of all conversations in the new age of communication where both traditional and new media are together struggling to communicate with the people who now are capable of ‘doing’ and ‘undoing diplomacy’ (Manor 2019). *** Ever since individuals began to matter in IRs, the media has played a decisive role. Governments have embraced the media to communicate with the public and to set domestic and international agendas. The media has been a facilitator and a tool for governments to influence the public and shape perceptions both within and beyond state borders. The power to interconnect the world and provide a new paradigm for state behaviour has made both mass media and multifaced mass medium (or internet) important tools for communication. This chapter has introduced certain important concepts that the book attempts to examine in course of the discussion on new media and its role in pushing new PD and political communication. These concepts and ideas will help readers to connect closer to core arguments in later chapters and enable contextualization of the themes. The chapter also discussed traditional media’s role in diplomacy and communication and its continuing relevance in the Digital Age. Although traditional media competes with new media, both coexist and continue to shape national and global discourses. Despite technological advances’ successful removal of constraints on policy action caused by time, distance, and information and its direct challenge of the old characteristics of diplomacy – such as ceremony, secrecy, status, hierarchy, and inviolability (Robertson 2018) – the traditional media remains relevant. With technology emerging as contested arenas in which different actors, including political leaders, and diplomats, together promote their own perspectives of global events while jostling for more space and attention of the digital publics (Manor 2019), it is the public which is confronted by a complicated media ecology. It is perhaps this attribute of the Digital Age that makes the traditional media occasionally more reliable than their new media counterparts. Traditional media not only is expected to survive and complement the social media platforms but is also likely to set future domestic and international agendas.

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Notes 1 The Czech dissident Vaclav Havel used the term ‘parallel polis’ – the people, organized and agentive, shaping the state from outside the party political system (Adnan 2021). 2 The ‘Evil Empire’ speech was delivered by US President Ronald Reagan to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983 during the Cold War, referring to the Soviet Union as ‘the focus of evil in the modern world’ (History 1983). 3 Horizontal media are social media which enable combining the roles of information recipient and information author (Shaw & Weaver 2004: 146). People in this kind of a network are connected to each other in face-to-face events, or on FB, Twitter or any other social network platform, sharing a common interest (sports, art), or a common background (family, college, business). 4 According to Harshe (1990), ‘a combination of circumstances such as the urge to follow an independent foreign policy, the pragmatic choice of befriending a powerful socialist state like the USSR and commitment to promote peace shaped the concept as well as the praxis of non-alignment’. 5 The Kargil war was fought between India and Pakistan in the Kargil district of Kashmir and along the Line of Control (LOC). During the war, the Indian Army not only evicted Pakistani intruders but also successfully recaptured the Tiger Hill as a part of Operation Vijay. 6 The Chinese government, in a bloody crackdown, halted the student-led demonstrations – calling for democracy, reforms, free speech and press – held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. The Tiananmen Square protests are also commonly known as the June Fourth Incident in China. 7 For example, the anti-government protest demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2019 reached every corner of the world via the new media platforms. Protesters planned moves and organized rallies via apps and even blocked multiple online platforms from reaching mainland China, in an attempt to control news about the unrest (Kharpal 2019). There was also an hour-long live stream on Twitter-owned service Periscope, while users posted Instagram stories. 8 This dimension of mobilization has gone far ahead with technology helping fight and thwart wars. For example, during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, the latter turned to online crypto crowdfunding to fund its fight against Russia (Basu 2022). 9 On 6 December 1992, a large group of Hindu activists of the Vishva Hindu Parishad and allied organizations demolished the 16th-century Babri Mosque in the city of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. The demolition occurred after a political rally organized by the Hindu nationalist organizations at the site turned violent. 10 Hindutva is an ideology seeking to establish the hegemony of Hindus and the Hindu way of life. 11 A nationwide survey in India in 2020 indicated that the trust levels of Indians in social media was recorded very low, particularly compared with the mainstream media platforms like newspapers and TV channels, during the outbreak of COVID-19, given that fake news and disinformation were spread widely about the pandemic (The Indian Express 2020a). 12 An attempt to impose a particular discourse over other narratives, in this case, predominantly Western.

3 NEW MEDIA Global Trends in Political Communication and Diplomacy

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States (March 1861–April 1865), employed the telegraph for the first time during the Civil War in 1862 for communicating with his forces in the front, making him the first ‘wired’ leader in history. The new electronic communication not only helped him win the war but was responsible for changing the nature of the presidency, as for the first time in history, it transformed the executive’s relationship with the military deployed in the field (Wheeler 2006). Over time, traditional media began to be replaced by the digital media, and the latter’s phenomenal rise – attributable to its active use by multiple leaders who employ digital communication tools with ‘more skill and efficacy’ than others – made political communication more instant and constant, giving way to a new Public Diplomacy (PD) (Manor 2019). Enhanced communication with the public also became ‘far more entertaining and engaging’ as the leader’s Twitter feeds, Facebook (FB) pages and so forth showed more shares, likes, and fans than their opponents (Giuffrida et al. 2018), underlining the supposed multi-directional dimension of the new media–enabled political environment. This extensive deployment of digital platforms has shaped a new discourse in political communication like never before in history, framing new messages of democracy on the one hand and enabling leaderships to consolidate power on the other. While some form of online presence has long been considered necessary for political campaigning in Western democracies (Williams & Gulati 2013), the ways in which such online endeavours have been fashioned has varied from ‘extended advertisements’ or ‘brochure-like controlled information provision’ (Larsson 2015) to varieties of what could be considered as more progressive, interactive utilizations of the medium at hand (Coleman 2004). In fact, given the interactive features of digital communication, leaders around the world and non-state actors are strategizing new techniques and innovations to enhance engagement, focusing on redefining, DOI: 10.4324/9780429298141-3

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strengthening, and maintaining relational bonds (Zaharna 2018). However, by relinquishing control over their messages and lifting the veil of discretion and secrecy that had accompanied traditional diplomatic processes, contemporary digital national leaderships have equally embraced the hybrid nature of the media systems, its intricate twists and turns, often deploying them as disruptive tools for supporting the threshold of conflicts1 (Aerosociety dna), leading to the undermining of the very objectives that digital PD had set out to achieve. This chapter analyzes the leaderships’ attention on social networking and examines the typical patterns of their engagement. It also assesses the extent to which world leaders are getting increasingly conscious of their images, struggling to manage them in a world where people have ‘access to unfiltered information and worldwide engagement, regardless of nationality or political status’ (Bjorn 2015). Leaders in ‘not free’, ‘partially free’ countries and in democracies are equally displaying tendencies to use new media platforms for propaganda. Some are even perpetuating centralization of power, employing the digital tools like Twitter, Weibo and FB, in the current international and political environments which not only ‘lack significant moderation’, inclining ‘constituents to reflexively back “their” leaders’ but also disapprove of opposition leaders (Baum & Potter 2019). Similarly, the new media technology exposes the limitations that exist within an interconnected world where the leader and the public are continuously communicating with each other. Nye’s pointing out that ‘even when foreign leaders are friendly, their leeway may be limited’ gets more traction in an internet-enabled world system where contrasting messages circulate and transmit all the time, negating and invalidating international borders. This chapter is premised on the assumption that new media platforms have blurred domestic and international borders as government policies are being debated and discussed by the global publics (Batora 2005; Huijgh 2011; Zaharna 2018) since policies and events have global implications, as was witnessed during the global financial crisis in 2008. To attain a balanced perspective on the employment of new media platforms, the chapter studies the use of the digital media by several countries, including non-liberal states, and their leaders (however India, the US, and China are excluded since these will be dealt with exclusively in later chapters) in calibrating their PD and directing political communication.

A Complex New Media Environment While new technology has empowered the public by providing them with a ‘new voice’, its prominence in the diplomatic praxis has been dramatic. However, the continuous sharing and exchange of ideas between the people on the one hand and between leaders and the public on the other have made contemporary political communication a far more complex affair. Despite the complexities involved, its reach and influence have led political leaders to embrace new media platforms to share their versions of stories with the public irrespective of their country of origin, thereby enlarging the scope of global PD. In fact, digital media’s penetration into the diplomatic realm has made distinct contributions to diplomacy, underlining the

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interconnectedness of issues while binding the people together against repression and political dominance. The Orange Revolution (2004–05),2 the Arab Spring (early 2010s),3 and the Hong Kong protests (2019)4 are all examples highlighting social media as a critical and effective tool for organizing public protests for influencing Public Opinion (PO) and generating support for a cause. The influence of digital technology was also reflective of the dawn of a new world order where protesters – many of whom were in their teens – fired tweets to fight ‘government thugs firing bullets’ (Mounk 2018), supporting a positive view of new media in promoting open participation, equal accessibility, accuracy of information, citizen interaction, and democracy (Budd et al. 2019). This participative character of social media, while encouraging some leaders, has also discouraged many from using these platforms. While several have enthusiastically adopted the former (even marginalizing traditional media to an extent to directly contact with the public, often for setting agendas and to communicate their policy positions), there are still others who have taken to monitoring and controlling its content to achieve their narrow agendas. The following section examines broad patterns of online conversation undertaken by national leaders and attempts to identify some common features of such digital engagement.

Elections and Online Communication With digital platforms expanding the scope and possibility of strengthening the connection between political leaders and their electorates, politicians have found these tools essential for maintaining an active digital presence during elections (Pettersson & Karlstrom 2011). Most democracies pass through multiple electoral cycles, comprising federal, provincial, and local body elections, requiring political leaders to deeply engage with the voters, which entail regular interactions with the public for addressing their concerns (Bulovsky 2018) and with electoral promises for their welfare. Images of individual leaders, in this kind of internet-driven political environment, often become a part of the broader efforts made by leaders to engage with constituencies and the new digital public. Several studies, in fact, indicate how new media, by building appropriate images of leaders, elites and politicians, has been able to influence public perceptions. This critical role played by social media has compelled the leadership to aggressively utilize digital platforms for image-building and intensive interaction. Their constant social media presence with multi-directional communicative tendencies (Lalancette & Raynaud 2017) helps to create a favourable persona in line with what their electorate desires. Whether in older and more mature democracies like the US and the UK or Rising Powers like India, Brazil, and South Africa, the new media has become important during electoral campaigns. However, along with this importance, the multi-directional communicative tendency of digital media has often been superseded by uni-directional communicative tendencies around the world, leaving little room for discussions and alternate discourses; this is largely due to tendencies of incumbent leaders to emphasize monologues.

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Notwithstanding emphasis on uni-directional monologues undertaken by several leaders, sharing of news and information flow, enabled by new technologies, has also become a reality. This flow and exchange of information have given rise to a new global media ecology, enlarging and revolutionizing the sphere of diplomacy like never before. While American leaders have pioneered the institutionalization of digital communication during elections – discussed in the next chapter – leaders of other major democracies like the UK have also taken to deploying social media during elections, beginning from the 2010 election – also billed the internet election.5 Digital platforms were aggressively deployed by leaders like Liberal Democrat Nicholas Clegg and the former British PM of the Labour Party Gordon Brown, who engaged with the audiences and deployed social networks as a campaign tool for the first time. Like the US and the UK, another democracy, Israel, took to FB for political communication during its 2013 election campaign. Online political communication had gained enormous traction in Israel as most ace Israeli politicians like Benjamin Netanyahu, Naftali Bennett, and first-time contender Yair Lapid not only had an active online presence during the first ‘Facebook elections’ in 2013 but were extremely popular on the platform (Samuel-Azran et al. 2015). Similarly, during the Danish national election in 2015, 97 per cent of Danish Members of Parliament were not only maintaining FB profiles but were using the platforms aggressively for political conversation with the people. Interestingly, the social media was responsible for heavily influencing political narratives during the Singapore elections of July 2020, which were held despite the COVID-19 pandemic (Palit 2020). Issues, including the government’s handling of the pandemic, were debated and discussed on digital platforms like FB, once again underscoring the evolving role of digital media during elections in ‘partly free’ countries. While most social media platforms have been instrumental in carrying political messages during campaigns, the role of Twitter as a positive force in societies during certain elections around the world has been significant. For example, in Pakistan – a ‘partly free’ country with a low internet penetration in the region – witnessed6 Imran Khan deploying Twitter actively to connect with the public during the 2019 elections. The legendary Pakistani cricketer was not only the first Pakistani leader to deploy digital platforms during the election as a candidate but he also used the social media platforms extensively as a two-way communication tool while timing his posts perfectly to grab national attention (Yousuf et al. 2018). In another ‘partly free’ country, Zimbabwe, which has a restricted media presence and a repressive political environment, Twitter was responsible for facilitating public political participation during the 2013 elections (Macombe 2017). Similarly, Nigeria,7 which returned to democracy in 1999, witnessed Twitter playing a major role once again during the general elections in 2015 (Auwala 2015). With evidence further suggesting that social media platforms are effective, given their ‘power of immediacy’ while providing information regarding elections in many countries, like Nigeria, the digital media is being hailed for its role in influencing the ‘fairness of the election’ (Auwala 2015) as well. Apart from Twitter, WhatsApp was responsible for

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playing a prominent and a visible role in Brazil’s fiercely contested presidential election in 2018, when 120 million Brazilian WhatsApp users turned out to be critical recipients of targeted political messages. However, there is also evidence of false information being spread through these platforms to mislead voters, reflecting the new challenges and complexities of a new media–enabled political environment. In the UK, manipulation of social media during elections made headlines when a mysterious organization, identified for spending enormous resources on a political campaign on FB advertisements, called for a more severe break from the European Union than the former British PM Theresa May had planned, reaching 10 to 11 million people (Satariano 2018) – once again underlining its range and influence. Nobel Prize–winning journalist Maria Ressa’s comment that FB’s ‘[bias] against facts’ threatens democracy further underline the anxiety around digital platforms. Despite digital media facilitating targeted messages to reach the intended publics and the concomitant engagement with people during elections, social networking has also come under severe attack. Their propensity for violating the integrity of elections around the world in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal8 for helping political candidates win elections demonstrates the dark underside of technology. As new media platforms struggle to differentiate between foreign influence and inter-country discourse and address authenticity and digital organizing, efforts are being made by governments around the world to monitor and control the content of social media platforms during elections. This dimension will be dealt with in detail in chapter 8 of this book.

Social Media and Nation-branding Nation-branding or ‘selfie diplomacy’ is ‘a nation’s brand image’ which ‘is its most valuable asset: it is national identity made robust, tangible and communicable, and – at its best – made useful’ (Arkenbout 2015). To promote a unique and a favourable image of their countries and target their national and international public (Fan 2010), states around the world have taken to nation-branding as a part of their PD strategy. Aronczyk argues: When used in the diplomatic arena, nation branding may serve as a proactive tool enabling the nation to repair reputations damaged by political legacies or avoid unfavourable international attention following unpopular domestic decisions. (Pierozzi 2018) Shaping global perception in an interconnected world has assumed great relevance for modern states given that they now mutually compete with each other to attract investors, tourists, greater presence of global media, and other foreign governments (Anholt 2006). With Public Opinion (PO) of a nation significantly shaping and influencing public perceptions, governments now actively and aggressively engage in brand-building efforts (Anholt 2006). Countries are also increasingly

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aware of the power of creating international events to position themselves in global maps with strong brands capable of withstanding difficult times for dealing with urban decay and negative publicity (Marshalls 2007). In such endeavours, the new media, allowing participation and interaction with target publics, has rapidly emerged as a popular platform for nation-branding exercises (Munar 2011). The growing institutionalization of new media platforms for achieving foreign policy goals, while helping to manage a nation’s image and reputation, is being preferred over traditional media. ‘Not free’ countries like China and Russia (suffering a negative global perception) and countries like ‘free’ South Africa and ‘partly free’ Sri Lanka (suffering from inadequate international attention) deploy digital media to rebrand themselves. Given their ability to transform users into active participants and their assumed contribution to a sense of personal identification with destinations (Moya & Jain 2015: 541), the new media platforms pose as facilitators, and countries, whether ‘free’, ‘partly free’, or ‘not free’, employ them to create their favourable international images. The Russian political community has been eager to rebrand its ‘Evil Empire’ image and mend its international reputation. Thereafter, a new logo (‘From Russia with Avant Garde Love’) and a new identity for Russian tourism have been assiduously developed in an effort to shed its past. Unlike the Soviet Union (SU) which possessed a powerful propaganda machinery, Russia during the 1990s, post-disintegration, found itself with an ideology to propagate but lacked the old Soviet machinery; at the same time, the country was suffering from a crisis of self-identification (Dinnie 2008). Upgrading Russia’s global image became an imperative for Russia since an imperfect image was damaging its global reputation and therefore proving an obstacle to Russia’s economic development. While the initial years witnessed television being employed for image enhancement (as pointed out in the last chapter with respect to other countries like the US), later, with the advent and the spread of the internet, digital platforms were preferred for shaping Russia’s global perception. Ketchum – a global public relations firm – was hired in 2006 to revamp the state’s national image. The agency introduced several innovations using social media platforms, including a blog on Twitter (Simon 2011: 334) to project Russia in a different but a more positive light. The Modern Russia campaign, while being more political in character, was also carried out on Twitter, and the Russia Beyond blog deliberately avoided political topics and issues. Sri Lanka – another small and a developing country – has equally employed digital media for nation-branding purposes necessitated by its Civil War (1983–2009), which particularly impaired its international reputation. In fact, small developing countries with limited resources like Sri Lanka’s find deployment of social media both cost-effective and simple for branding themselves, as was pointed out earlier. Colombo has employed its largest communication channel – the online portal www.srilanka.travel – to enhance its reputation and promote itself as a ‘Wonder of Asia’, attracting tourists from all over the world. Such websites have become greatly effective as brand-building tools by nation-states, big and small (Li 2011). Sri Lanka has also deployed specific human resources for blogging on different web pages

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aiming to enhance the country’s image by highlighting its domestic transformation and dynamism. Similarly, a relatively young democracy like South Africa has been pushed to create a positive and compelling brand image for international consumption since it realized that ‘there was a gap between the perception of the country and the reality of the country in the global marketplace’ (Dinnie 2008). It has deployed social media actively in this regard: To imprint on the minds of decision-makers, opinion leaders and trendsetters everywhere – the target audience – an image of South Africa as a desirable and distinctive place to visit, conduct business, invest, source products, services and ideas, host gatherings and experience a unique, unrestrained blending of cultures and hospitable, friendly people. (Nation Branding 2010) It set out to develop its national brand by engaging the International Marketing Council of South Africa, whose strategic objective was to establish a compelling national brand image and position it favourably for global consumption. The Council and the government together launched people-inspired, online-based marketing content while attempting to correct the negative clichés about South Africa. A promotional marketing brief, outlining the country’s major brand ingredients, highlights the [c]apacity to do difficult things well – from building a strong, inclusive and economically robust democracy after generations of racial oppression, to engineering the world’s deepest mines and largest radio telescope, to building high-end vehicles – Mercedes and BMW – for global markets, to hosting mega events like the World Cup – in a way that consistently defies expectation and stereotypes (emphasis added). (Nation Branding 2010) The overarching attempt of the exercise was to redefine and shape Brand South Africa as a country ‘Alive with Possibility’. Employing new communication mediums, online conversations, blog postings, and cyber chatter, the exercise was intended not only to generate interest and participation in the pioneering c­ ountry-branding program but to target the world’s 1.7 billion internet users (Nation Branding 2010) along with the international community. While encouraging tourism has been a priority with modern nation-states as a part of its brand-building exercise, sport events are also seen as providing ‘a great branding opportunity’ for image promotion and for rebranding purposes (Anholt 2006). South Africa effectively deployed social media to promote international mega sport events like the FIFA 2010 World Cup in soccer to help its global brand. YouTube, FB, and Twitter were extensively deployed to spread the excitement of the World Cup while placing South Africa successfully on the world map (Knott 2014). China has adopted a similar strategy

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of skilfully using sports to plant itself firmly on the global map, a dimension discussed in Chapter 5.

Political Leaders and Image-making As suggested by Aronczyk, digital media technology is indeed an effective PD tool for engaging the foreign public since communication strategy allow governments to better manage and control the images for global consumption (Pierozzi 2018). Along with conveying targeted political messages and building national brands, communicating effective images of the leaders to the public has equally gained traction in shaping 21st-century political communication. Gone are the days when political leaders were, at least occasionally, reluctant to engage in public speaking and political campaigning. While Woodrow Wilson as the president of the US (1913–21) viewed campaigning as ‘a great interruption to the rational consideration of public questions’, Republican nominee incumbent Calvin Coolidge was famous for his ‘silence’ in 1924 (Ellis & Dedrick 1997). Over time, campaign speeches and connecting with the electorate assumed centre stage in politics around the world9 as technological advances produced a new class of citizens, who were less trusting of governments while being vigilant of and challenging their political leaders (Wouters 2007). This led digital leaders and politicians to engage more with the online public, rendering the media landscape more complex and cluttered, as they compete for visibility and attention (Serazio 2015) of the networked community, which is now placed at the centre of diplomacy. Visual communication has indeed become a new norm in defining political communication given that the broader goal of political image-making is to generate, maintain, sharpen, and strengthen favourable perceptions among members of the public in order to affect their personal political attitudes and, by extension, decision-making in strategic ways. (Strachan & Kendall 2004) Contemporary politicians, as a result, now favour communicating with a broad spectrum of people using online platforms since they promote ‘forms of authentic communication by blurring the public/private divide, creating instant access to “real life”’ (Manning et al. 2017). In fact, studies indicate that images play a critical role when the public evaluate politicians ‘looking for specific qualities in political leaders, including honesty, intelligence, friendliness, sincerity, and trustworthiness, when making electoral decisions’ (Lalancette & Raynaud 2017). Political leaders, irrespective of their ideologies, therefore harness new media platforms, given their strong visual bent with images often superseding words (Manning et al. 2017), to showcase themselves as ‘ordinary’, ‘cool’, accessible, and informal, aiming to cultivate authenticity (Manning et al. 2017). This bolsters Holmes’s (2010) argument that processes of de-traditionalization imply that ‘people are increasingly reliant on

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emotional reflexivity in a world where established ways of being and doing can no longer be taken for granted’. Like many contemporary global leaders, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau – regarded for his youthful, approachable, and positive approach to politics – has been a pioneer in image-making efforts through his personal Instagram account since his election in October 2015 (Lalancette & Raynaud 2017). Trudeau is not only the first federal PM of the ‘Instagram Era’ (Andrew-Gee 2016) but is equally recognized as the ‘visually viral Prime Minister’ (Fisher et al. 2019) and the ‘king of the selfie’ (Petrowski 2016) by the networked Canadian public. Trudeau’s social media interactions are characterized by a prominent interest in connecting with the public through responses and retweets while sharing policy positions with citizens, reflecting multi-directional communication traits as opposed to uni-directional social media communication noticed for several of Trudeau’s peer leaders, including those from leading democracies. Jacinda Ardern, the PM of New Zealand, is another leader with a huge edge on social media. Whether to mark the two-year anniversary of her government in 2019 – recounting her government’s various achievements – or her speech following the Christchurch attacks10 the same year, her employment of the social media has been extensive. In fact, her achievements video is spread around the world, including the Arab world, where versions of it are subtitled in Arabic (Cooke 2019). Scrolling through the ‘shares’ of the original video, one finds many people commenting some variation of ‘I wish you were the prime minister of my country’, underlining her popularity and international adoration (Cooke 2019). The current French president, Emmanuel Macron, despite upholding the notion of ‘sacralization’ of the presidential function in France (Beckett 2017), made a ‘dazzling appearance’ on the Twittersphere in 2017. Macron’s social media presence especially targets the youth who are interested in politics but who avoid the mainstream media as the main source of information around domestic and foreign developments. The same reason compels his social media team to follow him, capturing his moves and livestreaming his speeches on Periscope, apart from carrying Instagram stories (Twiplomacy Study 2018) that showcase the president as ‘cool’ and ‘ordinary’. It is not only contemporary leaders who employ digital tools for political communication. Certain yesteryear leaders have also adopted popular social media platforms in their own distinct style. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, wanting to transform his image, embraced Twitter and FB to communicate a different and a more acceptable image. To transform his image of a ‘bourgeois’ and ‘aristocratic’ leader, he used visuals to present himself as a ‘hardworking professional businessman’, reflecting the projection of a specific brand of power and authority for the French electorate (Lalancette & Raynaud 2017). On his FB account, Sarkozy did not hesitate to share insights into his private life, including pictures of singer-­songwriter Carla Bruni, whom he married in 2008. Drawing a parallel, social media has several times captured visuals of India’s PM Narendra Modi with his mother - projecting him as a ‘common man’ bonding with family, thereby striking an emotional chord with the recently digital Indian voters.

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‘Not free’ regimes have also taken to online image management to portray themselves as affable with high regard for PO. As pointed out by Fidler (2014), ‘authoritarian leaders have developed sufficient confidence in the capabilities of their regimes to control the politics of internet access to embrace cyberspace for their own purposes’. The confidence has led some leaders in ‘not free’ and ‘partly free’ countries to embrace the new media platforms extensively to communicate their accommodation of the other, seeking to refurbish their own images. The Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, or the Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte have all expanded internet access in their countries while demonstrating tendencies to control its content – once again displaying their ‘less-liberal’ traits. There is little doubt that leaders in ‘not free’ and ‘partly free’ countries, realizing that ‘internet freedom’ empowers people (as it did during the Orange revolution and the Arab Spring) and therefore might produce threats to their perpetuity, are seen using new media platforms extensively to disseminate propaganda and to crack down on dissent. After all, digital propaganda not only divides but requires the divides to succeed (Bjola & Papadakis 2019). Others, like Rwandan President Paul Kagame, reputed for being merciless and brutal, skilfully control the discourse on social media (BBC 2017) while suppressing the traditional mainstream media (Muvunyi 2019) – i­ndicating yet again authoritarian tendencies. However, he was also one of the first African leaders to set up a website with a presence on Twitter, FB, Instagram, and Flickr. Apart from improving internet access in Rwanda, he made attempts to create a Twitter persona to embellish his international image as he was increasingly criticized for cracking down on the opposition and journalists back home (Kjuka 2013). Thus, the effective institutionalization of the new media with its visuals is deemed equally critical for their continuity. Syrian President Bashir Assad’s uploading of pictures on Instagram ‘where viewers could post responses was certainly a different kind of propaganda than practiced by the past authoritarian leaders’ (Garber 2013) underscores the compulsions driving such less-liberal leaders to embrace digital media for self-­preservation. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia – ­representing absolute monarchy – equally employs platforms like Twitter to reach out to the country’s digital youth and shape online debate with carefully managed media campaigns (Westall & McDowall 2016), revealing a shrinking space for criticism that is gradually becoming visible across countries ( Jones 2019).

Control and Engagement: Dual Use of Social Media by Less-Liberal Leaders Communication revolutions have largely been expected to be enabling in entrenching democracies with greater flow of information between various states, non-state actors, the public and greater participation of the latter in major political, social, economic, and foreign policy debates. A popular example of unrestricted communication flow damaging autocracies is the erstwhile USSR, as scholars argue

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‘the Soviet Union’s inability to control the flow of electronic information was seen as crucial to its demise’ (Kalathil & Boas 2003: 2). Unlike authoritarians who deter technology and care little about goodwill, democratic leaders are expected to ‘naturally’ adopt new media to cultivate goodwill and generate PO. In fact, this book partly focuses on how social media has instead emerged as a popular medium of political communication for leaders across countries – whether in liberal or less-liberal systems. Interestingly, in many democracies, elected leaders, like their less-liberal counterparts, seek to manipulate the communicative environment in which information exchange takes place (Bulovsky 2018) - leading to the emergence of strong populist leaders who do not hesitate to centralize power. The latter can manipulate information depending on their goals and, as a result, encourage communication to thrive through new media platforms while using them extensively, personally, in their own distinct ways. This is in line with Downs’s argument that politicians are rational and self-interested actors seeking to extend their own influence (Downs 1957), in this case through Web 2.0. While facilitating pro-democracy protests like the Arab Spring in 2011 and similar demonstrations against tyranny and authoritarianism, new media has also allowed the public and the leaders to proliferate with their hateful views and those seeking to spread disinformation, bypassing traditional gatekeepers (Leatherby & Rojanasakul 2018). Although digital platforms empower the public and enlarge the public space, a careful examination of the employment of the new medium also reveals their escalating deployment by countries for creating certain political narratives. For instance, when Ukraine was attacked by Russia early 2022, the latter deployed social media extensively to circulate anti-Ukraine content while trying to ‘galvanize domestic support’ for destabilizing the Western alliance (Klepper 2022). New media platforms thus also reflect the authoritarian state’s urge to communicate directly with the people to convey their ‘own’ perspectives on various issues, in line with their ideologies and political ambitions. Their employment in Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan, traditionally less democratic, similarly demonstrates the leaders’ attempts to engage with the public on the one hand and their control of its content on the other, indicating how technological affordances enable leaders to concentrate power. Although internet access in Saudi Arabia (where the Crown Prince actively uses digital platforms) is widespread, the monarchy is also known for placing restrictions on online information. Both international and local news sites are blocked, and campaigns are undertaken to shape online news coverage, discourage certain hashtags on Twitter, and tarnish government critics ( Jones 2019). The Saudi government is also known for undertaking coordinated efforts to not only smear opponents but to suppress online discussions and criticism of authorities as well ( Jones 2019). Another leader, Islam Karimov, the former president of Uzbekistan, was the first Central Asian leader to ban social media in 2010, fearing the Colour Revolution11 and its potential impact on civil unrest at home (Hrw 2018). While Karimov cracked down on the digital media, his successor, Shavkat Mirziyoye,

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appeared more in tune with the global media ecology characterized by a constant flow of information. After assuming office in 2016, he tried to project Uzbekistan12 differently by initiating various reforms, including efforts to unblock critical news websites such as Uzbekistan24 – a state-sponsored 24-hour news channel – modestly criticizing Karimov’s economic and social policies (Hrw 2018). Restrictions were also lifted from other news websites, like the VOA and Radio Free Europe, indicating that the media environment in Uzbekistan was changing and that the current government was more accommodating of the new technologies. The change might have been motivated by the desire to gain the support of 12.7 million netizens (by contrast, there were only 7,500 internet users in 2000, during Karimov’s time) (Sikorskaya 2016). However, restrictions on online content and blocking of websites remain. While granting citizens more liberal access to social media platforms has been regarded as a necessity by the leadership, it is also reflective of how the leader in a ‘not free’ country like Uzbekistan, running a still largely authoritarian state as a strongman, continues to tightly control the internet, thereby perpetuating incumbency. The contrast is also visible in Ethiopia – another East African country designated ‘not free’ by the Freedom House in 2019. While governments across the world continue to censor digital media by blocking access to dissenting blogs and websites, digital space has been freed up in Ethiopia. The country has not only expanded internet and mobile phone services but through e-government projects like Woredanet has enabled politicians and administrators to virtually connect across various layers of the state machinery. This marks an evolving contrast to ‘listening’ ceasing to be ‘a common metaphor for online activity’ (Crawford 2009) in the country with online control nonetheless, leaving the people disillusioned with the communication system. Thus, one witnesses a pattern unfolding in the way digital platforms are being deployed by prominently nationalist leaders – often posing as intolerant demagogues – while being in control, they occasionally want to be perceived as responsive and liberal too. The simultaneous tendency to control and engage social media has become a noted trait among leaders of such ilk. Turkish President Erdogan – a conservative democrat displaying autocratic tendencies from time to time – is a relevant example of the dichotomy mentioned. Under Erdogan13, Turkey has experienced a steady weakening of democratic institutions and greater control of social media, including blocking of websites (Grenier 2016). This, however, has not prevented Erdogan from separately engaging on social media. Although he described Twitter as ‘the worst menace to society’ in 2013 during the Gezi Park protests,14 he successfully harnessed it to his advantage to maintain his regime’s stability by dashing a coup in 2016 (Bulovsky 2018; Srivastava 2016). With airwaves beyond his control and under the sway of the military, Erdogan appealed to the Turkish people through the internet and FaceTime, urging them to take to streets in protest, leading to eventual upstaging of the coup. Erdogan has also been (dis)credited for creating his own ‘social media army’ to shape a favourable counternarrative, targeting the public – 92 per cent of

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whom are active social media users – and for co-opting elites by convincing them of his competence while intimidating rivals (Orucoglu 2015). This is a typical example of a leader initially controlling the media to suppress dissent and then using the media to obtain power and exert influence only to return to control once the objectives were fulfilled. Erdogan’s use of the new media demonstrated to the world the extent to which it could be utilized to secure specific (and often narrow) interests by a contemporary leader to ‘even employ it to proclaim “democracy” during a crackdown and a state of emergency with the President’s Twitter account hailing: ‘Turkey has a history full of democratic victories and it will always uphold democracy’ (Scott dna). Turkey, while showcasing purposeful deployment of social media by a leader in a less-liberal country to achieve multiple objectives, is also an example of expanding public space facilitated by technology. In 2018, a social media campaign hashtag #TAMAM (which translates as ‘enough’) demanded that the Turkish president step down. This was accompanied by another campaign hashtag #DEVAM (which translates as ‘carry on’) urging the president to continue in power, prompting the movement to be ‘one of the largest political hashtag wars in internet history’ (Pierpoint 2018), highlighting both the empowered Turkish public and the resultant power of hashtag in politics. The domestic showdown had impacted the global perception of Turkey as well. Ankara, an exceptional example of democracy in a general authoritarian Arab world, became instead a case study in ‘re-authoritarianization’ (Cook 2016), underscoring yet again the inescapable linkage between new technology and soft power. President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan exemplifies another interesting dimension of how social media is evolving as a state propaganda tool because of its criticality in ensuring peace and stability at home. The Kazakh government’s relationship with the internet is rather interesting and paradoxical. Although Nazarbayev was quite comfortable with social media at the beginning (Kazakhstan shared second place with Singapore in a global rating of citizens’ ‘e-participation’15 denoting ease of access to public services in 2012), the nine-month oil workers’ protest that broke out later in Zhanaozen city pushed the Kazakh government to rethink its social media strategy. The participants of the protest extensively employed FB and Twitter to mobilize resources and attract internal and external support while appealing to foreign governments and international organizations to destabilize the Kazakh leadership (Cook 2016), underscoring yet again how digital technology could be a democratic tool empowering the ordinary public (facing reprisal and suppression) to communicate beyond borders to generate support for a cause. However, the Kazakh authorities subsequently not only began blocking popular internet resources and national cellular networks but also took to active parallel engagement in social media, indicating its use as a propaganda tool for preserving peace and stability in the country. Later, in September 2015, the #Almaty city government did not hesitate to launch the same digital tools to improve the government’s feedback mechanism, helping the Kazakh citizens to directly communicate with the president via AkOrdaPress FB account, thus attempting to enable the

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government to ‘transition from broadcast to communicative paradigms which are centered on mutual interactions’ (McNutt 2014). This was deemed important by the networked authoritarian who embraced and adjusted to the inevitable changes brought about by digital communication (Lorentzen 2014) for self-preservation and retention of control and power (Bulovsky 2018) in a rapidly changing communication landscape. Another authoritarian leader, the former President Hugo Chavez of ‘not free’ Venezuela, had initially branded Twitter an instrument of his enemies – a position consistent with cyberspace being a threat to authoritarian regimes – but later embraced technology, tweeting avidly to over 4 million followers (Farber 2013) and marking the simultaneous tendency to control and engage while trying to pose as an ‘adaptive authoritarian’ (Reilly 2012) – a dimension highlighted with respect to China in Chapter 5. *** This chapter has attempted to study the role of digital media in transforming political communication in the contemporary world, where Web 2.0 is changing the way the public perceives their leaders given that the open spaces have eased interactions between leaders and their audiences. Political leaders are now well aware of the new media environment and are active in making efforts to adjust to the conditions. Nation-branding and image-building have become important agendas to be achieved in both domestic and international politics. With the new media making international borders obsolete, leaders not only are anxious to convey targeted messages but they also seek to amplify them through right visuals in line with what the public wants to hear and see. Because the youth are the most active users of the web, connecting with them during elections and election campaigns has become that much more critical as visual political communication becomes the centrepiece in this internet-enabled global media ecology. Along with brand and image-building exercises, social media has become greatly significant to leaders in obtaining and retaining power, irrespective of their democratic or non-democratic fundamentals. While digital media has significantly expanded public space, facilitating interactions and exchanges between leaders and their constituencies, it has also led leaders to seek centralization of power and retain more control. These developments, to an extent, have undone ‘new’ PD, which is supposed to be predicated on dialogue and engagement. And even if these do exist in some modicum, they are geared towards achieving certain objectives set forth by the leadership. However, the leaders, less-liberal or otherwise, also recognize the pitfalls of excessive state control that can damage their global image and reputation. As the chapter has discussed, less-liberal leaderships have shown the dichotomous tendency of controlling and engaging through social media, depending on the goals they wish to achieve. This aspect is indeed interesting in the evolution of the new media landscape given the empowerment experienced by both citizens and leaders, and the latter have as much space and scope to set specific agendas and execute them as the former have in reacting and responding. Many of these less-liberal states appear quite like China, which has skilfully employed the digital media to control

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and engage the public at the same time, as will be highlighted in Chapter 5. Without accepting or acknowledging China’s influence in any way, these leaders seem to have been impressed by the Chinese state’s management of the use of social media platforms. There are many other leaders in democracies, with systems and institutions not aligned to authoritarian practices, who demonstrate similar illiberal tendencies like those of their Chinese counterparts, indicating yet again the digital media’s ability to facilitate the rise of strong nationalist leaders in the new media landscape who engage and control the media at the same time for self-preservation.

Notes 1 The ‘threshold of conflict’, aimed at sowing confusion and uncertainty in rivals using cyber hacking tools, involves incidents that may cause disruption and even decrease public confidence. The difficulty of ‘who is behind this threat’ in areas such as cyber also gives strategic competitors or peer rivals a useful smokescreen of deniability (Aerosociety dna). 2 The 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, fraught with corruption, voter intimidation and electoral fraud was largely responsible for the Orange Revolution which witnessed a civil resistance in Ukraine. In fact, the role of cell phones for coordinating activists during the Revolution was phenomenal. They also proved useful for website discussions for sharing best practices and for making detailed reports of election fraud. 3 The Arab Spring was a series of anti-government protests and armed rebellions that spread across much of the Arab world influenced by the Tunisian Revolution in response to corruption and economic stagnation. Networks formed online helped mobilize protests while organizing the activists. 4 Hong Kong’s protests had started against plans to allow extradition to mainland China. This is an interesting example where both the protesters and the authorities extensively employed social media `as a tool in the battle of public opinion' (Shao 2019). 5 The 2010 General Elections in the UK witnessed a dual strategy for internet campaigning. Not only was the internet increasingly embedded within the election communication, but online communication strategies became a feature of most of the political parties’ marketing communication mix ( Jackson & Lilleker 2009). 6 In 2017, the internet penetration rate in Pakistan was approximately 16 per cent of its population, while in India and Sri Lanka, the same year, was both 34 per cent (The World Bank 2019). South Asia also has other interesting dynamics. Despite high penetration of internet in Sri Lanka at 28.2 (Internet Live Stats 2016), the ‘partly free’ country in South Asia, witnessed a limited role of the social media during its 2015 elections. Maithripala Sirisena, who defeated strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa, used Twitter and FB ‘only or mostly “to broadcast” some news and images, but hardly to engage citizens’ (Gunawardene 2015). 7 Nigeria is again a ‘partly free’ country according to Freedom House 2019 (Freedom in the World 2020). 8 The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal was a major scandal in early 2018 when the British political consulting firm harvested personal data from FB profiles, including India, without their consent and used it for political advertising (Cadwalladr & Harrison 2018). 9 Though visual symbols had long been a central component of political communication, it was the television technology during the 50s, 60s and 70s which made it a dominant source of political information - facilitating the connection between leaders and the public both at home and abroad (Schill 2012). 10 Two consecutive mass shootings occurred at mosques in a terrorist attack in Christchurch during the Friday Prayer on 15 March 2019.

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11 The Colour Revolution is a term that was widely used by the global media to describe a revolutionary wave that swept across several countries of the former SU, the Balkans and the Middle East during the early 2000s. Its origin can be traced back to the 1986 People Power Revolution (also called the Yellow Revolution) in the Philippines. 12 According to Freedom House (2018), Uzbekistan remains a consolidated authoritarian regime. For details see Freedom in the World 2018, viewed 25 April 2019 https:// freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2018/uzbekistan 13 According to Freedom House (2018), Turkey has declined from ‘Partly Free’ status to ‘Not Free’. For details see Freedom in the World 2018, viewed 25 April 2019 https:// freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2018/turkey%205 14 A wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Turkey began on 28 May 2013, initially to contest the urban development plan for Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park. 15 E-participation is assessed based on features of national e-government portals, especially the availability of online information on policies and budgets, or free access to online government service.

4 THE US LEADERSHIP New Media–driven Diplomacy and Political Communication Since 9/11

Historically, the US has integrated culture into its foreign policy while relying on and encouraging ‘dialogue between people who count and who are going to count’ (Parmar 2010: 114). This culture of dialogue and exchanges was combined with science and technology which together occupied a privileged place in the repertoire of instruments of soft power. Rapid advances in communication technologies have further offered the US leadership opportunities to engage with new policy spaces, apart from augmenting communication with the public. Technology-driven communication has indeed been a defining feature of US Public Diplomacy (PD), helping it to cultivate international goodwill and respect. During the Second World War, the US President Franklin D. Roosevelt had established the American Information Centres in Europe and had launched the VOA radio service to export American culture and intensify communication with the rest of the world. The Cold War years (1947–91) subsequently witnessed PD re-emerging as an essential part of Washington’s national security policy, encompassing both ideological and cultural strands (Beehner 2005). However, since the disintegration of the Soviet Union (SU) in 1991, PD ceased to be a priority for the US leadership (Cull 2009; Pamment 2014). But the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York while driving home the message that foreign perceptions were critical, also flagged its deep-rooted domestic consequences (Zaharna & Uysal 2015), compelling the US administration to revisit and revive its PD efforts. The promise by the current Joe Biden administration to improve America’s global image and reputation1 once again pushes American diplomacy to centre stage (Cull 2022) after a decline in the country’s image worldwide under Donald Trump. There is no doubt that diplomacy has come to matter much more than before with the advent of the information revolution since entities it has tried to influence have just not increased in number but also new forms of engagement, facilitated by technology, are spreading and proliferating through societies (Hanson 2012). DOI: 10.4324/9780429298141-4

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Given Washington’s long institutionalization of new media in its diplomatic praxis while being a pioneer of diplomacy at the same time, this chapter attempts to closely study the US experience. The aims are to examine the United States’ evolving PD with the world post-9/11 and make some special references to the Arab world and a few others like China. While the emphasis of the chapter is on the digitalization of diplomacy in the US, it also briefly discusses the compulsions that have driven the US leadership to revisit its strategy.

Post-9/11 Terrorist Attacks: Refocus on Public Diplomacy The September 11 attacks in 2001 not only exposed the US to the perils of terrorism but also served as a reminder of the grave mistakes committed by both Congress and various US administrations in downplaying PD until then (Epstein 2005). The adverse response to the early post-9/11 US PD in the Islamic countries, it was argued, was because of its rather poor relations with the publics of the Muslim world (Zaharna & Uysal 2015). It has been further asserted that the high-profile ‘Shared Values’ campaign,2 though well researched and well designed, was completely out of sync with the public sentiment of the time (Fakhreddine 2004). Notwithstanding the administration’s renewed attention to its diplomatic activities to strengthen its PD campaign in its war against terrorism and its eagerness to communicate better and share knowledge and understanding, its PD theory and practice remained dominated by one-way communication and messaging (Zaharna & Uysal 2015) with a global rupture in its relations. Subsequent US leaderships were forced to reassess their PD objectives, and the key word became engagement, which had multiple meanings, including ‘an emphasis on dialogue and activities aimed at building relations with nations, institutions and people’ (Gregory 2011). Mark Leonard’s (2002) stress on relational bonds and his argument that PD ‘should be about building relationships, starting from understanding other countries’ needs, cultures, and peoples and then looking for areas to make common cause’ began to resound in America’s practice of PD. The resultant focus on engagement corresponded with the rise of the new media, leading to the emergence of PD 2.0 (Cull 2009). Credible messaging and relational PD became the new lexicon in US external engagement while gaining more traction in diplomatic communication. The 9/11 Commission Report3 in 2005, after having investigated the plot, design, and circumstances that led to the attacks, emphasized these fundamental points (‘this country should identify what it stands for and communicate that message clearly’) while arguing ‘that public diplomacy is only good if the message is credible’ (Epstein 2005). Digital diplomacy, in this case, fitted well in the overall diplomatic narrative and was considered particularly useful for ‘altering the prevalent image of a nation among foreign audiences, and mend national images following times of crisis’ (Manor & Segev 2015). This aspect has been particularly important for a country like the US, suffering ‘engagement delusion’ – the gulf between conceptualization of engagement and its actual application (Comor & Bean 2012) – f­ ollowing American military invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.

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Not only had garnering international goodwill become a difficult task and an important objective to achieve in foreign policy but mending global reputation following the invasions became equally critical. After all, shaping global perception in an interconnected world has become an important function of the state given that they now mutually compete with each other for attracting investors, tourists, businessmen, consumers, international media, and other foreign governments (Anholt 2006). Washington soon began working on the idea of ‘network diplomacy’ – moving beyond the traditional siloed approach to information or intelligence gathering from foreign capitals, where Embassies closely guard information – to a networked approach, where information is easily shared between like-minded governments (Hanson 2012).

New Media–driven Public Diplomacy: From Laggard to Leader Despite Washington’s historic leadership in the field of communication technologies, scholars like Wilson Dizard (2001) have tracked the long history of the American state’s reluctant adaptation to technological innovations. While one-way use of the internet was introduced sometime during Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1996, it was only in 2002 that the US State Department, in its effort to pursue a more relational PD approach under Secretary Colin Powell, established a dedicated e-diplomacy unit. In 2002, the Council on Foreign Relations argued that new technologies necessitated PD actors to focus on citizens abroad and ‘adopt an engagement approach that involves listening, dialogue, debate and relationship building and increases the amount and effectiveness of public opinion (PO) research’ (Pamment 2013). By becoming the first Department to do so, the US rapidly and drastically transformed itself from a laggard to a leader in digital diplomacy by embracing e-diplomacy in an unprecedented way (Dizard 2001). The Taskforce, later renamed the Office of e-Diplomacy, comprises more than 150 full-time social media employees working across 25 different offices (Adesina 2017). It was in 2006 that the bedrock for digital communication was laid in the US by the then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who proposed to ‘set up “virtual posts” where people could visit a website and chat online with US diplomats’ (Wanjiru 2014). The arrival of America.gov – the US government’s chief PD portal – launched by the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs in January 2007, not only provided features on American life but also served as a platform for a whole host of interactive media, essentially webcasts, blogs, videos, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook (FB), and even Second Life – a 3D virtual world where users could socialize with free voice and text chat (Wanjiru 2014). The initiative signified working with networks, promoting open diplomacy, and relinquishing control – characteristics of a new media ecology that were expected to emerge as the new bedrocks of contemporary international communication around the world. Subsequently, in the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama, the first black US presidential candidate, embraced new media platforms to build his brand for

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reaching out to the grassroots electorate, in line with Charlene Li’s concept of ‘open leadership in time of social technologies’ (2010:12). The creation of ‘The Brand called Obama’4 took the US by a storm and also impacted global consciousness, reinforcing the notion that ‘everyone was included, and that this movement is actually a conversation to which everyone is invited’ (McGirt 2008). Obama and his team were not only able to harness technology for communication but were successful in communicating the ‘right’ image, and crafting the ‘right’ message, for global outreach. Obama’s personal website (barackobama.com) hosted a variety of content that individuals could download and further circulate, thereby effectively disseminating the messages that Obama wanted to convey. The website was also employed for organizing supporters and volunteers more vigorously – marking the first of its kind in modern history. Obama’s decision to bid for re-election in 2012 was announced through email and text messages, including FB posts and YouTube video, along with a specially developed app for connecting his supporters and FB friends to his campaign website. The proactive deployment of new media contributed to Obama’s reputation as a political leader eminently comfortable with digital technology and keen on using the platforms for extensive and effective public communication. For example, Obama’s YouTube presentation, The Choice, underscored his inclination for public engagement through online platforms and helped in shaping America’s narrative on several issues for international consumption. His online engagement, while primarily targeting the domestic constituency, also aimed to convey a globally inclusive message. The message, by personifying Obama, a global leader keen on rewriting history, as the first person of colour with roots in the Muslim world to be elected president of the US, was also aimed to promote a wider global hope, including perhaps amongst those who ‘helped ignite the Arab Awakening’ (Seib 2012). Obama, thus, presented himself not only in all his cultural hybridity – African and American and Asian, black and white, infused with all-American hopefulness – but also with the reserve that comes of living on the receiving end of power (Traub 2007). Obama’s election thus underscored a global confidence in him, which increased when he took over as the US president in 2009 (Pew Research Centre 2017), requiring the President with his kind of background, ‘to address a global constituency’ (Hayden 2011). He was expected to assume collective leadership and appropriate actions abroad and he obliged as was witnessed in the case of Ukraine in 2014.5 Apart from communicating the ‘right’ message, the extensive deployment of new media platforms helped Obama to ‘reconnect with the values that founded this country and also try to promote and find ways to enable other people to take those values and make them their own’ (Wallin 2012). The aim was to reinforce credibility for effectively reaching and grasping POs abroad on the one hand and achieving soft power goals on the other. Creating credibility among the international community, after all, is a much-desired objective of modern global actors striving to effectively communicate with foreign audiences for brand-building purposes (Harris 2013) and for achieving soft power goals. According to Mor, ‘to stand above the competition, to draw attention,

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and to hold it – and ultimately, to persuade – one needs to have a reputation for providing trustworthy, accurate information’ (2012: 394). Obama effectively symbolized and delivered just this. As far as foreign policy is concerned, PO has had a measurable impact on US external engagement only since Vietnam (Sobel 2001). However, typical Americans still seemed to have been insulated from foreign policy issues, especially during domestic elections, until the advent of digitalization, which appears to have challenged their insularity. Obama’s extensive use of social media during both the 2008 and 2012 electoral campaigns established Web 2.0’s value as a critical political instrument in US domestic elections, with similar implications for international politics, given the blurring of borders thesis. The employment of new media tools had indeed proven effective in influencing PO as a public relations (PR) tool in Obama’s 2008 campaign (Hayden 2011). His deployment of a personal Twitter handle (@BarackObama) for communicating with his constituency and introducing himself, his policies and perspectives on various issues were part of a broad policy of engagement for encouraging conversation and debate between Americans and foreign publics (Comor & Bean 2012: 204). He was able to harness the web to effectively connect electoral campaign content with PD (Cull 2007). The web not only lowered the cost of building a political brand and created a sense of connection and engagement but also dispensed with the command-and-control method of governing to allow people to self-organize (Carr 2008). The new media ecosystem heralded by Obama, while introducing image management techniques devoted to creating positive impressions of leaders among the glocal publics, was also able to draw attention via these impactful images and videos (Lalancette & Raynaud 2017), making the entire process more participative. However, its evolution to include more diversity in information and its presentation – while often facilitating policy swings – has nonetheless exposed the vulnerability of the US political system to foreign intervention. None exemplifies this better than the US presidential election of 2016, which was allegedly interfered with by Russia with bots and algorithms spreading fake news to influence electoral outcomes.6 This dimension of bots and fake news is discussed further in Chapter 8. Since 2017, the Trump presidency had unleashed a distinct diplomacy defined by the new media platforms setting free bots, algorithms, disinformation, and fake news. While bots and fake news were part of the discourse pertaining to the Trump administration (as highlighted time and again), the same administration had also elevated Twitter diplomacy to a new level as the former president not only actively engaged with other foreign leaders and foreign publics but also announced major foreign policy decisions online (Iakhnis & Badawy 2019). This re-emphasizes the blurring of border thesis and the creation of Castell’s new public space (2008), drawing further attention to citizens’ attitudes and their mobilization in the current information technology context. The next section discusses Washington’s ‘digitalization of diplomacy’ (Manor 2019), thereby establishing a new paradigm in global diplomacy.

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US Online (Dis)engagement of the World As mentioned earlier, the 9/11 attacks had made it imperative for Washington to revisit its PD efforts to strategically advance its interests, particularly in the Muslim world (Harris 2013). This strategic consensus – to build and improve Washington’s international image – more or less coincided with the development of new media platforms. It was increasingly believed that the digital media platforms could be employed to correct negative perceptions which were working against foreign policy objectives (Harris 2013). The Obama administration was thus determined to mend relations with the Arab world, and new media technology played a crucial role in this aspect of diplomacy. It has been argued by scholars that ties between nations, to a great extent, could be restored by public mentioning of another country on Twitter, which enable leaders to directly communicate with citizens of that country while engaging with the larger international audience (Iakhnis & Badawy 2019). According to a study of the US State Department’s Twitter account at the time, the most frequently mentioned region was the Middle East, ahead of Europe, Africa, and Asia/Pacific, and 18 per cent of all tweets analyzed pertained to Middle Eastern countries (Pierozzi 2018). The comprehension that the US was not being viewed favourably by the Arabs in 2011 (IMEMCnew 2011) had led the Obama administration to strengthen PD 2.0 in the region, which subsequently became ubiquitous in engaging the rest of the overseas public. As of 2018, the State Department had more than 2,000 official social media accounts, primarily on FB and Twitter and largely at US Embassies and consulates abroad, and a combined follower base of more than 89 million (Belbey 2018). New media has greatly facilitated PD by expanding its presence through dedicated platforms. The Obama administration was responsible for initiating virtual Embassies in countries like Iran, thus provoking discussions and enhancing visibility of the sender (Bjola & Holmes 2015) – the US in this case. The establishment of the first US virtual Embassy in Iran (Voice of America 2011) for promoting transparent dissemination of US policies in 2011 highlighted the new focus of the US administration and its efforts at digital engagement. The website – available in both English and Farsi – was set up [t]o provide another perspective and another source of information, so you can make up your own minds about the US, our concerns and about the Iranian government’s activities at home and abroad. (Erdbrink 2011) This again vindicates harnessing the influence of technology by a major global player, underlining the importance and effectiveness of online initiatives in the absence of offline formal diplomatic relations, in this case between the US and Iran. The Obama administration’s digital PD outreach stretched beyond the Arab world, assuming significance for other countries as well.7 Moving away from monologues, Obama’s White House team created multiple platforms for encouraging responses,

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apart from text messaging with country codes, a Twitter feed, #obamaghana, and FB online chat (Horton 2009). The Obama administration also harnessed technology to optimize knowledge management in the pursuit of national interests abroad and to promote online communication between leaders (Adesina 2017). These were evident from the situations that developed between Washington and Tehran in 2016. After two US Navy patrol boats wandered into Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf, their detention by the Iranian military forces and subsequent quick release the next morning pointed to a new ‘transformative’ diplomacy (Adesina 2017). The then US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart Javad Zarif took to Twitter as the new mode of political and diplomatic communication for conveying positive outcomes in diplomacy by engaging in knowledge management. Both leaders set the stage for ‘dialog and respect, not threats and impetuousness, swiftly resolved the #sailors episode. Let’s learn from this latest example’ (Duncombe 2017), underpinning the importance that Twitter-driven inter-dialogue and understanding were generating between two countries with distinct systems. While reestablishing diplomatic relations between estranged countries and promoting inter-dialogue with the others, the new media also introduces and empowers new groups and people influencing PD decisions, best illustrated by the launch of the Kony 2012 video by Invisible Children – a non-governmental organization with a strong global network. Launched in March 2012, its video on Joseph Kony, the leader of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, went viral, compelling President Obama to address the group’s concern directly and announce that ‘our advisers will continue their efforts to bring this madman [ Joseph Kony] to justice and save lives’ (Hanson 2012). This yet again highlights the blurring of borders thesis brought about by the new media mentioned earlier and Washington’s attempt to pose as a leader of the Free World,8 rejecting fear and ensuring justice for the Ugandans and thereby projecting an image in line with soft power objectives. The online presence of the US Embassy has also been increasing in countries like China, where its social media presence is quite distinct. An interesting dimension of China’s social media landscape has been the adoption of home-grown alternatives like Weibo by ‘others’, including the US Embassy in China, for communicating and interacting with Chinese netizens (Ying 2017). Avoiding targeted criticisms of China, the Embassy’s Weibo posts are diplomatic in tone, focusing instead on US history, culture, tradition, and domestic policies while at times referring to freedom, human rights, and the American Dream (Bjola & Holmes 2015) more subtly. However, occasional posts delivering ‘hard’ messages – drawing immense public attention and including attempts to set agendas – are also visible (Bjola & Holmes 2015). For example, through its Weibo posts, Washington often seems to provide a voice to Chinese social problems through ‘US news’, in the process highlighting local concerns on China’s development strategies (Bjola & Holmes 2015). US Embassies are also engaged in dealing with crisis situations for reaching out to overseas Americans and travellers by creating customized digital crisis communication plans and incorporating a social media component into their crisis

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preparedness exercises (Belbey 2018). This underlines Washington’s embrace of social media tools for crisis management with the idea of benefitting Americans abroad and strengthening its own global brand and reputation: ‘crisis communication via Twitter leads to higher reputation than crisis communication via blogs, which in turn leads to higher reputation than crisis communication via traditional newspapers’ (Schultz et al. 2011: 22). The practice predominantly resonates with China and India as well, as discussed in Chapters 5 and 7, highlighting the growing sensitivities of modern leaderships for connecting to their people in times of crises in a new media–enabled environment. Whereas Obama was the first US president to appreciate and cultivate the power of social media in PD and political communication, Trump has undoubtedly been the first Twitter President, crafting Twitter-driven diplomacy with a difference. Trump used tweets to purportedly signal a reversal in Washington’s long-standing positions on Taiwan, nuclear weapons, and the two-state solution to the Israel–Palestine conflict (Sidhu 2017) while attacking a number of countries in his Twitter posts. From urging protesters to overthrow the Iranian government and threatening to blow up North Korea to calling for cuts in aid to the Palestinians – his use of Twitter was a classic example of ‘how far they veer from the traditional ways American Presidents express themselves, let alone handle diplomacy’ (Erlanger 2018). Scholar Leslie Vinjamuri cautions that ‘Trump’s tweets do shape how others react’. Even if the posts were always not necessarily policy pronouncements, they did create significant confusion, putting American credibility on the line (Erlanger 2018). In early 2019, a tweet by Trump triggered volatility in the global market, jeopardizing bilateral ties between the US and China. Richard Perloff rightly pointed out that Trump’s use of Twitter marked the culmination of two decades of change in the way politicians communicated with the public: more personal, instantaneous, and frequently less verifiable (Buncombe 2018). Trump – known for his disdain for institutions tasked to mediate between the leader and the citizens (Plagemann & Destradi 2019) –deliberately shied away from using traditional media for communicating with the public. In fact, Trump continued to engage using the Twitter handle in what communication scholar Gail Fairhurst (2005) describes as ‘framing’ by reinterpreting negative coverage as ‘fake news’ and diverting public attention. With people gaining more of a voice and a ‘new leverage’ (courtesy of new media platforms) (Coombs 1998), Trump, much like Obama, was quick to understand that communicating with the public was the key to his winning the 2017 presidential election and for projecting his presidency as different. In this new-age political environment, citizens deploy digital media to reverse communication roles and, by extension, the relational power (Zaharna & Uysal 2015), demanding that leaders talk to them directly. While Trump exploited this new media landscape effectively, it was not clear whether he had concomitantly been able to augment Washington’s soft power. According to the Soft Power 30 index, American power had particularly declined since the beginning of Trump’s presidency (‘The Soft

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Power 30’ 2018), with Joseph Nye (2019) pointing out that ‘tweets can help to set global agenda, but they do not produce soft power if they are not attractive to others’. Clearly, direct but aggressive employment of social media can have prominent downsides – a fact that is probably not just limited to the Trump administration but visible for other leaders and countries as well! Trump’s unorthodox and often undiplomatic deployment of Twitter was unprecedented, creating a new form of ‘smart’ politics (Hollinger 2018). His tweets, while essentially domestic interest–driven and designed with his core constituencies in mind, had international repercussions given the ‘new world order’ (Slaughter 2004) with its obsolete borders (Batora 2005; Huijgh 2011; Zaharna 2018). Even if there is a recognition that his tweets may be largely intended to let off steam or reassure his domestic base, there was an increasing sense that the credibility of the administration, and of the presidency itself, was being eroded (Erlanger 2018). His suggestion that ‘his unfettered tweeting was helpful to American foreign policy’ exposed his faulty understanding of its impact on foreign policy and PD. His tweets reflected his thoughts and psyche, throwing light on the kind of messages he wanted to communicate to his supporters and adversaries alike. George Lakoff, specializing in cognitive science and linguistics, analyzed Trump’s tweets and concluded that ‘Trump uses social media as a weapon to control the news cycle. It works like a charm. His tweets are tactical rather than substantive’ (Buncombe 2018). His tweets also reveal that he has chosen his own strategy disregarding international goodwill: Although he has only been in office a few months, Donald Trump’s presidency has had a major impact on how the world sees the United States. Trump and many of his key policies are broadly unpopular around the globe, and ratings for the US have declined steeply in many nations. (Brandow 2018) Ever since Trump decided to run for the US presidential elections, his uni-directional employment of digital media hit headlines, drawing widespread criticism, which hardly disconcerted him as he continued tweeting his loud messages: ‘My use of social media is not Presidential - it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!’ ( July 2017), making it clear that Twitter was his preferred choice of communication with the public, especially the American electorate. His ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan along with ‘#America First’ set the new administration’s diplomatic strategy. His tweets were overtly nationalistic too. Whereas traditional cultural values and law-and-order issues were the focus of the Republican Party during the 2016 US presidential elections, other socio-demographic subjects with distinct nationalist undertones were circulated and were seen to be trending. Issues such as immigration and growth in ethnic populations – attributed to the previous administrations’ open outlook towards economic globalization, which were also favourite Trump themes – were highlighted to increase perceptions of threat, triggering authoritarian tendencies (Azpuru 2017) while making democracies

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less democratic in foreign policy (Baum & Potter 2019). The online hate rhetoric, which also increasingly characterized his presidency, provided [a] new enabling ground for right wing movements and exclusionary politics to stabilize, complementing a composite space of support that includes conservative groups that deploy conventional strategies of “serious” appeal, dissemination, and manipulation. (Udupa & Pohjonen 2019) Trump’s white nationalist-themed Twitter attack in 2019 against four Democratic Congresswomen of colour, who had criticized his administration’s policies on immigrants, reflected clichés of racist and xenophobic hate (Serwer 2019) that have had adverse impacts on America’s global reputation. As mentioned earlier, tweets by leaders like Trump, apart from shaping how others react (Erlanger 2018), can be detrimental to country images and its soft power. Trump’s tweets chastising US attorney general Jeff Sessions for indicting Republican Congressmen in September 2018 showed the tendency to use law enforcement agencies as political instruments rather than quasi-autonomous bodies free of partisan influence. There are other examples too. After the brutal killing of George Floyd, an African American, by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020, Trump’s insensitive tweet tribute9 led to massive BLM movements across America, Europe, Canada, Brazil, Australia, and many other parts of the world, given the new media–driven blurring of borders, for decrying racism. The killing was equally responsible for shattering America’s international standing as a leader of the global community while undermining its soft power image: ‘the example the United States sets at home and the image it projects abroad can either magnify American power or detract from it’ (Haass 2020). Washington was immensely criticized for its handling of the protests, which were given exhaustive coverage, especially by China and Iran – long targeted by the US administrations for their abominable human rights records, apart from other violations. The two countries not only celebrated Washington’s ‘hypocrisy’ but also flagged Washington’s ‘double standards’ over the riots, given its brutality against the protesters and the press. While China’s Foreign Ministry posted ‘I can’t breathe’ – Floyd’s last words – to Twitter, with a screenshot of its American counterpart criticising China’s crackdown on Hong Kong (Davidson 2020), the Foreign Minister of Iran tweeted about the ‘abase[ment] of African Americans’ and scenes in American cities of ‘brutality against protesters & press’. Developments like these have led many to reflect on the effectiveness of democratic institutions in the US under Trump and have reiterated, yet again, questions regarding the US leader’s sensitivity to interests of other countries in making foreign policy decisions (Bialik 2018). Trump’s tweets were also marked in their perceived impacts on domestic and foreign audiences: ‘These are statements of the President, of the US government, so the tweets are important’ (Erlanger 2018). However, Trump was known for using tweets and social media to secure his political base (Erlanger 2018), assuring domestic constituencies of his unwavering commitment to their cause. Globally,

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though, apart from confusing the publics abroad, his tweets upset many American allies, who were distinctly uncomfortable with the blunt and ‘undiplomatic’ tone and content of his tweets, leading them to reflect deeply on Washington’s global commitments under his presidency (Wike et al. 2018). On many occasions, particularly foreign policy issues that reverberate domestically, Trump tried backing his promises with actions, making it clear that he wanted to engage with the domestic constituency and that his tweets were directed primarily at them. For example, his tweet ‘Mexico will pay for the wall!’ (1 September 2016) not only became a favourite campaign theme but was also geared to gain popularity with American voters long disconcerted with Washington’s immigration policies. Critical academic views argue that the combination of ‘unorthodox behaviour’ by a head of state and his tweets based on ‘endless conveyor belt of half-truths, distortion of facts and outright lies’ (Udupa & Pohjonen 2019: 3058) was hardly committed to building America’s global image. In fact, PD 2.0 might have lost traction once again with the alienation and isolation characterizing domestic policies of the Trump presidency, which had profound foreign policy fallouts. As mentioned earlier, while 9/11 had prompted the US to re-visit its PD strategy, particularly with the Islamic world, Trump’s diplomatic overtures appeared in sharp contrast to what was set out post-September attacks. His tweets like ‘Donald J Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on’ (December 2015) impacted PD adversely since, in a social media–driven environment, domestic and international policies are intertwined, with one influencing the other through network connectivity (Slaughter 2004: 130). The following quip summarizes the critique of Trump’s Twitter-driven diplomacy: He lays out his resentments, insecurities, and obsessions on Twitter for all to see, opening up a gold mine to foreign governments seeking to understand and manipulate the American President. (Cohen 2017) Although Trump was the most influential leader as far as earning retweets were concerned, recording an average of 20,000 retweets per tweet (Wang 2019), he also deployed Twitter as a powerful one-way broadcasting tool like many of his counterparts. With two Twitter accounts – personal (@realdonaldtrump) (his older Twitter handle) and official (@POTUS) – Trump was clearly aware of an alternate discourse on diplomacy and political communication and eager to offer his own perspective. Many argued that ‘there’s certainly a blurring of the line between personal and official’ (Wang 2019), further vindicating their growing confusion with the nature of engagement followed by the US president, who defied norms and set his own agendas. A closer analysis of Trump’s tweets leaves little doubt over why they were unconventional and norm-defying. The tweets ranged from ‘confrontational’ to ‘genial’, depending on the targeted audience and the issue. For example, on the issue of

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international trade, his tweets were notably ‘confrontational’– comprising both ‘threats’ and ‘promises’– towards several countries, such as China, India, and Mexico. The tweets can be analyzed with respect to their underlying pressure that compels leaders to carry out ‘threats’ and ‘promises’. This is primarily because global leaders like Trump consider themselves more accountable to domestic audiences (Schultz 2001). In keeping with his campaign promises, Trump was proactive in dealing with countries which he thought were engaged in unfair trade practices with Washington and as a result he deployed Twitter as a tool for ‘correcting’ the situation. Besides criticizing China for its unfair trade practices during his presidential campaign, Trump promised his voters that he would ensure that China terminates such practices, including influencing currency for trade gains. He lived up to his promise by launching the trade war with China in 2018, slapping tariffs on Chinese solar panels. Subsequently, in one of the many belligerent tweets targeting China’s unfair trade practices, he attacked Chinese President Xi Jinping, warning that China ‘would be hurt very badly’ by trade war. He also suggested in his tweets that ‘there will be nobody left in China to do business with’ (7 May 2019) if the Chinese persisted with retaliatory actions. Twitter engagement and communication reinforce the International Relation (IR) thesis that leaders indeed feel the pressure of delivering what they promise to the people (Fearon 1994; Schultz 2001). It is also interesting to note how, in response to Trump’s tweets, a conversation was generated in China and a counter-response was created in the digital media landscape. Chinese netizens resorted to a humorous approach in reacting to the US–China trade war. In a post that went viral, China and the US were each allotted scores each time they restricted access to a company from the other country in their respective markets (Wong & Liu 2019). This indicates the extent by which ‘ordinary people’ contribute to the communication flow, reinforcing a ‘participatory’ turning point within the media (Caruso 2016). In keeping with his ‘America First’ slogan, Trump used Twitter to raise trade and tariff issues with India and Mexico as well. India was criticized for imposing high tariffs on American products: ‘India has long had a field day putting tariffs on American products. No longer acceptable!’ ( July 2019). A month earlier, it was Mexico that was at the receiving end. Announcing via Twitter that the tariffs ‘are hereby indefinitely suspended’10 until Mexico ‘agrees to take strong measures to stem the tide of migration’ underlines yet again the uni-directional communication that networked leaders like Trump undertake in a new media–driven milieu with an eye on fulfilling commitments to domestic constituencies. Washington’s practice of PD indeed experienced a major shift under Trump, who paid less heed to global reputations and ignored partnerships and alliances. Trump did not hesitate to take on friends on Twitter, such as Germany, Europe’s leading power and an old ally of the US: ‘We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change’ (May 2017). Again, the larger objective behind the blunt message was to reassure his voters of his commitment to cutting America’s trade deficits and boosting the domestic economy, even if such online undiplomatic tirades hurt the country’s PD efforts.

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The emphasis was not lost notwithstanding the loss of goodwill with Germany as the German leadership was forced to reassess its ties with the US while calling for ‘realigning the Trans-Atlantic Partnership’ (DW 2018). His Twitter attacks against China, India, and Mexico reflected similar intent and the overwhelming domestic pressure factor. However, his tweets at times also showcased a ‘genial’ tone, as was evident in the case of Russia: Very good call yesterday with President Putin of Russia. Tremendous potential for a good/great relationship with Russia, despite what you read and see in the Fake News Media. Look how they have misled you on “Russia Collusion.” The World can be a better and safer place. Nice!’ (4 May 2019) The same ‘genial’ tone is observed with respect to China. Despite the trade war, Trump was also admiring of the Chinese president: I know President Xi of China very well. He is a great leader who very much has the respect of his people. He is also a good man in a “tough business.” I have ZERO doubt that if President Xi wants to quickly and humanely solve the Hong Kong problem, he can do it. Personal meeting? (15 August 2019) President Trump’s near-obsession with tweets has led scholars to argue that he not only made the world hostage to the digital bursts (Ghitis 2019) but led to the growth of a new political landscape in diplomacy, characterized by complexities, irrationalities, and continuous change, which are no longer anomalies but the new normal (Trethewey & Ashcraft 2004). The characteristics of this new digital diplomacy are often inimical to international cooperation, shared visions, and image-building processes, given the focus on narrow agendas and stratified boundaries. Blackwill (2019), though, eloquently suggests that ‘flawed individuals and policy processes sometimes produce successful results’, and like Wagner’s music, he argues, Trump’s foreign policy is better than it sounds – in what is a ‘rather rare and objective’ but optimistic appraisal of Trump’s external engagement. *** The American leadership has indeed led the way for digital PD, as this chapter has indicated. The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US had compelled its leadership to re-focus on PD yet again, and relational PD became a major thrust of the Obama presidency. While the emergence of the web and the proliferation of new media platforms were expected to help build national reputations and relationships with the others, ‘the movement of POs made up of turbulences of information in a diversified media system, and of the emergence of spontaneous, ad hoc mobilizations using horizontal, autonomous networks of communication’ (Castells 2008) damaged both with a decline in soft power.

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While it was the US President Obama who initiated new media–driven PD by including the publics in the conversation, his successor, Donald Trump, completely transformed the nature of PD and political communication, using the platforms in his own distinct style. In fact, leaders like Trump had deployed the ecology of social media networks to initiate new forms of public engagement, warfare, commerce, and relationship-building. The employment of the digital platforms like Twitter was equally responsible for creating ‘chaos incitement’ within a segment of the American electorate which had gained decisive influence and ‘voice’ through these platforms (Petersen et al. 2018). This particular dimension is discussed with respect to China and India as well in Chapters 5 and 7 and later again in Chapter 8. This chapter, while demonstrating the role of POs in shaping diplomacy, has pointed out that the mechanism has yet to respond and align to mainstream international opinions, thereby negating Castell’s ‘diplomacy of the public’ considered central to any diplomacy. In fact, online negative engagement – more visible and ubiquitous when compared with traditional channels of communication (Lievonen 2020) and the government’s agenda-driven feeds for its own survival and continuity – undermines public confidence while compromising traditional political communication, thereby disrupting digital diplomacy objectives. Trump, like many of his peers, conformed to the rejection of the democratic potential of the new media, highlighting its capacity to undermine rational deliberation through negative campaigning and encouraging populist rhetoric, in an attempt to sensationalize the public sphere and foster celebrity politics (Loader & Mercea 2011).

Notes 1 The former Trump presidency – characterized by its authoritarian tendencies, rupturing of PD, a compromised national brand – has pushed the Biden administration to change course. The US Department of State’s newly created Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy (CDP) in 2022, aiming to elevate cyber and digital diplomacy, not only underscores the new presidency’s renewed focus on new media–driven engagement but the administrations’ goal to ensure that the internet remains ‘a transformative force for learning, for connection, for economic growth’ and not a tool of repression (Dark Reading 2022). 2 The ‘Shared Value’ campaign, apart from highlighting the common values between America and the Islamic world, was a public relations initiative created by the US State Department to persuade viewers to be more aware, open and accepting of America by dispelling myths about the treatment of Muslims. 3 The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission, was set up on 27 November 2002. Its task was ‘to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11 attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks. The Commission was also mandated to provide recommendations designed to guard against future attacks’ (The Curtin University 2004). 4 According to Reinhard, Chairman Emeritus of DDB Worldwide, ‘Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand’ and they are ‘new, different and attractive. That’s as good as it gets’ (Marketing Daily 2008). Contemporary political campaigns, increasingly relying on marketing to communicate to voters what a candidate represents, turned the candidate Obama into a brand that brought ‘the ultimate simulation and powerful product’ that was the candidate’s brand (Lilleker & Negrine 2006).

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5 Washington worked with its partners in the EU and its NATO allies, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, to put significant sanctions on Moscow. 6 The Russian government interfered in the US Presidential Election in 2016 with the goal of damaging the campaign of Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, boosting the candidacy of Donald Trump, thereby increasing both political and social discord in the US. 7 For example, the US engagement of Ghana through new media platforms set in motion a dialogue-oriented bilateral communication while promoting citizen participation in shared public spaces. 8 The Free World is a propaganda term primarily used during the Cold War to refer to the countries allied and aligned with the US and those affiliated with international organizations such as the NATO and the EU. 9 The nearly four-minute clip posted on 3 June 2020 showed images of peaceful protests while Trump spoke of the ‘grave tragedy’ before moving to a warning about violence from ‘radical left-wing groups’ amid scenes of unrest and looting with Twitter, FB, Instagram disabling the video over copyright issues. In May 2020, Twitter had applied labels to two of President Trump’s tweets – one that used the phrase ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts’ for ‘glorifying violence’ and another one for being ‘potentially misleading’ about mail-in-voting (Lyons 2020). 10 The reference to Mexico’s tariffs is the zero or very low rate of duties on Mexican exports to the US.

5 CHINA New Media, Public Diplomacy, and Political Communication

Major powers like China1 and India – unrelenting for more space at the international system and anxious to rebrand themselves through Public Diplomacy (PD) (Cooper 2009) – are playing more active roles globally and are eager to be heard by the international community. Being seated at the global high table is regarded as critical to these players, and the internet is deemed a tool that can help them to manage their image and reputation (Manor & Segev 2015) abroad while altering their power equations. Notwithstanding similar ambitions, the two countries have been distinct in their adoption of digital tools. India, a robust democracy, despite several institutional and systemic weaknesses, employs Twitter, Facebook (FB), WhatsApp, and the like for shaping both PD and political communication. India’s employment of the new media platforms, which have become particularly indispensable tools during Indian elections, increasingly defines its democracy (Tharoor 2019). A ‘not free’ China’s deployment of digital platforms, on the other hand, is different in its applications and also reflective of its distinct cultural context and political background. What is unmistakable, though, is China’s transforming political culture (Liu 2017), brought about by digital technology. Officially plugged into the virtual community in 1994, China has a new media landscape that is unique for attempting to alter the social and political fabric of the country while reinforcing its PD efforts. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), pushed by the Chinese President Xi Jinping to ‘tell China stories well’, created its first diplomatic Twitter account to digitalize its PD efforts in the European Union (Huang 2021). In fact, MOFA created its first social media account – the Public Diplomacy2 Office [@外交小灵通] on Weibo in April 2011 – to ‘popularize the public diplomacy concept, introduce China’s national conditions and ideas, and interpret China’s policy and advocacy’ (Huang 2021) for domestic DOI: 10.4324/9780429298141-5

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publics. Embracing of the new media by the Chinese state and its people – the largest internet population worldwide – has no doubt revolutionized contemporary political communication in the mainland. Having blocked Western social media platforms like Twitter, Google, FB, and WhatsApp, China employs home-grown alternatives, namely Sina Weibo3 (wei means ‘micro’ and bo means ‘blog’ in Chinese and is similar to Twitter; Sina Weibo, adopted since 2009, is the most popular social media platform in China), Baidu (Chinese parallel to Google), WeChat (which ensures a more intimate public engagement, similar to WhatsApp), and Renren (equivalent to FB). These local platforms have not only been forceful in shaping PD but have aggressively shaped Public Opinion (PO – yulun dao xiang) on major global issues as well. In fact, an interesting dimension of China’s social media landscape has been the embrace of these local alternatives like Weibo and WeChat by more than 165 foreign governmental organizations, including foreign Embassies in China and even foreign political parties, to engage and interact with the Chinese netizens (Ying 2017). However, what has been more fascinating is the state’s willingness to embrace Western platforms like Twitter, despite its rejection within the country, during the last few years to reach out to the international digital global community and thereby influence their perceptions. Developing local platforms and rejecting the widely used Western platforms have been part of the overall Chinese media strategy. Based on the conviction that Western media has been unfair to China, often playing up its weaknesses, and exploiting the ‘power of the word’ (hua yu quan) to exaggerate its potential as a regional threat, while ignoring its achievements, the embrace of the same by the state for connecting with the international online public demonstrates the leadership’s pragmatism. The great power status, denied to it since the First Opium War (1839–42), had not only eroded China’s confidence and self-respect during a century of foreign humiliation but also contributed to the development of the ‘post-imperial ideology’4 with implications for diplomatic strategies. Whereas historical outcomes shaped China’s modern PD and emphasized its soft power strategy (Sinha Palit 2017), contemporary power politics and the new media landscape altered its internal and external communication approach. For a major power like China, a hostile world order uncomfortable with its ‘rise’ has compelled it to work on its global image while it struggles to shape a favourable global PO. However, given that China’s system operates ‘under the principle of democratic centralism’ implying state control (Cowan & Arsenault 2008), its international communication has been distinct and conforms to propaganda tactics. A seven-month investigation by the Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute revealed that China’s ‘rise on Twitter has been powered by an army of fake accounts’ (Kinetz 2021). These accounts have not only ‘retweeted Chinese diplomats and state media tens of thousands of times’ but have covertly amplified ‘propaganda that can reach hundreds of millions of people – often without disclosing the fact that the content is government-sponsored’ (Kinetz 2021). This chapter examines Beijing’s digitalization of PD while analyzing how technology has enlarged China’s public space, thereby forcing the state to strategize

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PO to set its own agenda. The chapter also studies the impact of digital tools on the public and how the Party specifically attempts to shape and manipulate PO of domestic policies with foreign policy ramifications. However, we begin by studying the reasons behind the state’s adoption of the new media platforms, which is interesting given the state’s strong interventionist role in guiding internal political communication and diplomacy.

Why Does the State Adopt Social Media? Some scholars identify China – an authoritarian state similar to Russia – as a Sharp Power focusing on distraction and manipulation of domestic and international political environments (Walker & Ludwig 2017). According to them, the influence wielded by these countries through specific state-driven initiatives in the spheres of media, culture, think tanks, and academia is neither a ‘charm offensive’ nor an effort to ‘share alternative ideas’; neither is the influence about broadening the debate or ‘attraction’ or ‘persuasion’ but rather for crushing dissent and suppressing political pluralism and free expression (Walker & Ludwig 2017). This strongman politics (Lee 2017; Walker 2018), pursued by many contemporary networked leaders, is an interesting dimension of the internet-enabled political environment and has already been discussed in Chapter 3 with respect to other countries. New media platforms have indeed emerged as new tools for political leaders to influence and manipulate domestic and international perceptions and for shaping conversations and narratives. In addition, disseminating a positive national image as a counter-strategy is perceived as a major responsibility of the state to manage the complex international environment (Purayil 2019). These arguments hold traction particularly in the case of China (Hassid 2015; Luo 2014), where ‘wolf warrior’ diplomats employ Twitter to ‘defend and promote the Communist-led country’ despite the platform being blocked in China (The Economic Times 2020b), thus indicating Beijing’s determination to influence the perceptions of the overseas audience. In fact, Twitter was extensively used to disseminate information on the Party’s 100th anniversary celebration in 2021 (Twitter.com 2021), targeting foreign publics and leaders. It is indeed true that less-liberal leaders have demonstrated an urgency to embrace new media platforms as powerful tools ‘to expand soft power reach in public diplomacy’ (Pierozzi 2018) in an attempt to influence global perceptions. However, what is fascinating is the fact that social media platforms are being deployed to communicate strength and project power instead in less-liberal countries. China demonstrates all of these tendencies – embracing digital media for suppressing opinions and projecting power while communicating a positive image to the global audience as well – rather tellingly. While Beijing showcases its soft power and PD efforts by adopting new media platforms to communicate with the international community (discussed a little later in the chapter), it also uses the same platforms to disseminate propaganda and crush dissent in ‘sensitive’ areas of the mainland, such as Tibet and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region bordering Central Asia (Byler 2019). Anxious to protect its

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global image in the face of criticism over its draconian security policies in restive Xinjiang and human rights violations in Tibet, Beijing relies heavily on the digital media as a tool of global propaganda as well as repression in the region. While the Chinese government built 3G networks in the Xinjiang in 2011 enabling resident Uighurs to access social media platforms like WeChat (Byler 2019), it also deployed the self-styled Diba Central Army – a Chinese patriotic group targeting other online platforms criticizing Beijing – to aggressively troll pro-Uighur groups (The Straits Times 2019), turning the region’s ‘internet as a space of surveillance’ (The Straits Times 2019). Similarly, while resident Tibetans and the Tibetan diaspora actively use WeChat for communication, those demonstrating sympathy and support for the Tibetan cause on social media are trolled and persecuted (Dalha 2019). Tibetan social media users, much like their counterparts in Xinjiang, are equally subjected to frequent censorship and surveillance by a suspicious government. While regular elections in democracies like India and the US compel their leaders to adopt new media platforms to interact with the domestic public and maintain a high level of ‘responsiveness’, ‘openness’, and ‘accountability’ (Bulovsky 2018), the motivations for conditioning and directing less-liberal regimes to use digital technology are different. According to Bulovsky, ‘the political power structure as a whole incentivizes authoritarian leaders to maintain social media accounts to bolster an image of legitimacy, even while they limit political rights’, preferring uni-directional communication. Interestingly, this uni-directional (monologue) feature is prominent in the political communication of many democratic leaders as well, as mentioned in the previous chapter. However, in the case of less-liberal leaders, they are perhaps more prone to skilfully control and frame its content. While facilitating ‘authoritarian-type’ engagement of the citizens and shaping the foreign policy discourse ‘with Chinese characteristics’, local social media platforms also allow less-liberal leaders to set agendas by regulating online content (Luo 2014; Qiang 2019). In fact, the Communist Party’s ‘increased internet control’ during the outbreak of COVID-195 pandemic was aimed globally to influence perceptions: Beijing launched an assertive external information campaign aimed at sculpting global discussion of its handling of the virus. This campaign has clear goals: to deflect blame from Beijing’s own failings and to highlight other government’s missteps, portraying China as both the model and the partner of first resort for other countries. Some of the campaign’s elements are familiar, focused on promoting and amplifying positive narratives about the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] while suppressing information unfavourable to it. (Rosenberger 2020) This agenda-setting function of the government, predicated on soft power, fits China’s Communist perception of the role of the media and its emphasis on the media’s influence in guiding PO, propagating ideologies and specific policies (Pan 2000). However, ‘the ephemeral, anonymous, and networked nature of internet communication’ renders total control by state agencies nearly impossible (Qiang 2010). This

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networked character of online communication, having enlarged China’s public space, has given rise to an active civil society, which aggressively employs new media platforms to express its opinions and alternative views while criticizing the government and its policies (Li 2020). This dimension was once again visible during the pandemic when the Chinese social media and even the official press erupted in outrage over the government’s mishandling of the virus during the early stages, revealing how fragile the Party’s control over information has become. It also highlighted the latent power of Chinese civil society (Pei 2020) which seems to have disconcerted the leadership, pushing it to employ the ‘internet police’ for threatening the publics who posted about the government’s mishandling of the pandemic (Rosenberger 2020).

Enlarged Public Space Amidst State Control? Equipped with new media and its power to inform, ‘today a much larger part of the world’s population has access to that power’ (Nye 2008), leading even less-liberal governments to engage with the public. Li Zhaoxing, the former Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs, had used the internet to interact with the domestic publics on foreign policy issues in 2003 – the first such example of online engagement in China (Yang 2016). Subsequently, such government communication helped to strengthen the state’s totalitarian character, thereby tipping the erstwhile balance (Zheng 2008) in favour of more dialogues and exchanges in keeping with the digital objective of listening to the people. While Chinese citizens have unabashedly embraced digital tools for communication, Chinese leaders have been ‘turning their information, habits, and desires into powerful levers of control’ (Qiang 2019), and in the process building the world’s ‘digital totalitarian state’ (The Economist 2016). Since Xi Jinping’s assumption of office in 2012, media policing has become a major state priority as airwaves and chatrooms have become populated with government-friendly ‘positive’ content along with stricter internet controls coming up in sensitive areas like Xinjiang and Tibet and during pandemics like COVID-19 mentioned earlier. Fake news,6 which has accompanied digital communication, has provided the Party enough grounds for clamping down on online communication in response to ethnic tensions in Xinjiang (read anti-government protests): ‘to prevent and punish the crime of spreading false information that disturbs social order, and to protect the legal interests of citizens, legal representatives and other organizations’ (Wong 2016). This government action needs to be looked at from the blurring of borders context since information transcends borders and disrupts PD efforts while hurting national brands. In 2016, a new media policy for the Party and state news was adopted: All the work by the Party’s media must reflect the Party’s will, safeguard the Party’s authority, and safeguard the Party’s unity emphasizing that state media must align themselves with the ‘thought, politics, and actions’ of the Party leadership. (The Guardian 2016)

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This led to several media crackdowns, including digital platforms, despite the attempt to combine political discipline with ‘finding explicit popular support for its continued rule’ (Creemers 2016). This dilemma is a continuum in the Chinese state and highlights its major function: to manipulate and influence PO. However, state control of media content becomes particularly challenging in the 21st-century Information Age given the robust and active online Chinese community boosted by information flow among citizens, on the one hand, and the creation of a new form of social interaction between the state, media, various professionals and intellectuals, and ordinary citizens, on the other (Breslin & Shen 2010). These dimensions are partly visible in the case of Hong Kong, where online protests portray a fascinating picture. The country – regarded by many as one country with three systems7 rather than ‘One country, Two Systems’8 – has its own peculiarities and challenges. As the people in Hong Kong took to the streets in 2019 to protest a proposed extradition bill that would allow the city government to extradite suspects to mainland China, the event marked the beginning of a protest movement that extended into 2020 (Frosina 2021), grabbing international media headlines. While the Chinese government tried to manipulate information on digital platforms like Twitter and FB (Stewart 2019) to control its spread overseas out of fear that its PD would suffer, the protests caught international attention with many world leaders urging the Chinese leadership ‘to listen to the concerns of its people and its friends in the international community and to pause and reflect on these controversial measures’ (The Guardian 2019). The movement, while amplifying the issue as a democratic crisis, appealed ‘to the potential of digitally enabled communication to nurture a sense of community based on collective, horizontal, and participatory decision-making’ (Frosina 2021). Garnering global support for the cause, the movement was even successful in generating crowdfunded media campaigns.9 This once again indicates the social media–enabled enlargement of public space and the blurring of borders thesis that the book highlights time and again. Incidentally, the blurring of borders thesis has a different side to it as internet shutdowns are ‘becoming an increasingly common tactic used by authoritarian regimes in response to protest’ (Hsu 2019). On the one hand, the common man shares online the atrocities brought upon them by Beijing for the international community to take note of; on the other, the state shuts down the internet while engaging in a massive deliberate spread of disinformation and counternarratives on the protests, attempting to influence its PD objectives. In fact, this goal of the CCP has been partly achieved as many Chinese, including its diaspora, have organized themselves in defence of Beijing’s rhetoric. The Chinese netizens, aiming to flood non-Chinese social media platforms such as FB and Instagram, posted patriotic slogans and the Chinese flag emoji to influence global perceptions in favour of the Party (Dong 2019). While this might indicate decades of Chinese nationalist education and propaganda, the unquestioning submission to power, the internalized fear of authority, and the display of aggression inherent in authoritarianism (Dong 2019), other reports suggest that there is far more public support for Hong Kong’s cause than Beijing is willing to admit as many Mainlanders have joined the Hong Kong protests (Fan 2019).

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As the online space expands in China, it also reveals the pitfalls of excessive state control that damages its global image and reputation, evident from the Hong Kong case, discussed earlier. While the leadership continues to censure and control the digital platforms out of fear that they could precipitate its demise as they did in many other countries, including the erstwhile Soviet Union (SU), the public space has also proved critical for the state. The impact of new digital technology, which ultimately brought down the SU (along with several other Communist regimes in Eastern Europe), highlights the role of modern technology in challenging states, state ideologies, and establishments that are relatively less responsive to people’s demands with overarching state controls. Decades later, in 2011, the skilful use of social media platforms contributed to the overthrow of authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. The examples compelled authoritarian regimes like China and their leaders to co-opt, embrace, and ‘adjust to the inevitable changes brought about by digital communication’ making them ‘networked authoritarianism’ (Lorentzen 2014) or ‘adaptive authoritarian’ regimes (Reilly 2012). A rapidly changing fragmented global milieu not only made them insecure but also forced them to struggle for self-preservation and retention of control and power (Bulovsky 2018). Unlike in liberal democracies, where restrictions on media are difficult (though not impossible) to impose, in less-liberal regimes with top-down implementation approaches arising from command and control, restrictions – like blocking ‘subversive and undesirable’ websites and using ‘keyword-filtering technology to censor politically sensitive information on the Net’ (Luo 2014) – are easier to engineer. The effort is much more on managing online content in a way that is conducive for the regimes. It also manages digital content in a way that often justifies its hard stands on PD and foreign policy issues by exploiting online opinion like that of the trade war with the US, discussed later in the chapter. Indeed, the digitalization of PD has underscored the blurring of borders thesis (Batora 2005), allowing diplomats to implement ‘domestic digital diplomacy’ to ‘shape and build domestic support for the government’s foreign policy’ (Huang 2021). Therefore, exploiting radical and dogmatist views of the public has, to an extent, emerged as a priority with authoritarian regimes adapting these opinions given that extremism in any form poses the greatest risk to regime stability, making their accommodation inexorable (Shirk 2008) by authorities in charge. While internet-enabled information flow and exchange of opinions on critical foreign and domestic policies seem to be shaping China’s contemporary diplomacy, it must also be reiterated that ‘the regime can still set boundaries on acceptable policy debates, the proliferation of even constrained discussions about vital issues of international security and foreign policy’ (Byler 2019). In recent years, the Chinese leadership has devoted massive resources to control and frame online content, often to guide online conversations in line with its own foreign policy agendas. Government policies have contributed to a dramatic fall in the number of postings on Sina Weibo while silencing many of China’s most important voices advocating reform and opening-up of the internet (Economy 2018). While Jessica Weiss highlights the state’s confusion over whether to ‘indulge’ or ‘repress’ nationalist impulse that

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can lead to intense online debate or spark demonstrations (Kai-Fu 2011), China’s microblogging websites, hesitant to antagonize the government, label themselves ‘Beta’ providers, implying that ‘they are subject to strict government control and censorship fearing their loss of “power” in case they cross the line or threaten the political power of the government’ (Kangliang 2011). It has been argued that ‘the regulation of online criticisms and sporadic nationalist protest according to calculations made in Beijing’ could reflect ‘the continuing strength of the Chinese government rather than its helplessness in the face of nationalist pressure fostered by the advent of new media’ ( Jie 2016). However, this control of content, overflowing communication space continuously, has been far from easy. With the online public at the centre of PD now and active in the production process (Luo 2014) – having moved away from the traditional government-­controlled mass media – they are able to resist the Party’s ability to influence PO, thereby perpetuating democratic tendencies to an extent. Microblogging sites are now providing avenues for expressing public concerns and spreading information both within and outside the mainland, sometimes even giving rise to its own ‘uncivil society’ (deLisle et al. 2016). A relevant example here once again is Xinjiang, where the Uighurs took to WeChat in a major way, using Arabic script – radically different from the character-based Mandarin – to communicate and to avoid detection. Their use of WeChat was unique in the sense that it acted as a form of coded speech that state actors were unable to decipher (Byler 2019), creating insecurity amongst the ruling elite, who, in turn, had to strategize measures for controlling its use even more aggressively.

The State and Digital Diplomacy While China’s internet revolution is regarded as the driving force for its economic take-off in the new millennium (Ying 2017), its economic reforms, ushered in 1978, set the pace for change. The Open Door Policy (1978)10 not only helped to generate economic wealth, promote education, and encourage urbanization of the Chinese economy and society but later created a demand for internet and the new media as well (deLisle et al. 2016), thereby partly transforming the state–society relationship. Subsequently, the launch of the internet in 1993 helped the state to catapult ‘the country into the ranks of technologically advanced nations’ (Shirk 2011: 1) while aiding its brand-building efforts and intensifying its diaspora engagement as part of PD over time. While Beijing is often criticized for its ‘all culture, no politics’ approach to soft power (Dynon 2014), its PD, interestingly, is essentially an authoritarian concept of psychological control, manipulation, falsification, deception, and disinformation (Jowett & O’Donnell 2012). However, the state’s practice of PD denotes propaganda as harvesting ‘flowers and applauses’ in China (Liu 2013). It forms a fundamental part of not only CCP ideology – representing Chinese intellectuals’ pursuit of national independence – but also the awakening of the public, which is ‘regarded as the result of modernization and, in turn, further promote[s] modernization’ (Lu 2015).

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In fact, its PD efforts have been praised for promoting and communicating its desired image while building relationships with other nations and their people (Wang 2006). This has become even more critical as the explosion of social media transcends hierarchical chains of diplomatic communication and draws ordinary people into the spotlight of political life (Bjola & Jiang 2015: 71), as mentioned earlier. What gets highlighted is Beijing’s distinct character in pursuing digital PD and its sustained dialogue with the public, apart from developing and spreading ‘a national discourse for global context’ (Pierozzi 2018; Yang 2016).

Influencing International Public Perception: US–China Trade War and COVID-19 It is fascinating how the Chinese state has been exploiting Western digital platforms like Twitter for shaping PD, especially with respect to Washington. The US–China trade war in 2018, in fact, provided a perfect opportunity to Beijing to recalibrate and redesign its digital PD (Huang 2021). The occasion pushed the leadership and the diplomats to actively engage in social networking, and the number of diplomatic Twitter accounts showed a sharp increase at the time (Huang 2021) for engaging with the foreign publics. Similarly, on Weibo, the MOFA reinforced its presence by creating another official account – the Spokesperson Office – targeting digital domestic publics. The effort was to ‘do a better job in telling the story of China, with its realities and policies’ and ‘make use of such platforms to facilitate exchange and promote mutual understanding’ (Huang 2021), quite in line with its soft power strategy. The MOFA, in fact, drew a bottom line for China’s global communication activities at various stages of the US–China trade war (Huang 2021). Research revealed how the Chinese diplomats, at the level of content production and distribution, artificially built an invisible content network that aligned with official statements issued by the MOFA on Weibo (Huang 2021), indicating the state’s intent to harness domestic PO on a trade dispute. Digital PD from the network communication perspective refers to ‘a communicative construct situated context and discursive patterns’ (King 2009). Thus, messages become strategic instruments for PD actors in building agendas, projecting images, and gaining legitimacy and credibility. The US–China trade war and the subsequent cooling-off situations were utilized to frame the events accordingly. When the US and China signed the Phase 1 agreement, the moment was seized upon by Chinese Embassies around the world to not only project the occasion as a win-win situation for both powers but also showcase that international cooperation was initiated by the Xi administration (King 2009) and was a major focus of the government. The attempt was to emphasize dialogue and negotiation – two critical elements of soft power – and then trumpet it globally. While the Chinese Embassy in Saudi Arabia tweeted in Arabic its endorsement of the US–China trade agreement, other Chinese missions and diplomats reacted to this event by underlining the core idea that equality, cooperation, and win-win are the best and right choices for China and the US (King 2009).

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It is also very interesting to note how China changes its online messages – its tone and content – depending on the target audience. For example, unlike during the US-China trade war situation where the government targeted to influence the overseas audience, on a domestic issue like Xinjiang, on which the US had raised human rights concern during the 13th round of US–China economic and trade consultations, the strategy adopted was very different. While attempting to downplay the dispute on Weibo, the Chinese diplomats used neutral, moderate, and subtle expressions on Twitter to frame this dispute for arousing online nationalism. Chinese diplomats, in an effort to propagandize, ‘retweeted posts presenting Beijing’s efforts and contributions to Xinjiang’s modernization, multicultural respect and protection, and people’s happy life to demonstrate the success and achievements of China’s Xinjiang governance’ (King 2009). China’s digital PD definitely appears to be an effective tool to showcase its soft power targeting the international public by framing overseas events to advocate the government’s focus on cooperation and collaboration on the one hand and helps to fan domestic nationalism on the other. The outbreak of the pandemic provided yet another occasion for Beijing to engage in PD given that the pandemic was proving particularly damaging for its global reputation. In fact, as part of its digital diplomacy, senior Chinese diplomats have been urged to ‘amplify, spin and outright false messages’ such as on the origins of COVID-19 (Huo & Maude 2021). Encountering an increasing global criticism over claims that it intentionally misled the world by covering up the true extent of the virus in Wuhan, China decided to use Twitter to rebut foreign criticisms. Data from the official Twitter accounts of various Chinese Embassies and spokespersons revealed that the official Chinese Twitter activity went into overdrive as a result of the pandemic, indicating China’s desire to influence and shape the debate around the virus targeting the foreign publics (Alden & Chan 2021). The microblogging site was embraced as an effective ‘crisis messaging tool’ not only for pushing out swift and targeted rebuttals in real-time to a global audience (Alden & Chan 2021) but also perhaps for setting agendas by shifting focus to other countries’ management of the crisis and pointing out their failures.

Nation-Branding and Stretching Soft Power along with ‘Influence’ Like many other contemporary states, Beijing engages in brand-building exercises employing technology. After all, nations are attentive towards the way they are portrayed (Anholt 2006) given that a positive international reputation results in global admiration and is instrumental in expanding exports (Rocca 2015), thereby contributing to overall national economic growth. The Summer Olympic Games organized in 2008 was among the early major occasions in recent history entailing global promotion of the China brand. These mega sporting events provide modern states ‘a great branding opportunity’ to promote their image and re-brand themselves for global consumption (Anholt 2006). Using ‘the Olympics as a marketing tool to increase its global brand equity’ (Berkowitz et al. 2007), China aggressively

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employed digital media to communicate its ‘democratic, open, civilized, friendly, and harmonious’ image to the world (China Business Review 2008). Hosting other mega events like the Shanghai Expo in 2010 also served to establish Shanghai as a brand city in league with other prominent global cities and plant China firmly on the global communication map. While mainstream tourism websites were identified for carrying digital advertisements of the Shanghai event, key content portals and other popular websites were linked with the official Expo 2010 website for reaching global consumers (Vilagkiallitas dna). Apart from employing new media platforms to communicate its charm, the Chinese leadership had embarked on real-time marketing, such as the Winter Olympics in 2022 (Simply Mandarin dna) to effectively portray China as a strong global brand. Nonetheless, despite these efforts, questions remain over whether China’s brand is improving as new technology gains more traction in its contemporary diplomacy. Although pegged ‘the fastest growing nation brand in absolute terms’ (Mingjie 2017), the Freedom on the Net 2018 gave the country a grade of 88 on a scale from 1 to 100 (100 being the worst). As long as the government poses as a ‘surveillance state’ (like in the case of the Uighurs), curbs democracy protests (like in Hong Kong) and cracks down on dissent (like in Tibet), it’s global image and reputation will be far from ‘soft’. Instead, the international community will continue to regard the Chinese brand as repressive and authoritarian, despite its efforts to communicate otherwise. The government’s constant efforts to develop software programs and hardware to comb through images, videos and speech recordings in the WeChat histories of a targeted person in seconds (Byler 2019), further hits China’s soft power, with cynicism continuing over its intentions and objectives, particularly in a mega project like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).11 While China brands itself to create a favourable image, its BRI is a classic example of Beijing trying to impress upon the global publics its ‘non-threatening character’, once again as part of its soft power strategy. With wariness among the international community gradually mounting over the geo-strategic implications of the BRI – launched in 2013 to strengthen infrastructure, trade, and investment links between China and other parts of Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East – Beijing decided to recast it from a thought leadership position (Grimley 2017). Well designed to appeal to the international public, the Digital Silk Road has become the focal point of the BRI and controlling the flow of data is ‘increasingly important for shifting the balance of geopolitical power in China’s favour’ (Kitson & Liew 2019). Emphasizing the project’s resolve to pursue ‘a better cross-cultural dialogue, broad shared interests’ and a ‘deeper understanding of different localities in a world map of civilizations’ (Deqiang & Zhengrong 2017), the BRI is an effort to expand China’s soft power while strengthening its PD (Boboc 2017). Thus, communicating right has become critical for the Chinese leadership to successfully implement the BRI, while apprehensions of a negative response have motivated the authorities to harness both social and traditional media to communicate China’s benign intent behind the BRI to influence global PO. For instance,  in

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South Asia, the Chinese Ambassador in Maldives is visibly active on both social and traditional media to counter debt-trap diplomacy12 allegations (Custer et al. 2019) and to advance the BRI from a soft power perspective. Similar tendencies are visible in Nepal, where digital outreach has helped Beijing handle negative reactions regarding its growing economic and military clout in the country (Custer et al. 2019). In fact, hashtags have also been utilized by the Chinese leadership to create collective conversations (Giglietto & Lee 2017) given the BRI’s controversial international perception. Beijing launched its first online Friends of #BRI forum in February 2021 to share knowledge, experience, opportunities, and understanding of the grand project to develop lasting collaborations with each other. It has also been pushing Belt and Road Bedtime Stories – a series of films produced by China Daily targeting overseas children through its YouTube channel, a platform inaccessible from mainland China but accessible outside – to publicize the BRI. This is yet another example showing the state’s willingness to embrace Western platforms like YouTube to fight criticisms and to demonstrate its benign intentions to the global community. Despite Beijing’s efforts to recast BRI more favourably for international consumption, sceptics continue to perceive it negatively, and many prefer to call it a ‘new Marshall Plan’ (Fabricius 2017). Interestingly, the project also underscores a one-way communication – a dimension of new media landscape which is visible across all networked countries. China’s deliberate influence operations to generate support for projects like the BRI has disconcerted many. With a dedicated department – the United Front Work Department (UFWD) (also called ‘magic weapons’ by President Xi) – seeking to ‘guide’ foreign actors and states (Heath 2018), China’s political interference, in other countries with respect to the BRI, has become real. This is specifically visible in countries like Kazakhstan where Beijing’s PD seems to have ‘succeeded in shoring up the support of Kazakhstan’s political elites’ but ‘has fallen short of its aspirations to strengthen ties with the average Kazakh’ (Custer et al. 2019). Kazakh authorities – in response to anti-China social media campaigns by domestic nationalist groups over the project – set up an information ministry to control such spread, particularly those related to Beijing. This was obviously motivated by the rapid increase in China’s investments in Kazakh’s key strategic sectors, which now have exceeded those by Russia (Custer et al. 2019). The BRI’s target is not the foreign audience alone but the domestic audience as well. This is in line with Putnam’s (1988) explanation that foreign policy decision-making is influenced by a two-level game between diplomacy and domestic policy which is responsible for pushing leaderships, at least occasionally, to communicate with domestic publics on foreign policy matters. The BRI is an appropriate example highlighting the criticality of the domestic audience in Chinese diplomacy and foreign policy-making. Apart from communicating a benign perspective on the BRI to the international community, Beijing has been mindful of engaging domestic constituencies on the subject through the Belt and Road is How promotion video on official Chinese social media channels (Koetse 2017). The People’s Daily

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has used another video, The Belt and Road-We Make it Happen, to communicate China’s international efforts to the local Chinese, an objective also sought through wide sharing of the We promo on Weibo, specifically targeting the youth.13 This official, digital communication with the domestic as well as the foreign audience is not exclusively Chinese but a tendency visible in the Indian case as well, as discussed in chapter 7. The efforts underscore not only Rising and major Powers’ reliance on new media tools for communication but the imperative to engage with the domestic audience as well to consolidate and strengthen the leaders’ positions while generating public support for their policies. Digitalization of diplomacy has also increased the significance of harnessing diaspora networks to cultivate the nation brand in contemporary PD. China’s engagement of its overseas population to actively spread Chinese civilization (Ren 2009) abroad has been under way since the late 1970s. The expectation to cultivate the overseas Chinese from a soft power angle to promote ‘friendship between China and the people all over the world’ (Ren 2009) has further strengthened the state–diaspora relationship in contemporary China. Although new media technology became a mainstay in the management of public perception and PO worldwide, the MOFA was relatively late in deploying the digital platforms for diaspora outreach. It in only in 2018, to cultivate ‘vessels’ capable of advancing China’s global agenda and national interests (Sun & Yu 2017), that MOFA joined WeChat along with Weibo. By developing a constellation of new tools and methods (Bjola dna), the Ministry soon connected with the modern diaspora. Also, the digital engagement was driven by the opportunity to engage with millions of people, in real time, and at minimal costs. In fact, Cooper (2009) argues how the emotional attachment of the overseas Chinese to the mainland is exploited to effectively employ them for nation brand-building exercise around the world – only made easier with the proliferation of digital tools. Confronted with a ‘significant pressure from the international community over its political and business practices that only adds to its difficulties in dealing with its domestic issues’ (Buckley 2019), Beijing began deploying digital platforms to bolster ‘the government’s positive image through dialogue and interaction with the public’ in seeking the diaspora’s assistance in branding China and shaping and influencing domestic PO (Purayil 2019). Transmitting the right messages to the diaspora is critical in this regard. This is also connected to the state’s attempt to showcase a policy shift necessitated by the dramatic expansion in the number of overseas Chinese citizens and foreign investment prodded by its ‘Going Out’ strategy14 undertaken at the turn of the century. With the number of overseas Chinese rising, online policy debates highlighting public attention to citizen safety abroad have compelled the leadership to support those debates and policies by taking proactive and responsible actions. A media scholar explains that ‘sometimes there is just a simple social incident overseas; however, the [Chinese] media will grab hold of the incident, exaggerate it and portray it as a foreign policy issue’ while the government often combines political rhetoric, institutional innovation, and even foreign policy shifts to deal with those reports and take appropriate actions (Reilly 2012).

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Exploiting Public Opinion for Shaping Diplomacy China, aiming to be a great power on its own terms, reflects certain distinct characteristics in dealing with international issues, including the use of PO amongst others, as an effective tool for advancing and setting state agendas. It has been observed, with respect to mass nationalist protests and demonstrations, that Beijing has preferred to give a ‘go ahead’ for employing them as bargaining chips in international negotiations in the past ( Jie 2016) but without compromising its own position of power or demonstrating its weakness. This is particularly visible in the case of the US. According to Weiss, the CCP allowed anti-American protests in 1999 to gain ‘international benefits of signaling resolve’ (Gries et al. 2016) based on its international calculations. China has indeed come a long way since then in using nationalist protests to justify its positions on certain matters of diplomacy and foreign policy. In the Digital Age, citizen views and sentiments expressed online are difficult to rein in – a fact noted by the state and utilized contextually. Notwithstanding media censorship and content control, PO, facilitated by the rapid proliferation of new technologies, has been gaining traction and is ‘becoming an important factor in China’s policy process’ (Shirk 2011), leading many scholars to argue that PO has become instrumental in diplomatic decision-making (Li 2014). In fact, evidence even suggests that Chinese nationalist online sentiments against the US have been exploited by the Chinese state to give way to a particular conversation fitting its own objectives. Public activism has indeed necessitated that the state educates its citizens regarding the international environment, external relations, and foreign policy concerns, thereby attempting to shape their opinions in line with the state’s national interests ‘as defined by the regime’ ( Jie 2016). It has been noted that online PO in matters of diplomacy and foreign policy is usually employed by Beijing to fulfil and set certain political and international agendas. Deployed as a bargaining chip for negotiating international agreements and treaties ( Jie 2016) or in grave international situations, this particular tool has proven effective. A strong PO can be projected as either constraining the leadership’s flexibility or supporting its positions in international negotiations or crises. A recent academic work analyzing Chinese online opinions about the US showed that attitudes towards the global hegemon are ‘negative’ when the focus is specifically on its foreign policy actions, perceived ‘antithetical to China’s national interests’ (Guan et al. 2018). This online ‘negativity’ was used by China in its trade battle with Washington in 2018 not only to demonstrate that Beijing was prepared for the escalation of the trade conflict (Liu 2018) but also to signal to the domestic public the determination of an all-powerful state refusing to succumb to Western pressure. Chinese netizens were effusive in displaying their support for their government’s ‘hard’ position, and the online Chinese communities declared their willingness to ‘fight to death’ and ‘play the game in US-China trade war’ (Zhou & Xiao 2018), thus indicating how Chinese domestic perceptions are influenced in matters of economy, concerning a major power like the US. While Realists argue that nationalist POs can limit the government’s ability to engage in effective diplomacy which in turn could tarnish China’s global image

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( Jie 2016), the Chinese leadership strategizes them for achieving other larger objectives. A strong nationalist opinion has dominated China’s Japan policy as the Party elites demonstrate a growing responsiveness to nationalist demands. During the 2012–2013 Diaoyu Islands15 controversy, flare-ups of anti-Japanese (and anti-government) sentiment – both online and in the streets of urban China – were followed by a clear toughening of the CPC’s Japan policy (Gries et al. 2016: 162). According to Reilly (2012), these ‘hard’ or ‘reversed’ positions taken by the state in line with what people desired reflect its turn towards an ‘adaptive authoritarian regime’, avoiding repressing popular nationalist online discontent since the state’s claim to legitimacy depends on its nationalist credentials. While many other scholars claim that online POs have compelled the leadership to act nationalistically (Reilly 2012; Shirk 2011), it is also likely that online protests and petitions could not have occurred or been sustained without tacit state support, which effectively maintains its control over such nationalist outbursts ( Jie 2016). Perhaps, scholars have rightly argued that to assume that the state ‘reversed’ its position on critical foreign policy matters in the face of online protests is ‘presumptuous’ ( Jie 2016). *** China’s use of the new media is peculiar and attests to their less-liberal type use. This chapter specifically highlighted the Chinese way of using new media tools to further its global aspirations in keeping with its national objectives. The digitalization of Chinese diplomacy continues to evolve, making the Chinese state, to an extent, sensitive to people’s online activism and occasionally aligning with the nationalist pressures in matters of diplomacy and foreign policy, as mentioned. However, this alignment needs to be looked at in line with the perspective that the leadership might be deploying the new media platforms to its advantage, pushing its agendas both internally and globally. The chapter also exposes the paradox inherent in China’s promotion of its soft power and its efforts to perpetuate authoritarianism with the global perception of China remaining ambiguous despite social media largely shaping its PD and political communication. With the world continuing to grapple with China’s rising power combined with nationalist flavoured posts like ‘You are nothing without the Motherland’ in 2013 calling upon the people to be wary of ‘Western anti-China Powers’ (Ying 2017), the dominant perception of China remains that of a ‘surveillance state’ (Qiang 2019) trying to reassert its dominance globally and manipulating new media tools to practise its distinct digital diplomacy.

Notes 1 Many scholars label China a ‘Returning Power’ dictated by a different psychology – ‘a newly-prosperous PRC demands to be respected, not lectured by those who oppressed it. Misapprehending the nature of the problem will exacerbate it’ (Woon 2020). 2 The term PD, which first appeared in a CPC academic journal, was proposed by Zongyun Zi (Huang 2021).

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3 Sina Weibo, just one of the various Weibo service competitors in China (others include Tencent Weibo, Sohu Weibo), limits the length of the post to 140 characters, as in Twitter. However, it can express more than three times the content message of an English tweet of 140 roman characters, given the service benefits from the high information intensity of the Chinese language. Weibo also allows users to write an entirely new 140-character tweet as an additional comment which are listed under the entry, like a traditional blog. All discussions are referenced by a single Weibo entry, making the tweets look more like FB posts with an interactive comments section, and can therefore be seen easily in one place (Kangliang 2011). 4 A term coined by Manjari Chatterjee Miller, the concept clearly indicates a sense of grievance about the past, an insistence on entitlement in the present as restitution for the humiliation and exploitation of the past and a search for respect and status (Bajpai & Pant 2013). 5 According to many, it was the CCP which should be blamed for the spread of the pandemic from Wuhan to other parts of the world. The Party not only hid the outbreak of the virus for weeks but silenced doctors and jailed journalists for speaking about the virus (Rogin 2020), once again demonstrating the Party’s authoritarian tendencies during crises by deciding to hold back information while coming down heavily on the people for thwarting opinions and expressions. 6 In China, the synonymous term for ‘fake news’ is ‘rumours’ (Benny & Xu 2018). 7 According to Friedman (2019), China is one country with three systems: Beijing is the sovereign power; the conservative pro-Beijing Hong Kongers – who dominate the local administration and accept the limited democracy rules inherited from Britain; and the more urbanized, full-democracy-aspiring, internet-savvy youth in the streets. 8 Hong Kong actually functions under ‘One country, Two Systems’ arrangement that marked the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, and as a result, has experienced relatively little online censorship. That agreement has given Hong Kong residents ‘substantial civil liberties and the rule of law under their local constitution’, according to the independent watchdog organization Freedom House (Hsu 2019). 9 In June 2019, a crowdfunding drive was able to raise hundreds of dollars comprising of 20,000 donors who printed full page advertisements in more than 10 major international newspapers (Political Science 2019). 10 Ushered in by Deng Xiaoping, the Open-Door Policy was a new economic measure which opened up China’s economy to foreign investment. 11 The USA and several other European countries have expressed concerns about how the BRI is being implemented (Haenle et al. 2019). 12 Debt-trap diplomacy refers to the strategy used by China to lure or trap developing, or underdeveloped countries like Africa to borrow money to be used for much needed infrastructure projects. 13 The splash created on social media around the CCP’s centenary celebration in 2021 was yet another reminder of the leadership’s intent to re-connect with the youth. The #China Communist Party Founding 100 Anniversary not only appeared over 11.7 billion times on Weibo but also on other platforms such as WeChat and Baidu – all designing their websites to mark the Party’s centenary (Brar 2021). 14 The ‘Go Out’ policy is the People’s Republic of China’s current strategy to encourage its enterprises to invest overseas. 15 Diaoyu or Senkaku lies in the East China Sea between Taiwan and Okinawa.

6 INDIA’S DIGITAL PUBLIC DIPLOMACY AND POLITICAL COMMUNICATION The Evolution (Pre-2014)

History indicates that ancient states communicated and interacted purposefully with one another whether it be in culture, religion, or trade. Communication characterized civilization and has marked its evolution since ancient times. Ancient India was no exception. Sustained interactions across borders defined India’s history of communication, long before diplomatic communication even emerged in the lexicon of social sciences. While traditionalists long deprecated foreigners, India’s interactions with the world have been an important part of its civilization (Sen 2005). Indian culture, as it has developed over the years, not only was prepared to absorb material and ideas from elsewhere (Sen 2005) but was also willing to share them with the others. While Sanskrit came to India from abroad in the second millennium BCE, Panini1 – who was responsible for systematizing and transforming Sanskrit grammar – was of Afghan origin. Consequently, significant remnants of India’s influence have been visible in Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, and several other Southeast Asian countries in their art, civilization, and culture. India engaged in trade with Mesopotamia, Egypt, Central Asia, and Afghanistan during the Indus Valley Civilization, reflecting ancient India’s willingness to interact and communicate with the rest of the world. After independence, communication continued to dominate India’s political and social fabric, and India’s first Prime Minister (PM), Jawaharlal Nehru, was hailed as a leader who ‘rules a country of continental size and bewildering diversities with a microphone’ (Malhotra 2014). Subsequently, as the international landscape began to transform rapidly, diplomacy and engagement emerged as critical components of statecraft for influencing communication. The internet has been an important consequence of the current information environment, bringing with it the abilities of new media platforms to break the elite’s dependence on traditional media’s (especially those in the forefront of making and providing DOI: 10.4324/9780429298141-6

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opinions, such as prominent intellectuals, scholars, and public leaders) for credible information. Along with the ICT revolution, alternative information ecosystems have emerged to fill the void left by a citizenry less inclined to believe the traditional media (Baum & Potter 2019). Western states have long stood out for influencing and utilizing the ‘global information environment’ while communicating its brand to the outside world to attract tourists, trade, and investment (Ham 2001; Javier 2006). Contemporary India, symbolizing the increasing embrace of Public Diplomacy (PD) by a non-Western state, adopted similar efforts in this regard, as did countries like China (as discussed in the previous chapter). In fact, Asian countries are particularly engaged in practicing PD through a decisive alternative narrative on development and progress, specifically targeting the West (Hall & Smith 2013). For example, China has been aggressively employing PD (Melissen 2005a; Zhao 2015) to rebrand itself as a ‘benign’ power – antithetical to the international perception – to cultivate international respect (Zhao 2015). Its distinct deployment of social media to achieve PD goals was discussed at length in the previous chapter. In fact, Chapter 3 also discussed other leaders, including less-liberal ones, employing digital tools in an attempt to transform global perception of their country and their leadership. This chapter, studies the evolution of India’s PD efforts, delving into the early deployment of the new media in Indian diplomacy and highlighting technology’s early role in enlarging the public political and civic space in India. The chapter examines how digitalization of diplomacy was undertaken by the Indian authorities, while the citizens embraced the digital platforms. They were together responsible for transforming the very idea of diplomacy and communication even before PM Narendra Modi – the second-most-followed politician globally on social media2 – came to power in 2014. Modi not only adopted new media tools in his own distinct style but reshaped PD while revolutionizing communication with the domestic and the overseas audience. The next chapter exclusively discusses how the Indian state under Modi’s leadership employs new media platforms to recalibrate PD and refashion political communication while strategizing technology to influence and manipulate public perceptions in its own marked way.

India’s Public Diplomacy 1.0 The evidence of early PD from Asia is quite novel and is in sharp contrast to Washington’s practice of PD, which was aimed primarily to overwhelm the former Soviet Union’s (SU) global influence during the Cold War. In countries like India and Indonesia, where tragic consequences of colonization led to the development of ‘post-imperial ideology’3 – PD was adopted to meet a different objective. Decades of colonial subversion and the ‘victimhood’ psyche (Bajpai & Pant 2013) led PD to provide the former colonies with an opportunity to pursue anti-colonial agendas and spread specific ideas aiming to undermine European influence in the region and throughout the ‘Third World’4 after independence (Hall & Smith 2013). Despite being ‘still in its infancy’ (Anholt 2008), Asian PD has grown at a fast pace given the benefits that

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can flow from positive engagement (Nincic 2011). As PD developed, promoting soft power also became an ‘essential purpose of PD’ (Batora 2005; Melissen 2005a; Nye 2008) with the latter becoming the main feature in the external engagement of Rising Powers like India. Casting positive images worldwide became particularly important: ‘the projection of India’s soft power is very much a part of the processes of public diplomacy’ (Mishra 2016; Pant 2015; Suri 2011). In fact, India’s economic liberalization efforts in the 1990s were partly geared towards image-building and strengthening relational bonds, confirmed by former PM Manmohan Singh: This was not merely an external economic policy, it was also a strategic shift in India’s vision of the world and India’s place in the evolving global economy. Most of all it was about reaching out to our civilizational Asian neighbours in the region. (Gupta 2011) The effort was to transform India’s foreign policy from ‘hard to soft power’ in order to reach out to its immediate neighbourhood while ‘trying to become a ‘benign’ hegemon of the 1990s’, from being a ‘malign’ one in the 1980s (Wagner 2005). The early digitalization of Indian PD efforts thus needs to be looked at from a soft power perspective, which was also largely linked to its great power ambitions. As India’s foreign policy became more pragmatic by focusing on economic and strategic interests, its attitude towards soft power began to mature. While a section of India’s strategic community continues to believe that India does not need to overemphasize its soft power (‘India does not feel the need to struggle for acceptance and friendship among the international community’; Masood 2017), the government seems to have thought otherwise. Although the Public Diplomacy Division (PDD) in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) is one among a host of players engaged in deliberate or incidental projection of soft power, its activities in this area are particularly ‘aimed at a conscious amplification of our soft power potential’ (Suri 2011). In a world still dictated by old-school rules with hardly any space for new players in the international system (Holsti 1991), Rising Powers, including India, have been eager to make their presence felt, and figuring at the high table is an important agenda for them to pursue. Gaining acceptance in the international hierarchy (Holsti 1991) and rebranding themselves through PD became important objectives to be achieved (Cooper 2009) as they aspired to be ‘recognized and understood globally’ (Brown 2011). Many scholars have also pointed out that India’s pursuit of PD is a reaction to China’s adoption of PD in its foreign policy (Dutta 2011; Hall 2012). However, officials of the PDD have pointed out that the External Publicity Division (XPD) has long been the precursor to the present PDD, which was formed in 2006, predominantly to relieve the overburdened XPD and create a department dedicated to effective global engagement in the changing media environment (Natarajan 2014). Also, with the Western media often projecting India as a ‘recalcitrant state’ and thereby damaging its global image (Dasgupta 2011), crafting a new image through PD was critical if India wished to emerge as a major global

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player. New media platforms – ‘location-independent’ and the ‘new great equalizer’ (Seib 2013) – were expected to enable India to communicate its stories better and explain its positions on certain important issues to the global and regional audiences (including domestic) in an effective way. With India’s economic and strategic growth expanding its national ambitions, its leaders and diplomats realized the strength of new technologies in transforming diplomacy and politics (Hall 2012; Ritambhara 2013; Seib 2010). Consequently, PD 1.0 began to gain immense prominence in India’s foreign policy for creating a ‘greater understanding of India and its foreign policy concerns both within India and abroad’ (Suri 2011), and a new literature on India’s PD began to emerge (Dutta 2011; Hall 2012; Natarajan 2014; Seib 2010). India, seen as ‘exotic’, ‘chaotic’, and geopolitically undefined with an ineffective PD (Seib 2010), begun shifting course, like the others, by moving away from the ‘club’ model of diplomacy – where diplomats primarily interacted with their peers and other government officials – towards a ‘network’ model of diplomacy, marked by efforts by the same diplomats to create and maintain relationships with actors outside of the core diplomatic community (Heine 2006). This once again affirms John Robert Kelley’s (2014) argument that diplomacy’s purview is no longer an exclusive club. Economic compulsions, political priorities, and the resulting blurring of borders accompanying the digital media revolution, along with a certain degree of peer pressure, drove India to adopt Web 1.0 in its external engagement on the assumption that an active deployment of technology would enable India to project its ‘power of attraction’ and help in ‘correcting and adapting to inadvertent or private one-way communication flows’ which ‘if left unanswered, could undermine transnational relationships and national reputations’ (Cowan & Arsenault 2008). These initiatives were accompanied by traditional efforts like ‘more high-level visits, telephonic conversations and informal contacts, using pegs like private visits, religious pilgrimages and [travel stopovers] in order to make personal assessments, exchange views, [and] resolve problems’ (Sikri 2009: 17) for recasting a new India. With idealistic foreign policy attitudes being shed fast, the leadership was determined to connect deeper with the global public to communicate its aspirations and cultivate goodwill. As India experienced the hybrid phase in connective action networks around 2011, India’s political communication began to transform (Pande 2015). By this time, internet and online communication had become significant in political communication, running parallel to the legacy media (Pande 2015) while facilitating Arab uprisings. With PD becoming ‘a central activity which is played out across many dimensions and with many partners’ (Leonard 2002) and several governments around the world deploying technology for communication, information-gathering, and promoting specific values at home and abroad (Bradshaw 2015), India, soon decided to embrace the new media platforms. The government around this time started to believe that ‘it is in their national interests to “explain” their growing impact on the rest of the world by “engaging, informing, and influencing key international audiences”’ (Brown 2011). Consequently, the MEA pioneered the institutionalization of digital technology and opened the @IndianDiplomacy

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Twitter handle in 2010 to communicate with interlocutors and foreign publics while connecting with the Indian diaspora. The government, including India’s defence forces (Anandan 2013), began using social media to engage publics and cultivate soft power, even before digital platforms had gained traction in India’s PD efforts and political communication. On 15 September 2012, the INS [Indian Naval Ship] Sudarshini of the Indian Navy undertook the first nine-nation voyage of the ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Brunei, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangkok, Singapore, Malaysia, and Myanmar, leaving out Laos), tracing the ancient route taken by Indian mariners to Southeast Asia. An interactive website was launched by the Ministry of Defence on the occasion to closely track the voyage and post descriptive blogs by the skipper and the crew, making it the first occasion where the Indian Navy co-opted technology to promote a diplomatic naval voyage (Anandan 2013) for strengthening its relationships with the Asian neighbours. While traditional media long dominated the Indian PD discourse, this occasion was an example of the marked shift towards social networking on behalf of the establishment to effectively communicate in a world which was increasingly being defined and dictated by the new technology.

Ministry of External Affairs and PD 1.0 Employment of digital media platforms in directing political conversations by Rising Powers like India, Brazil, and South Africa has been remarkable given their rapid growth in these countries and their contribution in shaping a distinct PD. Worldwide communication landscape has changed fundamentally as Public Opinion (PO) assumes a new salience in the current technology-driven environment. A virtual public sphere, characterized by collaborative networking platforms, has given rise to a networked public that challenges official discourses and shares alternative perspectives and opinions (Loader & Mercea 2011), thereby driving closer unofficial and official discourses. With new media enabling the public to increasingly ‘feed’ into foreign policies, communications scholars have noted how better understanding of them ‘not only at the rational but also the emotional level’ (Graham 2014; Wang 2006) has become critical in the new PD framework. These factors, amongst others, have driven the Indian state to engage in agenda-setting, apart from brand-building itself, to revive India’s global image (Suri 2011). The PDD only complemented and strengthened the state’s efforts at brand-building: Efforts by nations to win support and a favorable image among the general public of other countries, usually by way of news management and carefully planned initiatives designed to foster positive impressions. (McQuail & Deuze 2010) It also helped in addressing ‘the challenges posed by this rapidly changing global environment’ as terrorism, climate change, and international trade negotiations began influencing domestic politics (Suri 2011). Despite being a somewhat late

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starter in adopting digital media for achieving PD objectives,5 India has been eager to establish a dynamic presence in cyberspace to deepen its engagement with the youth, create effective new channels of information, and provide valuable feedback shoring credibility (Suri 2011). The government was quick to realize that seeking new audiences like politically engaged young Indians, members of the Indian diaspora in the West, and key opinion-makers in India’s immediate region or the resource-rich developing world (Hall 2012) was important in the new ­technology-driven international environment, where people had both information and power. Consequently, Indian diplomacy began to strengthen its presence on social media, and several Indian Embassies opened individual Facebook (FB) pages while MEA spokespersons and several diplomats engaged in official social networking (Natarajan 2014). In fact, there was an equal attempt to connect MEA’s ‘productive but disparate activities with a deliberate move towards strategic communications’ (Suri 2011) in the early years. From a communicative perspective, visuals and emotions are also critical in digital communication as they attempt to inform, shape, and define the efforts by Foreign Affairs Ministries to engage with the public. Taking a cue from advantages associated with new media platforms, the PDD (incidentally, the first government department in India to develop a mobile app for smartphone users) began hosting a dedicated YouTube channel containing documentaries showcasing the country’s cultural resources, highlighting partnerships with neighbours and others. The MEA’s deployment of digital tools through a new PD website and channels on FB, Twitter, and YouTube won the PDD recognition for innovative employment of social media in government (Annual Report 2010–11: XVI). Appendix I captures many of these initiatives undertaken by the Division from time to time. Social media accounts of the MEA and the engagement they have facilitated with the public indeed represent important milestones in India’s political communication strategy, emphasizing a relational approach of PD, as noted by Zaharna (2018) in a different context. However, given the much easier availability of information in the networked world, foreign publics – major targets of PD initiatives – are also able to make their own judgements based on how countries adhere to their own values (Natarajan 2014). This further pushes the boundaries of PD, making diplomatic initiatives more complicated and challenging. While communicating with the foreign public has been an important PD agenda, the government has been just as keen to engage with the domestic audience. As mentioned earlier, the internet, by blurring borders (Batora 2005; Huijgh 2011; Slaughter 2004; Zaharna 2018) and providing a larger and diverse array of political information, holds a mirror for citizens to better reflect on actual performances of their governments (sometimes comparing their own with the others) – thereby enabling users to better discern and reflect on the workings of democracy and governance in their own countries (Snow 2014). The reflections of citizens are expressed on social media, transmitting them across borders and influencing and impacting foreign perceptions. This aspect of domestic social media affordances is discussed in the next section with respect to the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and India against corruption (IAC) in 2011.

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The MEA, perhaps in its first attempt at holding a mirror (Snow 2014) up to the public – deliberately or not – began to disseminate information through the website it launched in 2003 (Appendix 1). With regular Twitter updates on consular assistance and achievements, targeting the diaspora, its attempts to strengthen bonds between the diaspora and their host countries, facilitated by the foreign missions, is conspicuous. However, these websites hardly showed intense public engagement. In fact, contrary to Daryl Copeland’s (2013) argument that diplomats are experts in creating narratives and employ digital media to provide citizens and the diaspora fresh insights into their nation’s diplomatic goals, visions, and policy priorities, the Indian Embassy websites, even now, appear more like bulletin boards.6 There is little evidence that the Embassy websites direct real conversations with the publics (diaspora or otherwise) on domestic political issues in India, and appear more to be ‘speaking at’ digital publics (Copeland 2013). As Henry Kissinger points out: New technologies make it easier to acquire factual knowledge, though they make it harder in a way to process it because one is flooded with information, but what one needs for diplomacy is to develop a concept of what one is trying to achieve. The internet drives you to the immediate resolution of symptoms but make it harder to get to the essence of the problems. It’s easier to know what people are saying, but the question is whether diplomats have the time to connect that with its deeper historical context. (Seib 2012) While the MEA, the Indian Embassies and the consulates adopted social media for achieving PD objectives, Indian political leaders, who equally became important players in diplomacy, showed an enthusiasm to embrace the digital platforms. In 2009, when computers in government offices were still not allowed to access social media platforms like Twitter, Shashi Tharoor, then Minister of State in the MEA, engaged in social networking to communicate directly with the people (Desai 2017). Although the communication was one-way, his adoption of social media was revolutionary at the time. While his tweets on current affairs, including his overseas travels (such as to Haiti in the aftermath of a destructive earthquake), created controversy both at home and abroad, given that a minister was seen ‘bypassing’ traditional media to engage directly with the public (Desai 2017), he was the first minister to do so. His embrace of technology set in motion the subsequent digitalization of diplomacy by the MEA. Soon enough, the @ IndianDiplomacy Twitter handle was established, and this was followed by a FB page, a YouTube channel, and a BlogSpot page under the same moniker. The handle @IndianDiplomacy and its deployment of the hashtag ‘#digitaldiplomacy’ – also a global hashtag used by other foreign governments and international agencies for official engagement – continue to be prominent in disseminating information on India overseas (Sachdeva 2017). On 20 October 2010, India’s PD website went live, utilizing the full range of the web tools, and India’s digital diplomacy formally took off as an

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important tool of statecraft, enlarging functions of the diplomats who became, like their counterparts, more accessible than ever before (Sinha 2018b). Apart from Tharoor, who was a political leader, Ambassador Nirupama Rao was the first diplomat to pioneer the use of Twitter as a tool of Indian PD during the early years of digitalization of diplomacy in India. As the Indian Foreign Secretary in 2011, Rao used social media extensively to facilitate evacuation of Indians from Libya, in response to direct calls for help, after a Civil War broke out in the North African country. Her Twitter diplomacy to organize ‘Operation Homecoming’ is a pertinent example of early effective digital diplomacy by India (Thakur 2012), underscoring responsiveness and accountability. Rao was one of the first Indian diplomats to sense the significance of Twitter, during episodes of crisis, for filling the communication vacuum. Communicating effectively during crises influences a nation’s global brand and reputation, as mentioned in Chapter 4. Positioning new media as a successful crisis communication PD tool (yet again), the MEA launched a dedicated Twitter handle, activating ‘OpGanga Helpline’ (@ opganga), to evacuate the Indian students stranded in Ukraine during the Russia– Ukraine conflict in 2022 (The Tribune 2022), establishing Twitter once again as a crisis communication tool.

New Media Enlarges Public Space As the government prepared to adopt new media for more effective communication with the public in an attempt to overhaul PD by using state-of-art technology and communication techniques, social media had already started to facilitate an alternate communication flow. This section focuses specifically on the new media’s role in enlarging public space before and immediately after 2010 – the year that India launched the @IndianDiplomacy Twitter account for greater public engagement.

Online Experiment in Action: Mumbai Terror Attacks in 26/11 Social media’s greater affordability compared with traditional media (Strandberg 2013) and its explosive deployment by people of all age, race, gender, and socio-economic status (Gustafsson 2012) became abundantly visible in November 2008, when Mumbai witnessed a series of terrorist attacks. While demonstrating the destructive use to which new communication technologies could be put – the invading terrorists carried blackberries, cell phones, and a satellite phone with them – social media was responsible for firmly placing ‘ordinary people’ in the communication flow, underlining, yet again, a ‘participatory’ turning point (Caruso 2016). The character of communication during the 26/11 Mumbai attacks conveyed a message somewhat similar to the September 11 attacks in the US, which drove home the fact that foreign perceptions have domestic consequences (Zaharna & Uysal 2015). Whether this led to the overhauling of Indian PD efforts, similar to those in the US, is difficult to underpin; however, it did enlarge the Indian public space, and critically PD was further reinforced.

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Within minutes of the 26/11 attacks, blogs and social media networks like Twitter were overflowing with news, photos, and eyewitness accounts – highlighting citizen journalism on the one hand and the proactivity of social media in initial reporting on the crisis, touted as a ‘first’ (Nayak & Krepon 2012), on the other.7 A group of bloggers based in Mumbai used Metroblog – a news wire service focusing on everyday life of Mumbaikars – to share updates with its readers and the wider world, and a new Wikipedia page on the attacks was promptly created and subsequently refreshed for days (Beaumont 2008). The new online public also created a Google Map showing the location of buildings and landmarks involved in the incident and provided links to news and eyewitness accounts (Beaumont 2008). The developments reflected communication of a domestic crisis by the domestic public to a greater audience, including the international, highlighting the blurring of borders thesis – a dimension that was conspicuous in Hong Kong (discussed in the preceding chapter) – while reaffirming the rise of a new genre of netizen public – both producers and consumers of information – driving governments, including in India, to routinely call for and promote citizen engagement ( Johnston & Taylor 2018). As pointed out repeatedly, the new media environment has indeed been responsible for obfuscating lines between national and global issues (glocal), thereby bridging international and domestic divides as communication through Twitter, FB, Instagram and the like gains enormous traction. Scholars like Boileau (2016) argue that FB not only is the closest account of a public sphere but is inclusive and equal for all through its network. Half broadcast and half participation, it allows an abundance of information to flow with the capacity to interact with this information through a flexible feature set (Boileau 2016). While the digital Indian publics during the Mumbai terror attacks captured the scenes and amplified them abroad, similar incidents abroad have been carefully transmitted to the domestic publics to set agendas, as was highlighted in earlier chapters. Shahi Tharoor had rightly pointed out: ‘[I]n today’s world, you cannot meaningfully confine your public diplomacy to foreign publics alone. In the current media environment, whatever message any government puts out is also instantly available to its domestic audience on the internet’ (Hall 2012), making digital communication more uniform. Going forward, one can argue that digital platforms are not only essential for interacting with foreign publics but are equally useful for domestic engagement, which could easily get transferred to foreign politics (Harris 2013). With engage­ ment being ‘a new paradigm for public relations in the 21st century’ ( Johnston 2014), the Ministries of Foreign Affairs around the world are having to deploy digital platforms extensively to communicate with their resident and non-resident populations alike. However, engaging the foreign publics not only gets more critical in the new media environment but also becomes easier for garnering domestic support for foreign policy achievements ( Johnston 2014) – an aspect that will be studied at length in the next chapter. Apart from highlighting the blurring of borders thesis, whereby social media platforms disseminate information and shape PO within and outside, the terrorist attacks in Mumbai vindicated the coexistence and simultaneous functioning of the

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traditional and the new media, (their fusion), also called the ‘hybrid’ communication system (Chadwick 2013). For example, the traditional international media, such as the CNN, used video footage and photos sent in by people on the ground in Mumbai to corroborate their reports. TV and radio channels, as well as newspapers, equally and aggressively tracked the blogosphere to cull more information (Beaumont 2008). While it could be argued that there was a functional coexistence of both medias during the crisis, it needs to be pointed out that in India it took a catastrophe like 26/11 for the government and the media industry to evolve new frameworks for coverage (Mirchandani 2018). In fact, notwithstanding the ‘fusion’ and one complementing the other, it was the digital media which emerged as a powerful tool that shaped and influenced the global discourse around 26/11. Digital media also reduced dispassionate and passive deliberation over policy while trained and seasoned journalists – familiar with customized and somewhat sanitized reporting – faced competition from amateur reporters and bloggers who questioned official versions of events (Baum & Potter 2019). In fact, during the early days in India, technology, apart from revolutionizing political communication and challenging mainstream media, increasingly defined mass movements like the Anna Hazare–led Anti-Corruption Movement in 2011,8 when the internet penetration rate in the country was just about 11 per cent (Schmidt 2013). The movement corroborated further that social networking sites enabled fostering of ‘interpersonal trust and cooperation that spreads between and among individuals in these social networks’ (Carlisle & Patton 2013).

Social Media and India Against Corruption The IAC campaign on social media took place at a time when the global environment, facilitated by the digital media, was active on protests, such as the Arab Spring, changing the status quo. Following the news of the Arab uprising, there was a significant level of unrest amongst India’s civil society ‘to bring about a revolution, to clean up the polity and to get rid of corruption in India’ (Rodrigues 2019).9 The campaign clearly personified the ‘emergence of spontaneous, ad hoc mobilizations using horizontal, autonomous networks of communication’ in which there was a movement of PO, made up of information – not restricted by time, space, or national borders – in a diversified media system (Manor 2019; Castells 2008). The new media was largely responsible for spearheading the IAC campaign, led by social activist Anna Hazare, and fits well with Donk’s (2004) suggestion that ‘the rise of new media has increased communication between people all over the world and the internet’, allowing them ‘to express themselves through blogs, websites, pictures, and other user-generated media’. Movements like the IAC offered the public the right to participate instantly on the internet, and its applications provided them a power to show their concern, which was just ‘within one click away’ (Parashar 2012). These occasions highlighted the growing public space and

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its influence on the global public space marked by digital activism by citizens who were immensely empowered by the new technology. With the internet offering revolutionary potential for social movements to go online by circumventing ‘official’ messages carried by the traditional media and speaking directly to global citizens (Parashar 2012), digital media was ‘democratizing’ public communication while strengthening social mass movements. By creating a media phenomenon, digital technology helped garner support for ‘Team Anna’ by catapulting IAC into a global phenomenon (The Centre for Internet & Society 2011). The movement also reached the diaspora through social media platforms, indicating the power of technology in reaching out to overseas Indians and its ability to garner support for a mass movement like the IAC. Not only were young professionals living in New York, Singapore, London, and Hong Kong tweeting, posting on FB, organizing, and gathering to talk about Hazare and his cause, but some even took time off from their careers to fly to India and physically support him (The Centre for Internet & Society 2011). This was indeed an interesting time in India when the new media platforms were gradually but steadily gaining traction in political and social communication, which until then had been dominated by the traditional mainstream media. In this technology-driven media landscape, the traditional media (800+ television channels, thousands of news publications, and hundreds of radio stations) continued to play a major role in covering the campaign, thus demonstrating its unique position of power in a ‘transitioning society’ (Rodrigues 2019). The campaign had rapidly increased television viewership, which was significant given the acute revenue stress for television channels following the global financial crisis (Rodrigues 2019).10 The print media was equally responsible for covering the campaign with the Indian news media having a good track record in building an agenda on the theme of corruption by investigating wrongdoings, and building on investigations done by official watchdog bodies during the time (Ram 2012). The mainstream media enthusiastically covered the Anna Hazare movement, believing that in Anna Hazare they saw a mass movement that they thought reflected a change in India, and a new moral call for politics. And, both in their different ways were initially swept off their feet. As a result, they failed to question the contradictions within the movements. (Rodrigues 2019) Thus, in the new digitized information landscape, the mainstream traditional media, in a bid to demonstrate its resilience, not only continued its traditional task of facilitating agenda-setting (Lippmann 1922; McCombs & Shaw 1993) but also helped to disseminate information about the campaign on a regular basis like the new technological tools. Digital PD, emerging as the diplomacy of the public and not of the government, was thus beginning to intervene in this global public sphere, ‘laying the

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ground for traditional forms of diplomacy to act beyond the strict negotiation of power relationships by building on shared cultural meaning, the essence of communication’ (Castells 2008). Although the IAC was responsible for mounting an uprising using FB, Twitter, text-messaging, and YouTube against a string of corruption activities involving several government officials and political leaders, the leadership of the time was still unable to estimate the power of technology (Lakshmi 2011). Despite the enlarged public space that was brought about by the new media, the government needed time to adjust to the internet-enabled communication system: ‘we didn’t use social media as effectively as they [activists] did’ (Lakshmi 2011). Interestingly, while the ruling government failed to recognize the digital media’s potential to unite, India’s first social media political party, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), was formed in the backdrop of the IAC movement in 2011 (Naidu 2013). Tweeting that ‘the political revolution in India has begun’ and promising to end corruption from the system by putting forth a model of alternative politics, AAP’s digital outreach urged the Indian diaspora to join an international network of groups that provided support for the Party in subsequent successful election campaigns. Inspired by its anti-establishment alternative with a positive agenda for change (Webb 2019), digital media undoubtedly played a critical role in the formation of intense individual attachments to the Party. What is fascinating is the subsequent digital engagement of the diaspora which soon began to gain phenomenal traction under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),11 led by Modi (as will be discussed in the next chapter). The loyalty to the Party, which was visible with respect to the AAP, later increased manifold for the BJP with digital technology dictating Indian political communication and PD with Modi coming to power at the Centre in 2014. While digital platforms empowered the common man in India and even gave rise to political parties like the AAP, it also demonstrated the Indian state’s early uneasiness with respect to online free speech and its reactions. In 2012, Ravi Srinivasan became the first Indian to be arrested for a tweet.12 The arrest of the soon-to-become poster boy for online free speech in India (Roy 2014) not only led anti-corruption campaigners to question the motive of the police and the Congress Party but was also able to attract international media; the BBC interpreted his arrest ‘by the state as a weapon against dissent’ (Roy 2014). While underscoring the power of social media and the accompanying hope to change society by the public in its early days in the country, it also points to the gradual decline of India’s global image where dissent was gradually emerging an anathema for the government. It equally highlighted the liberal state’s fear of technology, discussed in greater detail in Chapters 3 and 5 with respect to less-liberal states. *** This chapter has discussed India’s first brush with new media platforms which had actually begun in 2008, when the Indian public initiated conversation via digital media to spread information and disseminate real-time updates during the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai. While highlighting the blurring of borders thesis whereby terror updates transcended physical borders, the Mumbai terror attacks

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also underlined the glocal nature of incidents and events. In keeping with the new media–driven landscape, ordinary citizens emerged as the new producers of news, playing a parallel role in shaping perceptions at home and overseas. The incident not only changed the very nature of political communication but also diminished the role of the traditional gatekeepers. This perhaps partly drove the Indian state to embrace technology for communicating with both the domestic and foreign publics, including the diaspora, whom they realized had ceased to be mere consumers of official-fed news and government propaganda. As technology started to dominate India’s political environment, the state increasingly aspired to be a major power and pursue a pragmatic foreign policy predicated on soft power. The Indian state was determined to adopt an online interaction in a media landscape where the connected domestic publics had become the main targets of foreign policy (Hill 2003: 279), in a way undoing or challenging traditional PD. While ‘questions persist about the extent to which digital diplomacy makes a significant difference in how states pursue their foreign policy objectives and how they manage the relationships between them’ (Bjola 2016: 298), the new media platforms have indeed transformed India’s PD approach while revolutionizing its political communication. Although India was late in digitalizing its PD like many others – given the apprehension amongst the diplomatic community regarding its capacity to effect change enabled by technology which would heavily challenge their exclusive status (Kelley 2014) – the government soon co-opted the new media platforms for engagement. Realizing its potential in the new media landscape, India, as a Rising Power, was steadfast in adopting the social media tools for communication with tailored messages and information targeting both domestic and international audiences. While citizen activism became predominantly visible, first during the 26/11 terror attacks and subsequently during the IAC campaign, the government realized its advantages and disadvantages. The PDD embraced digital diplomacy and, by its online presence and interaction with internet publics, represented not only a ‘new India’ but also an Indian state in tune with the realities of the Web 2.0 (Natarajan 2014) which it was eager to communicate globally. Deemed refreshingly non-sarkari (Natarajan 2014), its adoption perhaps democratized diplomacy in keeping with its democratic credentials while empowering the public equally in the early days. Subsequently, building a large digital following for spreading messages via reactions through the network (Keller & Königslöw 2018) started to characterize modern Indian leaderships as well – a dimension that became visibly stark under PM Modi. The next chapter will study the Indian state’s greater and more distinct integration of new media platforms in official communication while cultivating PO in matters of PD.

Notes 1 Panini, the father of linguistics, was an ancient Sanskrit scholar from the Indian subcontinent. 2 Narendra Modi, with a total audience of 110.9 million on FB, Twitter, and Instagram, is the second most followed politician in the world on social media after the former US President Barack Obama in 2019 (The Economic Times 2019).

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3 China, as mentioned in the previous chapter, is also identified as suffering from ‘post-­ imperial ideology’ given its history. 4 The term ‘Third World’ was coined during the Cold War to imply countries which were neither aligned to the West or the East (Communist). Subsequently, the term began to be used for developing countries of Asia, Africa and the others. 5 The US and China have also been relatively slow and reluctant in using digital technologies in diplomacy as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively. 6 However, it is equally true that the consular aid (MADAD) functions along with the branding exercise on the Embassy websites. Both ‘aid’ and ‘branding’ have together gained traction with some real help provided to distressed Indian citizens and the diaspora in different crisis situations. 7 India’s social media sites like Twitter were inundated with a huge volume of messages the moment news broke out of the terrorist attacks. One tweet from Dupree appeared to be coming from inside one of the hotels: ‘Mumbai terrorists are asking hotel reception for rooms of American citizens and holding them hostage on one floor’ (CNA dna). In fact, tweets were being posted at a rate of around 70 every five seconds upon the news of the disaster breaking out (Beaumont 2008) providing eyewitness accounts and updates. Flickr was equally deployed for providing news on the terror. It was host to a set of photos from Vinukumar Ranganathan, who had grabbed his camera and headed out into the street, taking a set of pictures on the night – containing 112 photos with dramatic scenes captured in one of the districts, Colaba – in the aftermath of the attacks. Twitter meanwhile provided a constant stream of information through its search function, allied to the use of tags #mumbai being the favourite as the situation developed (Arthur 2018). This was also one of the early usages of hashtags during crises in India. 8 The IAC was an anti-corruption movement which began in 2011. It was a series of demonstrations and protests across India intended to establish strong legislation and enforcement against perceived endemic political corruption. The movement was named among the ‘Top 10 News Stories of 2011’ by Time magazine (Khanna 2019). 9 Tensions had been building in 2010, when scams and scandals repeatedly made news in the mainstream media, discrediting the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA government led by the Congress Party) in particular, and politicians in general. Some of the scams, worth billions of dollars, were made public by official watchdog bodies such as the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) and the Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG) during the time. It was alleged that the Central Government had bent rules and allocated 2-G spectrum licenses to mobile phone companies at a cheaper rate in return for huge kickbacks (Rodrigues 2019). 10 As per the Television Audience Measurement (TAM) data for the week ending 20 August, the genre share of Hindi news channels had witnessed an 87 per cent jump in the viewership, while the English news genre saw a boost of 74 per cent (Rodrigues 2019). 11 The BJP’s origin lies in Bharatiya Jan Sangh formed in 1951 by Shyama Prasad Mookherjee. After the state of Emergency in 1977, it merged with several other Parties to form the Janata Party. It defeated the Congress Party in 1977 Lok Sabha Elections, and after three years in power, was dissolved in 1980 to form the BJP. 12 On 20 October, Srinivasan tweeted to his 16 followers that Krati Chidambaram, a politician belonging to India’s then ruling Congress Party and son of Finance Minister P Chidambaram, had ‘amassed more wealth than Vadra’ (Roy 2012), the son-in-law of Sonia Gandhi, the President of the Congress.

7 INDIA’S DIGITAL DIPLOMACY AND POLITICAL COMMUNICATION (2014 ONWARD)

The stellar importance of Public Diplomacy (PD) in International Relations (IRs) and communication in the era of new media is evident as more and more governments institutionalize digital technology for communication, information-gathering, and promoting values at home and abroad (Bradshaw 2015). In fact, Rising Powers like India are seen to be increasingly co-opting new media platforms for their diplomatic engagement. With technology historically regarded as an opportunity to overcome traditional disabilities and for catching up with the world (Mazzarella 2010), the rise of Information Technology has helped the Indian government to utilize the social media platforms to “explain” their growing impact on the rest of the world by ‘engaging, informing, and influencing key international audience’, and ‘believing it is in their national interests’ (Brown 2011) to do so. While the fundamental essence of digital revolution has remained the empowerment of publics and the transformation of political communication, the technological revolution has changed India’s media strategies as well. Technology has redefined engagement and adaptation with relational approaches becoming a major focus. While the new technology has provided India with an opportunity to showcase itself as a major player and a responsible power,1 the online space has also become a contested turf defined mostly by its broadcasting ability (Boileau 2016) – a dimension that has been prominent worldwide. The new media landscape has also witnessed the emergence of digital populist leaders, keen to make an imprint on global foreign policy, asserting their presence on the world stage. Populism loosely referred to as a relationship between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, helps us to ‘understand and explain a wide array of political actors’ (Albertazzi & McDonnell 2008) who have become increasingly conspicuous in democracies around the world. Not only is populism grounded in anti-elitism and anti-pluralism, but it also calls for a radical break with the past, disdaining and DOI: 10.4324/9780429298141-7

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marginalizing institutions mediating between the leader and the public, such as the traditional mainstream media (Plagemann & Destradi 2019). These leaders ‘no longer need the traditional media to distribute their messages’ and are deliberately seen to be undermining the media’s messenger role to inoculate themselves against potential critical reporting (Baum & Potter 2019). It is in this context that this chapter analyzes the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) rise to power led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi through effective employment of the Web 2.0 for diplomatic engagement. While the new media landscape has indeed enlarged public space and compelled the government to embrace digital communication in its PD and foreign policy, Modi, like many of his peers, is also known for confining his communication to his core supporters, whom he reaches directly through closed social media ecosystems. The chapter, while assuming that new media platforms are capable of influencing and manipulating – subject to the presence of the traditional media (competitive, robust, independent, and well entrenched), and an uncensored internet (Pande 2015) – examines India’s proactive deployment of digital tools for brand-building exercises, engaging with foreign publics, including the diaspora, along with the domestic constituency to refashion PD and achieve foreign policy goals since Modi’s coming to power.

Brand Modi In the technology-driven new media political environment, popular and charismatic leaders like Modi have emerged with media-genic personalities, distinct in their oratorial skills and using emotional, slogan-based language. Similar to the role that social media played in branding the former US President Barack Obama (discussed in Chapter 4), the digital media played an active and aggressive role in brand-building Modi as well as new actors wish to be ‘recognized and understood globally’ (Brown 2011). Projected as a global business leader and cast in the mould of mythical Hindu icons to appeal to large sections of the majority, Modi was branded through astute employment of digital tools fitting well with those of other stars and celebrities of his era (Rai 2019b). The brand was directed at ‘generating, maintaining, sharpening, and strengthening favourable perceptions among members of the public to affect their personal political attitudes and, by extension, decision-making in strategic ways’ (Strachan & Kendall 2004). The character of branding on social media, as described above, also reflects the modern-day voter who ‘will support the candidate or Party that most closely matches their personal ideas and values, not always the candidate that aligns with their political views’ (Lilleker & Negrine 2006), while selfies characterize a leader’s online conversation and popularity. Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is not the only global leader known for his selfies. Modi’s ‘selfies’ are equally popular and a prominent feature of his online communication, vindicating that ‘selfies and other social media tactics can help shape the image of the BJP leader’ (Taylor 2015) like many of his counterparts. It has been argued that the #SelfieWithModi from the 2014 elections to the Indian Parliament was an ‘example of interaction and reciprocity …

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that got people talking about the leader as one of their own. Anyone could take a selfie … and could then themselves be part of a hashtag thread they shared with their leaders’, thus ‘shaping the citizenry’s imagination of its political leader’ (Pal et al. 2016). Turning political leaders into brands appealing to the public, and helping them to touch an emotional chord with their citizens, the extensive and aggressive deployment of the new media platforms resulted in fast dissemination of the leader’s messages. ‘An emotional identification with them, binding together sections of society into a people, and the people to the leader’ (Sinha 2017) not only helped to create the Modi phenomenon but also came to represent a celebritization of Indian politics, denoting a structural shift in political communication (Rai 2019b). With online social networking equated to social capital and described as ‘the influence [which] potential leaders develop because of membership and participation in social groups’ (Baran & Davis 2010), the BJP and Modi’s efforts to engage through Web 2.0 is not accidental, nor is it a result of the BJP coming to power and Modi becoming the PM and being bestowed with the onus of engaging with the rest of the world. Modi was an avid user of social media even as the Chief Minister (CM) of Gujarat, particularly during his second term in office (2007–2012). A dedicated member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)2 – the organization articulating and spearheading the Hindutva project – Modi’s electoral campaigns in Gujarat, both in 2007 and in 2012, reflected strong Hindu nationalism; his supporters even feted him Hindu Hriday Samrat (‘Emperor of Hindu Hearts’). After Gujarat, image makeover was vital to BJP and Modi for pulling off the 2014 Lok Sabha (lower house of the Indian Parliament) elections. The makeover was essential for resonating with a large and diverse audience, many of whom were critical of Modi’s role as CM during the Godhra riots in 2002,3 which had established him as an ‘international political pariah’ (Doherty 2014). The failure of the BJP during the 2004 parliamentary elections, which followed soon after Godhra, was partly responsible for pushing the Party to embrace digital political communication to emphasize its ‘desire for development’ (Nigam 2011) targeting the youth, the urban middle class, and the diaspora. The communication included delivering the unfulfilled promise of ‘India shining’ (Kaur 2016) which would enable Modi ‘to compose a people beyond Hindutva’ (Sinha 2017). However, ‘enterprise Hindutva’ – ‘a mediatized form of Hindu nationalism shaped largely by the affordances of social media and the cultural practices surrounding them in urban India’ (Udupa 2018) – has remained a prominent theme with the BJP since its electoral success in 2014, and digital tools have been aggressively employed to communicate nationalism to the targeted audiences. The Party workers and sympathizers’ pro-policy postings, tweets and messages: disseminating missives endorsed by top Party officials that are designed to stoke tension between the Hindu majority and Muslim minority communities’ (Findlay 2020), have often compromised India’s brand and global image. This is an interesting policy posture since it has often conflicted with the larger pan-Indian global brand-building exercise that the BJP government has assiduously tried to cultivate through digital tools. During the image transformation, BJP was careful to project

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Modi as a national leader and a nation-builder – neutralizing the sense of religious extremism embedded in his identity – by shifting the focus of his vision towards economic development (Price 2015) from an identity confined to the narrow domain of provincial Hindu fundamentalism (Sinha 2018b). Building Brand Modi by mobilizing new media was fundamental to the campaign that saw BJP and Modi winning elections to the Indian Parliament in 2014 by an overwhelming majority. His ubiquitous brand was employed to skilfully epitomize a ‘capitalist dream-world dressed up in a Hindu cultural nationalism that the aspiring middle-class roots for’ (Kaur 2015). The success of the strategy was in elevating brand Modi beyond the BJP by creating an identity synonymous with the nation ( Jaffrelot 2015). Powered by digital communication, the brand made Modi an acceptable political choice for liberals and conservatives alike in India while positioning him as a global leader. The transformation was the outcome of a well-thought-out strategy comprising relentless and rapid communication of messages, including visuals of Modi, on new media platforms. The MEA’s Twitter handle and Facebook (FB) page witnessed a 400 per cent jump (Ministry of External Affairs 2014) following his entry in office in mid-2014. The evidence underscores the role of technology in the making of brand Modi and the concomitant importance attached by the Party and his government to co-opt digital tools for communication. Right after stepping into office, Modi engaged actively with the global community, acknowledging greetings from counterparts on Twitter, setting the stage for a new phase of diplomatic engagement by shifting the ground rules of its PD (Sinha 2018). Brands, though, notwithstanding their appeal, can incur damage during difficult conditions. The Modi brand was no exception. It was adversely affected during the COVID-19 crisis, when many argued that brand Modi had failed to capitalize and grow in stature while leading the fight against the virus (BrandWagon Online 2020). With the digital media actively reporting and deliberating on COVID-19, and the crisis being seen as brought on by a ‘hapless government’, a ‘flailing state’, and an ‘absent administration’ (Mahapatra & D’Souza 2021), the pandemic pushed antiModi discourses online, underscoring the power of the digital public, which can be unsparing to leaders, especially during crises. These impressions, however, appear to have moderated considerably with India’s successful administration of vaccines to its people and its emergence as a global supplier of COVID-19 vaccines.

Prime Minister Modi, Digital Diplomacy, and Political Communication As mentioned earlier, the BJP and Modi’s deployment of digital media during the 2014 election was an example of the use of technology to soften ‘hard’ edges of his image to help offset the concern that India’s middle classes might have had about voting for a firebrand socially conservative sectarian (Giuffrida et al. 2018). As a leader relying extensively on digital media to get across messages to the targeted audience – whether overseas or domestic – Modi, along with his Party, sought to activate citizens’ political orientations, mobilize them, and recruit them into

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active political participation through various electioneering campaign strategies (Strandberg 2013). In fact, Modi earned accolades from the FB leadership as the platform hosted him for an in-person engagement at its headquarters in 2015. Beamed live around the world, the event held up India under Modi as an example of how modern governments could institutionalize social networks to establish contact with the world and its people. The same year, the PM was dubbed the ‘social media PM’ by the BBC (The Economic Times 2019). Modi’s engagement with digital media had begun well before 2014. By taking up digital communication in 2009, Modi4 coerced the legacy media to follow his lead in agenda-building on issues important to the BJP and the Indian public (Rodrigues & Niemann 2017) and made ‘Indian politics inclusive by allowing citizens, who were traditionally excluded from politics due to geography and demography, to gain direct entry into the political process’ (Rao 2019). This included the diaspora – a community actively and digitally engaged by Modi since becoming the PM. In 2012, just a few months before the Assembly elections in Gujarat (incidentally, 2012 was also the year Modi expressed his intent to run for the office of PM), he chatted live on Google+ Hangout, fielding selected questions from around the world and shaping a ‘new’ PD where the public, essentially domestic, were the key targets of diplomacy. It was the first time in India that a major leader was online, talking face-to-face with the public raising questions with #ModiHangOut (Vaidya 2012). This was also an effort to democratize and revolutionize political communication by a leader eager to listen to the ordinary people.5 While many criticized his move to marginalize the traditional media, arguing that he disempowered the mainstream news media and its role as the Fourth Estate (Malik 2014), others endorsed his embrace of technology to connect with the public. Modi’s later digital communication, though, has been criticized for being uni-directional: ‘Modi’s one-way communication in relation to mainstream news media continued online on Twitter, where he did not retweet or reply to others’ (Rodrigues & Niemann 2017), underscoring what might be described as the broadcast nature of his digital interactions that were largely visible with respect to other leaders discussed in Chapters 3–5. Not only were his policy pronouncements of demonetization of the Indian currency in November 2016 (notebandi)6 employing digital tools more reflective of monologues as opposed to the earlier example of engagement, but listening too became the ‘missing half of communication’ experienced by many other states (Macnamara 2018).

Soft Power and Engaging the Diaspora Even though the Indian nationalist movement had made initial efforts to forge bonds with the diaspora,7 the engagement of the overseas public (or non-resident Indians, or NRIs) has been a noticeably prominent priority of the BJP (Kapur 2010). Post-independence, India adopted ‘a civic, territorial nationalism and a secular inclusive state which did not consider the emigres nationals and therefore, avoided maintaining ties with them’ (Kapur 2010). However, the Modi government

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has redefined the concept of diaspora and built it on ideas of blood ties and kinship. Extending ‘the idea of nationhood beyond the constitutional parameters’ (Varshney 2016), the overseas Indians have been actively engaged by Modi since coming to power. His significant push across new media platforms to reach out to the diaspora and the others around the world, attempting to touch an emotional chord with them, embodies an approach drawing together appeals to cultivate soft power with relationship-building and image management through outreach to broader social networks in targeted countries (Hayden 2018). Modi’s landslide victory in 2014 was contributed to by an Indian diaspora of 30 million, who were skilfully cultivated deploying new media platforms (Hiro 2015) and who made Modi ‘a part of the winning narrative of the Hindu diaspora in particular’ (Shankar 2019). The BJP’s overseas arm – the Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP) – was able to induct overseas Indians into its campaign machinery by deploying new media platforms through meticulous planning, and present a spontaneous exuberance of several overseas Indians for Modi – ‘a leader with a millennial’s mind for viral content’ (Smyth 2019). This attempt to generate diaspora support was repeated in the 2019 parliamentary elections (Shankar 2019). The sizeable Indian diaspora – particularly its more affluent sections in the US, the UK, Canada, Singapore, and Australia – not only was engaged to create social media buzz around Modi’s re-election but was also cultivated to resonate their influence ‘with India’s own aspirational youth, making them powerful social media influencers’ (Shankar 2019). Indeed, the efforts of the BJP in this regard have always been to harness the Indian diaspora to reap electoral benefits since ‘if you get that excitement on Facebook, that will have a psychological impact’ in India (Shankar 2019). Given the blurring of borders thesis, discussed variously in previous chapters, using digital tools for political campaigning has relevance in PD as the diaspora has become ‘a core component of foreign policy initiatives’ and ‘a vehicle of India’s soft power’ (Singh 2017). With Twitter allowing leaders and political actors to directly engage with followers and publics at home and abroad on foreign policy issues (as highlighted in the preceding chapters), the handle has equally facilitated framing of appropriate messages to maximize electoral gains. A pertinent example is the vast majority of OFBJP ranks who are members of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh – the foreign arm of the RSS – responsible for recruiting volunteers from the US to travel to India for campaigning during the elections in 2014. There were others who ‘made or sent at least 200 calls and text messages every day from the US’ to reduce abstention rates among middle or upper-middle class friends or relatives during the election (Hiro 2015). Diaspora engagement is also geared towards mobilizing funds for the Party. The idea of a new India – which Modi has been resolutely communicating online to the international audience – can successfully translate the diaspora’s transnational support into national monetary gains without requiring cerebral engagement (Gulati 2017). This is reinforced by two factors: the BJP’s long association with diasporic communities and the unique format of Modi’s diasporic events, which are designed to entertain (Gulati 2017). Engagement has also been slanted in a relatively

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‘high-profile’ fashion for the diaspora in the West, more specifically the US. The challenge of this approach remains in the deeper and wider engagement of the heterogeneous Indian diaspora, which, unlike its Chinese counterparts, is varied in social, economic, and demographic characteristics (Sinha 2019b). Tweeted as India’s ‘permanent ambassadors’ by Modi, members of the Indian diaspora have also been deemed critical in flagship economic and social initiatives like the ‘Make in India’,8 Swachch Bharat! (Clean India!), and Digital India campaigns – all of which are PD tools for communicating a new India to the world. The message has been made apolitical, with an emotional appeal, for reaching out to the masses, including the diaspora, thus influencing and shaping public discourses and setting agendas, at home and overseas, around themes that the BJP and Modi feel would generate broad-based support for government policies. These development-­ oriented initiatives, especially the ‘Clean India’ campaign, while being agenda-building efforts (Rodrigues & Niemann 2017), are also aimed at appealing to the younger, middle-class Indians, apart from the NRIs, both being groups appalled by the filth that disfigures much of India (Harriss 2015). The contemporary engagement of the Indian diaspora also involves tailoring consular services to help diaspora groups in times of need, thus emphasizing the soft elements of diplomacy. Consular crisis communication has proven to be a significant part of Modi’s diaspora engagement, and consular diplomacy has benefitted immensely from data analytic capacities of digital technology, helping it to remain connected with relevant citizen networks (Hayden 2018). India’s evacuation operation in Yemen in 2015 was lauded by the international community.9 The utilization of social media at the time, disseminating information in real time, with then External Minister Sushma Swaraj responding to online queries with little lag, grabbed headlines. Twitter was constantly used by the MEA to share and communicate updates about the crisis (The Society of International Law and Policy 2015). The evacuation of stranded Indians from Ukraine in 2022, and the role of the dedicated OpGanga Twitter helpline (The Tribune 2022), was once again a reminder of India’s use of social media as a crisis management tool and demonstrates the state’s deployment of Twitter for effective communication during conflicts and crises. With the government’s continuous aim to remain engaged with the diaspora, even beyond crisis situations, the Pramit (Pravasi Mitr – overseas friends) app was launched in New York in 2019 to connect better with overseas Indians in the US and to strengthen the response management system of the Indian Consulate. The government – by relaxing visa norms, easing business rules, and merging the Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) and Persons of Indian Origin (PIO) cards – has also been purposeful in its outreach, demonstrating its sincerity to communicate with the diaspora, a long-time promise of the BJP. From targeting the overseas group for influencing voters with messages of endorsement for Modi and his policies from different locations around the world, to sending emails requesting volunteers to help and register on ‘NRI4NaMo’ – a centralized online platform to coordinate various activities (The Tribune 2022) – the BJP’s efforts reflect a mobilization of support of overseas Indians for the Modi government’s domestic policies.10 In fact, mega events like the ‘Howdy Modi’ in

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Houston, Texas in September 201911 had a domestic angle as well. Telecasting live on Modi’s official YouTube channel and other social media platforms, and trending on Twitter, it targeted the domestic constituency as well to [a]llow Modi to be seen by viewers back home in as positive a light as possible, fêted by an overwhelmingly supportive crowd made up of people whom ordinary Indians would consider savvy and successful. In this way, such events are part of Modi’s broader, ongoing effort to consolidate his position as the most dominant Indian politician of his era. (Hall 2019) A major PD event, it was not only deployed for stirring up excitement around it, but was successfully used to showcase Modi as a world leader, comfortably sharing the same stage with the US President – projecting influence and power. These events, while touching an emotional chord, shrewdly downplay the political agenda with a non-political mask (Hiro 2015) or generate support for a particular domestic policy issue with global repercussions. The Howdy Modi event was aimed primarily at generating support for the Modi government’s muscular foreign policy – an endorsement of its strong stand, whether it be on Pakistan or the repeal of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. Modi’s announcement of the decision to abrogate Article 370 in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir ( J&K) at the event in Texas was intended partly to highlight his strength as a leader along with his democratic credentials. The practice of PD is fundamental to promoting soft power (Batora 2005; Melissen 2005b; Nye 2008) and the latter is a key component of external engagement by countries, including India, which has been actively strengthening the soft power elements in its foreign policy (Hall & Smith 2013). In fact, the idea of soft power, as a deliberate state policy, has considerably expanded under Modi’s leadership. Whether mega events like the Howdy Modi organized abroad for communicating with the diaspora, Modi’s tweets on Yoga and herbal medicines (‘Yoga will bring discipline, clarity and good health. #YogaDay2019’), traditional Indian medicine (‘Demand for herbal medicines is high. With a focused, innovative approach & right packaging we can export herbal medicines all over the world’), or even his own Yoga video, the objective has been to place India’s tradition and culture firmly on the world map. However, India’s soft power pull remains limited despite the efforts mentioned above. While scholars agree that ‘Prime Minister Modi’s charismatic interaction with world leaders, in comparison to India’s neighbours, is far more reported on by international media’ now representing ‘a strategic advantage in the soft power for India in the region’ (Heng 2016), India’s absence from The Soft Power 30,12 underlines ‘India evidently does not yet benefit as much from international awareness, positive associations, or investments in cultural diplomacy as many other countries’ ( Jaishankar 2018). The Freedom in the World (2021) not only reported a decline in India’s democracy but also downgraded it from ‘free’ to ‘partly free’. This, to an extent, highlights India’s still-weak PD apparatus: ‘public diplomacy cannot achieve

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its aim if it is inconsistent with a country’s foreign policy’ (Melissen 2005b), indicating yet again that India needs to reframe and overhaul its foreign policy priorities while working on its global image and effectively communicate it to the international audience from a PD perspective.

Nation Brand-branding While branding modern leaders have become imperative from a PD perspective, since they have increasingly begun to influence the national brand (Manor 2019), rebranding nations through PD has gained enormous salience (Cooper 2009) in the contemporary digital world. Modern nation-states are striving to effectively communicate with a foreign audience to build a brand while competing to earn credibility within the international community (Harris 2013). Branding, as seen during the Modi government, in electoral campaigns by the BJP (discussed earlier) is an exemplary case study in political branding along with efforts to manage and control its global image. The diaspora engagement, once again discussed in the preceding section, directly feeds into nation-branding efforts, given the strategic choice of the target audience, which espouses an amorphous sense of nationalism, and prior political predispositions to the BJP, shaping a new political sphere of power, called ‘diaspower’ (Gulati 2017). Branding India, however, is not a recent PD development. The ‘Incredible India’ campaign launched by India’s Tourism Ministry in 2002 to promote India internationally as a tourist destination was a major initiative to increase foreign tourist arrivals in the country. However, with Modi’s coming to power, branding has become only more aggressive and defined with set objectives to be achieved. Mor’s (2012) argument that ‘to stand above the competition, to draw attention, and to hold it – and ultimately, to persuade – one needs to have a reputation for providing trustworthy, accurate information’ is what the Indian state seems keen to achieve. In 2014, Modi’s flagship ‘Make in India’ – a campaign that was seen to be ‘catching fire’ by Forbes (Wharton 2016) – was to brand India by highlighting its attractiveness as an investment destination and for luring global businesses. Not only did ‘Make in India’ become popular on social media (adding a new member every three seconds on its FB page and thereby becoming the most sought-after government initiative ever on a digital media platform; Deccan Herald 2015), The Wall Street Journal also evaluated the program favourably a year after its launch, citing a surge in inward foreign direct investment into India. As mentioned earlier, Modi’s efforts to rebrand India has targeted the diaspora in a major way. He effectively crafts his communication with overseas Indians by emphasizing change, development, and progress (Gulati 2017) – three of his major catchwords – while addressing them abroad. By emphasizing change and rejecting the old narrative, he constructs a rationality of progress (Gulati 2017) to rebrand India as a new modern India, which the diaspora could relate to and be proud of. In fact, his narrative of change also evokes a renewed sense of progress and anticipation of the future, which are integral parts of national identity (Wodak et al. 1999). This is evident in his addresses to the overseas Indians. For example, in Sydney in 2014,

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he told the crowd: ‘We couldn’t die for the nation, but we can live for the nation, that is something that everyone has the opportunity to do’. Modi’s addresses were characterized as being ‘heavy on rhetoric persuasion, commonly used for discursively depicting national identity through the notion of transformation’ (Wodak et al. 1999) as he urged the diaspora to be a part of the new modern India. In all of this, Modi’s attempt to touch a chord with the overseas Indians is equally conspicuous. Modi’s frequent references to technology and science are influential in shaping modern and neoliberal discourses (Mazzarella 2010) geared towards nation-­ branding, as seen from his tweets hailing India’s scientific community and the country’s achievements during the fight against the COVID-19: A decisive turning point to strengthen a spirited fight! DCGI [Drugs Controller General of India] granting approval to vaccines of @SerumInstIndia and @BharatBiotech accelerates the road to a healthier and COVID-free nation. Congratulations India. Congratulations to our hardworking scientists and innovators. The PM further tweeted: It would make every Indian proud that the two vaccines that have been given emergency use approval are made in India! This shows the eagerness of our scientific community to fulfil the dream of an Aatmanirbhar Bharat,13 at the root of which is care and compassion. (3 January 2021) However, as pointed out by Gulati (2017) in a different context, the brand India that Modi ‘constructs is poised at the brink of change and seeks relentless modernization, which legitimises his neoliberal agenda’. Gulati added that ‘unfortunately, it is not accommodating in engaging with plurality, acknowledging alternative voices, or addressing social inequities’ (Gulati 2017). The sustained push on social media by BJP to energize the narrative on Hindutva has run parallel to efforts to rebrand India on social media, embodying ‘the aspirations of the beneficiaries of neoliberal reforms, who wanted more of them’ (Sinha 2017). The Modi government’s efforts to build India’s global reputation has also been impacted by damaging disinformation campaigns, particularly during the pandemic. An ‘infodemic’ of fake news and communally charged disinformation (Mohsina & Joseph 2020) has not only hit the national brand but has also threatened its relational PD – an issue discussed in the next chapter. The government’s religious profiling after the Tablighi incident in early 2020,14 both online and offline, inflamed communal tensions and disconcerted the international community, specifically India’s Muslim partners. The domestic incidents, while reiterating the blurring of borders thesis, also highlighted the role of Twitter diplomacy in highlighting and resolving crisis-like situations. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), many of whose members are India’s old strategic partners, tweeted: ‘unrelenting vicious #Islamophobic

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campaign in #India maligning Muslims for spread of #Covid-19 as well as their negative profiling in media subjecting them to discrimination & violence with impunity’ (Ayub 2019), drawing attention to its concern. The PM tweeted his response to assuage the mounting concerns about India’s handling of its minorities: COVID-19 does not see race, religion, colour, caste, creed, language or borders before striking. Our response and conduct thereafter should attach primacy to unity and brotherhood. We are in this together: PM @narendramodi (April 2020)

Is Hard Political Communication Ignoring Soft Power? Studies indicate that political websites espouse the traditional top-down model of communication (Carlson & Strandberg 2008). They also reflect digital media, enabling politicians to ‘preaching to the converted’ (Norris 2003), as individuals are increasingly exposed only to information reinforcing existing views and avoiding challenging opinions, generating an ‘echo-chamber environment that fosters social extremism and political polarization’ (Garrett 2009). Given that several citizens today depend on the internet for political information, such efforts ‘affects the quality of political representation, the policy-making process, and the stability of the democratic system’ (Mutz 2002). These views hold traction in the case of India, where technology poses as a ‘force multiplier’ when allied with a clear message and cadres who are true believers (Bhattacharjee 2016). At the same time, many remain unconvinced of Modi’s communication outreach, describing his ‘select’ interactions with people an ‘illusion’ (Kumar 2019). Networked leaders’ political communication is often strategically aimed at diverting attention from domestic problems while bolstering regime legitimacy and suppressing opposition (Pearce 2015) – dimensions discussed in Chapters 3–5. While it is strongly contended that democratic leaders, contemplating military actions elsewhere, have good reasons to weigh the potential domestic political costs and benefits of doing so [given that costly misadventures might entail high electoral prices when confronting an informed and vocal public; (Downs & Rocke 1994; Smith 1996)], the Indian example is an interesting contrast like many others. Notwithstanding the urge to push soft power, India is engaged in setting agendas to influence PD while exercising and communicating hard options. It has used military options wherever deemed necessary, justifying them through social media and thereby seeking the power to manipulate the communicative environment that experiences a continuous exchange and flow of information (Bulovsky 2018). By employing digital platforms, the BJP, like several other Parties, has created a narrative emblematic of a ‘reverse CNN effect’, influencing the media’s agenda rather than letting the media dictate foreign policy priorities (Manor 2019). The efforts demonstrate the government's determination to utilize the national brand for setting agendas without resorting to diplomatic jargon and at the same time rationalizing ‘hard’ foreign policy decisions by influencing Public Opinion (PO).

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Although scholars like Baum and Potter (2019) argue that democratic leaders might be compelled to rethink engaging in risky foreign conflicts given the domestic political risks associated with foreign policy failures, digital democratically elected leaders, including Modi, seem to have co-opted social media platforms to communicate both strength and nationalism, thereby shaping an alternate narrative to impress upon audiences – whether domestic or foreign. The Indian example elucidates that democratic leaders have no less reason for initiating conflict than their less-liberal counterparts, underlining the emerging strongman criteria in leaders, mentioned in Chapters 3–5. While International Relation (IR) scholars generally agree that leaders usually feel some pressure to carry out the threats and promises that they make in the international system as they care about their global reputation, current leaders appear more likely to follow through on threats as they also have domestic audiences to cater to who can hold them to account if they don’t (Fearon 1994; Schultz 2001). This was clearly visible during the Trump presidency, as discussed in Chapter 4. In this respect, leaders in democracies and their tweets – resembling their less-liberal counterparts to a large extent –obviously fail to produce soft power. This could be because ‘they are not attractive to others’ (Nye 2019) still. However, they do set agendas - both domestic and global – and have domestic appeal too, like it was pointed out variously in the preceding chapters. In keeping with the qualities of a modern leadership – eager to set agendas, engaged in hard political communication, and unhesitating to engage in conflicts – the incumbent Indian leadership effectively communicated its determination to act and project India’s military power in Uri (2016)15, Pulwama16, and Balakot (2019)17, deploying new media, and targeting both the domestic and the overseas audiences. This is also an example of India’s evolution as a smart power (Nye 2005) on the global stage. The official leakage of the Uri surgical strike against the militants operating in the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) to a few television channels in 2016 not only generated a ‘spectacular political theatre’ ( Joshi 2018) for both domestic and international audiences but also aimed to influence the electorate18 (Firstpost 2016). A similar strategy during Pulwama and Balakot might have influenced parts of the electorate in the 2019 general elections by partly deflecting public attention from domestic concerns like economic slowdown, lack of jobs, and rising communal tensions. This is in line with Downs’s argument that politicians are rational and self-interested actors seeking to extend their own influence (1957) – a trait conspicuous in the new media–driven environment. The BJP’s release of a rap music video early 2019 before the Pulwama attack, titled Banda apna sahi hai (‘He is the right guy’), including the surgical strikes in Uri in 2016, while highlighting Modi’s achievements as a strong leader, was also an attempt ‘to tom-tom its nationalistic credentials’ (Sinha 2019) and thereby shape diplomacy in a populist style. The effective infusion of nationalism in its political communication (and successfully being able to touch an emotional chord with his people) led Modi and the BJP to a landslide victory in 2019 as voters endorsed his vision of a muscular, assertive, and fundamentally Hindu India (Slater & Masih 2019). However, these have also had some adverse implications for India’s global

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brand as these tendencies continue to reshape Indian society, secularism, polity, and economy in a typical way. It is interesting to note how certain state actions, like the abrogation of Article 370 by the Modi government in 2019, while whipping up a storm on social media, was followed by an internet shutdown in Kashmir (Schultz & Yasir 2020), which was later restored in early 2021. The government had also requested Twitter to block accounts and tweets that were ‘propagating objectionable content’ on grounds of controlling terrorism, most specifically in Kashmir (The Wire 2017). The government claimed that the shutdown was necessary to pre-empt the spread of false information that could threaten peace and stability in the state. However, other opinions suggest that ‘the blocking order might be driven not simply by a desire to curb terror threats but also the flow of information about human rights violations in Kashmir’ (Kohli & Srivas 2017), which dealt a severe blow to India’s global soft power image. Many also perceive these actions as a ‘clear example of shutdowns being used to kill anti-government sentiments’ ( Johri 2020).

Has New Media Strengthened India’s Public Diplomacy and Global Image? Digital media communicative practices are playing decisive roles in shaping PD and foreign policy. Like many other countries, India has adopted new media platforms to engage foreign governments and the modern online publics. In fact, Modi is among those contemporary leaders who prefer digital platforms for communicating directly with online citizens and broader international audiences, vindicating the notion that leaders in democratic countries tend to occupy more central positions in the digital network (Iakhnis & Badawy 2019). By tweeting regularly and posting on FB, Modi is firmly placed within the social network. His tweets have ranged from congratulatory messages to his counterparts (e.g., Indonesia President @jokowi in October 2019 on being reelected to office), condolences (e.g., on the demise of Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew in 2015), and welcome messages (e.g., ‘Welcome to India, President Xi Jinping’ once again in October 2019) to ‘Clean India’ and ‘Make in India’, targeting the foreign audience – all of which are attempts to ‘create a receptive environment for another nation’s foreign policy’ (Manor 2019) as well as its domestic policies. If interactions are aimed at brand-building, Modi’s unorthodox engagement tactics through social media platforms have been unprecedented. Notable in this regard are his efforts to communicate with foreign audiences in their own languages. His tweet on the eve of his arrival in Japan in 2014 in Japanese elicited enthusiastic response, and his employment of the Weibo platform before visiting China in 2015 also attracted widespread attention, evident from the fact that his first post on Weibo (‘Hello China! Looking forward to interacting with Chinese friends through Weibo’) was heavily forwarded and commented upon by Weibo users (India TV 2015). Apart from emphasizing the intent to engage deeper with the networked foreign publics, these messages were meant to publicize initiatives like the Act East

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Policy (AEP)19 which also include China, Japan and other Asia-Pacific countries, globally and reiterate India’s efforts to reach out to countries far and wide. Indian overseas missions have been mandated to post frequently in local languages as well to directly communicate with the local community, including the diaspora. Digital media, emphasizing dialogue and two-way communication, is expected to make democracies more vibrant, and the government often appears eager to adopt it for effective communication with key audiences to recalibrate India's PD predicated on soft power. However, some scholars highlight, that notwithstanding the digital technology-driven communication that has transformed political and strategic communication in India and enlarged the public space, the `skillful and propagandist use of mainstream and social media by the Modi government' (Varughese 2019) often compromises India's democratic credentials, damaging its national brand. Contemporary online leaders are using technology to disseminate information and to build and maintain online images – not necessarily to engage the digital publics in discussion on policy issues – but because they regard new media–­enabled communication as a one-way flow, deliberately avoiding comment threads or building dialogues with the online publics, whether domestic or foreign. Modi’s style, like many of his counterparts, fits the narrative. Jackson and Lilleker’s (2009) assumption that contemporary politicians deploy Twitter to inform voters about campaign or party events, or as a tool for self-promotion, is much in line with Modi’s digital communication. His lack of interaction with followers on social media underlines that ‘world powers have embraced Twitter more as a propaganda tool than as a two-way method of communication’ (Groll 2015) as Party websites, blogs, FB profiles, and Twitter accounts remain merely ‘hi-tech ways of transmitting old-tech messages’ (Ross et al. 2015). Indian officials, though, point out that given the pressing issues faced by the leadership of one of the world’s largest and most complex democracies, it is practically impossible for the PM to respond to all online comments and reactions personally.20 It is argued that in keeping with India’s democratic tradition, Modi therefore prefers public addresses, including those organized abroad, for commenting on various issues, including controversial policy decisions like the National Register of Citizens (NRC)21 or the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).22 This approach is rather interesting. Furthermore, Modi’s interactions abroad and his in-person interviews have occasionally been criticized for being ‘staged’ and ‘choreographed’ (Sen 2018) and connect to the view of social media being used more for propaganda than for encouraging discussion and deliberation on controversial issues. The digital media landscape is also being increasingly characterized by its silencing of critics, an increasing trend in many democracies. To de-legitimize media criticism of Modi, terms such as ‘paid news’ are being extensively employed by the BJP while #Presstitutes are spread to denigrate Modi’s critics (Sinha 2017). While Modi’s campaign tapped into new media’s promise of ‘radical innovation and participation’, it seems to have retained an element of central control, enabling more decentralized practices of constructing a people, building many-to-many communication around forms of one-to-many communication (Sinha 2017). ***

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The BJP has been a pioneer of digitalization of PD and social media-enabled political communication. The Party, led by PM Modi, has deployed social media tools like Twitter as a way of composing the people that Modi would lead and derive sovereignty from (Sinha 2017). To do so, it was important to provide the people with a new narrative involving the rebranding of India while touching an emotional chord with the public. The idea of a new India was skilfully espoused by utilizing the digital tools while communicating India’s stature as a global power and its leader on par with other leading global leaders as a PD strategy. But the idea of a new India has also been predicated on ‘enterprise Hindutva’ extensively used for connecting to wider Indian audiences. This, however, has run into sporadic conflict with the overall branding objective that the Indian leadership has wanted to achieve using the new media tools. The ruling Party’s preference for monologues and propaganda has adversely affected India’s global brand and reputation as well. Apart from directing a new narrative on India’s development and progress, the digital media tools have robustly engaged the Indian diaspora, regarded as a strategic asset. Modi has successfully mobilized emotions among domestic and overseas Indians by cultivating nationalism and projecting himself as a Hindu leader capable of taking on adversaries. Sometimes, however, this nationalism, coupled with ‘emotional antagonism’ diffused through social networks pervading the Party’s international communication (Evolvi 2019), has inflamed religious acrimony and minority-baiting in India (Varughese 2019). The new digital communication, while building brands and pushing India’s soft power, has entrenched populism and highlighted occasional less-liberal tendencies.

Notes 1 The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to India for establishing itself as a pioneer in global collaboration on public health. With criticisms mounting against India’s handling of its minorities during the outbreak of the corona virus, Modi pushed for online global cooperation and multilateralism in an attempt to divert global attention while telegraphing ‘a message that India is a responsible and collaborative global player with the capacity to spearhead global cooperation to address shared threats’ (Kugelman 2020). Whether the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) or the G-20, they were all planned and implemented digitally, aimed for crafting global responses for managing the virus together (Kugelman 2020) with India posing as a leader. 2 Founded in 1925, even before India’s independence in 1947, the RSS is an Indian rightwing, Hindu nationalist, volunteer organization. It is the progenitor and leader of a large body of organizations called the Sangh Parivar which represents the Hindu nationalist movement in India. 3 The 2002 Godhra riots was a three-day period of inter-communal violence when Narendra Modi was the CM of the western Indian state of Gujarat. 4 In 2009, Modi came up with his Twitter account @narendramodi (Vaidya 2012), which had boasted of 57.2 million followers. 5 The BJP and Modi’s successful use of new media technology in 2014 encouraged leaders from other Parties with different agendas to develop Twitter profiles and shift significant parts of their political campaign online, reducing the use of mainstream media in the process (Pal & Panda 2019). While the rapid growth of new media platforms equally provided

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other Indian political leaders the opportunity to create personal brands, they however, enabled the establishment, led by Modi, ‘an individualized hegemony with almost no other challenger on this platform, eventually becoming a political brand’ (Sinha 2017). 6 In order to curtail shadow economy and to come down on black money, the Government of India, in November 2016, demonetized all ₹500 and ₹1000 banknotes. 7 Historically, efforts to engage the diaspora for influencing overseas PO was underway even before India had become independent in 1947. The nationalist leader from the Indian National Congress, NS Hardikar, in 1922, suggested delegation of propaganda work to overseas Indians and train them in publicity work for influencing global PO (Guha 2014). 8 The ‘Make in India’ project was another nation-branding strategy launched by Modi in 2014. 9 India’s Operation Rahat rescued about 7000 people – 5000 Indians and 2000 foreigners of 48 nationalities (Society of International Law and Society 2015). 10 The Indian diaspora in UK and the US demanded international isolation of Pakistan after the Pulwama attacks early 2019, auguring well with Modi’s policies. 11 Modi’s mega events in Sydney, New York (2014); Shanghai and Singapore (2015); and others attests to his robust engagement of the Indian diaspora. 12 Soft Power 30 is an index ranking 30 countries in terms of soft power resources. 13 Aatmanirbhar Bharat means a self-sufficient India. 14 A selective bias against the Muslim community in India first emerged after the Centre declared that the Tablighi meet, a missionary movement that encourages Muslims to return to the faith as originally conceived, held in March 2020 in Delhi, was ‘not a national trend’ ( Jain 2020). The religious profiling sparked abuse against the Muslims with the Media Scanner, an Indian fact-checking platform, compiling a list of at least 69 fake videos against Muslims and at least 28 attacks prompted by online abuse (Media Scanner 2020). 15 There was an attack by four heavily armed terrorists on 18 September 2016, near the town of Uri in the Indian state of J&K. The terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed was involved in the planning and execution of the attack. 16 On 14 February 2019, a convoy of vehicles carrying security personnel on the Jammu Srinagar National Highway was attacked by a vehicle-borne suicide bomber at Lethpora in the Pulwama district, J&K. The attack resulted in the deaths of 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel and the attacker (The Economic Times 2020c). 17 The Balakot airstrike was conducted by India in the early morning hours of 26 February 2019 when Indian warplanes crossed the de facto border in the disputed region of Kashmir, and dropped bombs in the vicinity of the town of Balakot in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan. 18 In 2016, India was going for State Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kerala, Puducherry, and Assam. 19 The Act East policy is an extension of the Look East Policy (LEP) launched in 1993 by then Indian PM Narasimha Rao. Modi tweeted: Our ties with South East Asia are deep rooted. Strengthening relations with ASEAN nations is an important part of our ‘Act East’ policy (6 November 2014). This tweet was made just a few days before his visit to Myanmar to attend the East Asia and the ASEAN-India Summit. 20 The author’s interview with an Indian diplomat. 21 The NRC is a register maintained by the Government of India containing names and certain relevant information for identification of Indian citizens of Assam – a northeast state – which is also home to a large population of Bengali Muslims. 22 The CAA, undertaken in 2019, seeks to amend the definition of illegal immigrant for Hindu, Sikh, Parsi, Buddhist and Christian immigrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, who have lived in India without documentation. However, the Act is yet to be implemented.

8 DISINFORMATION, EXTREME CONTENT, AND PUBLIC RESPONSE India, the US, and China

Andrew Chadwick’s observation that ‘the issue is no longer whether politics is online, but in what form and with what consequences?’ (Lee 2009) holds true for all contemporary nations plugged into the internet. Rising Powers like India, technologically and economically advanced countries like the US, and Communist nations like China are all extensively and aggressively deploying new media platforms in political communication and propaganda for shaping a new Public Diplomacy (PD). While historically propaganda originated around the 1600s for political effect, digital propaganda – more recent in origin and even more ambiguous – discourages opposing views (Born & Edginton 2017), while ‘disinfomration’, ‘fake news’ and ‘post-thruth’1 inundate the online network. Whether ‘the lies, the junk, the misinformation’ of traditional propaganda are being ‘supported by Facebook or Twitter’s algorithms’ (Hern 2017) or other incidences of disinformation (to be interchangeably described as fake news) are difficult to establish, their disruptive role has definitely generated extraordinary concern. These dimensions of new media platforms are becoming omnipresent as ethnic nationalism2 (Ignatieff 1993) pervades the new media ecosystem across countries. Social media analytics, combined with fake news, is targeting specific groups to reap domestic political advantages. They are also displaying the proclivity to interfere in other countries’ domestic affairs, like the UK’s 2016 vote on Brexit and the US presidential election the same year, to induce the public ‘into a state of self-­defeating and endemic scepticism by undermining the very criteria on the basis of which they develop their cognitive abilities to make sense, interpret and shape social reality’ (Bjola & Papadakis 2019). In fact, ‘fake news’ as a term entered the global mainstream lexicon from October 2016, peaking in the immediate aftermath of the US presidential election in November (Unver 2019). Since then, many Western democracies have been facing ‘an unprecedented systematic, and unrelenting DOI: 10.4324/9780429298141-8

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disinformation assault on their cyberspace, mainly from Russia, which has been enabled by the very digital technologies that Western countries have created’ (Bjola & Papadakis 2019). This dimension of new technologies has necessitated its analysis from a broader strategic perspective since asymmetrical measures carry tactical weight for those subscribing to a realpolitik vision of world politics with states competing with each other for power, resources ( Javier 2006; Pynnoniemi 2019), legitimacy, and recognition – discussed earlier in various contexts in the preceding chapters. Alongside the growth of disinformation in the new media landscape, modern politics is equally witnessing efforts to derail the objectives of digital diplomacy, which pertain to facilitating uninhibited conversations in open spaces. Disregarding listening, digital platforms are being aggressively employed by digital states to spearhead uni-directional communication while setting agendas suiting their narrow national interests and ideologies – dimensions that have been highlighted earlier in the book. However, their character has also been distinct in each country. Unlike in the US, where foreign-backed information influenced voters during the presidential elections in 2016, in India, it is more home-grown fake news which manipulates Public Opinion (PO) to influence the elections: ‘the problems of disinformation in a society like India might be more sophisticated and more challenging than they are in the West’ (The Quint 2018). In fact, scholars studying social media campaigns in India highlight: ‘The deliberate spread of disinformation by politicians and political parties has often led to misinformation – the accidental spread of false content – as a result of hyper-connectivity and digital illiteracy’ (NP 2019). The case of China is even more distinct given its authoritarian character to control online content and manipulate perceptions both at home and abroad. In fact, bots are active on regional hashtags, swamping local discourses with banal or pro-government news and often disinformation. Therefore, with obsolete borders and the online public placed at the centre of diplomacy, liberal and less-liberal governments are forced to engage with the online publics, whether domestic or international – to achieve gamification on social media3 for garnering support for their domestic policies which now have foreign ramifications while cultivating soft power – ‘a means to success’ for those who know how to leverage it. This chapter studies examples of disinformation and extreme online content impacting the greater objectives of PD and soft power in India, the US, and China. This particular dimension of ‘imperfect communication infrastructure’ reveals valuable insights into the way data and unbounded flow of speech are politicized to create situations ripe for manipulation and deception. The chapter also discusses the emergence of alternate voices for debunking fake news while highlighting government concerns which have forced them to take measures for tackling the spread of disinformation within and beyond borders.

New Media Platforms: Achilles’ Heel While leaders around the world have adopted digital media to steer a conversation with the publics and to stay connected with them, they deliberately and often

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unintentionally embraced the uncertainties of the information revolution as well. Technology has not only been contributing to erosion of trust, faith, and relationships but is increasingly posing as the Achilles’ heel of public policy in the 21st century since ‘the circulation of a high volume of dangerous and damaging misinformation and disinformation’ resulting from a ‘combination of existing socio-­ political circumstances, popular attitudes and values, political power relations, and the availability of a technological tool’ has made their spread easy and risk-free (Bhat & Banaji 2019). Citizen-built bots – holding the promise of democratizing propaganda by taking it out of the control of elites and allowing the public to spread their messages and boost their voices via the megaphone effect – are primarily being used to spread extremist views and content in uncritical allegiance to dominant leaders instead (Woolley & Guilbeault 2017) while placing strategic communication in a flux. There are notable concerns about the use of bots to achieve ‘manufactured consensus’ – or create the illusion of popularity for leaders who might otherwise be on political fringes (Woolley & Guilbeault 2017). Around the world, the platforms are being deployed by leaders, largely with extremist perspectives, and their followers, to ‘force’ the public to consume specific information fitting their social agendas and political priorities. This can be easily done through a YouTube-centric worldview, where the networked youth are seen ‘rejecting mainstream information sources in favor of platform-native creators bearing ‘secret histories’ and faux-authoritative explanations’ (Madrigal 2019). Various studies point to bots and algorithms being extensively employed to spread online propaganda and to frame messages, manipulating and influencing PO (Woolley 2016) in a digital media ecosystem: ‘they create a bandwagon effect, to build fake social media trends by automatically spreading hashtags, and even to suppress the opinions of the opposition’ (Woolley & Guilbeault 2017). India is often accused of spreading disinformation by employing ‘cyber troops’ tasked with manipulating online POs by the ruling Party (Bradshaw & Howard 2018), specifically to direct its own distinct political conversation while muffling dissenting voices. India is not an exception in this regard. Bots are reshaping the American political landscape as well with an ‘illiberal tide’ witnessed under President Donald Trump (Cooley & Nexon 2021). A rising internet-fed intolerance of the ‘other’ continues to underscore the digital media–enabled modern political landscape in both India and the US. However, as far as China is concerned (and as highlighted in Chapter 5), the government and the public’s online communication – whether political or otherwise – is manipulative and manipulated while being a reflection of its distinct cultural context and political background. This section discusses the patterns of the digital spread of disinformation and extreme content in India, the US, and China. However, the focus is more on India while it discusses the US and China contextually and wherever relevant. While each is distinct in its own way, what is fascinating is how each country – despite their different political systems – have some similar patterns of circulating false

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information online while trying to direct a particular conversation – targeting both the domestic and the foreign audience.

Nationalism, Religion, and Fake News In India, digital skills and functional media literacy, allied to strong ideological prejudices and hatred against the other, has assisted the spread of disinformation (Saxena 2021). A category of recently digitized users believes and share almost whatever they receive – especially when they are received from family members or friends (Rai 2019a). While some argue that the ‘people in India share fake news stories with nationalistic messages for “nation building” purposes’, an ‘overlap between fake news and pro-Modi political activity’ (Chakrabarty et al. 2018) has also been prominent. A BBC study titled ‘Duty, Identity, Credibility: “Fake News” and the Ordinary Citizen in India’ found Indians following ‘nationalistic sentiments’ while forwarding messages, and being guided by emotion, instead of factual correctness (Chakrabarty et al. 2018). In fact, given the current nationalist surge in India, religion is a close second among circulated topics, encouraging users to forward messages, fuelled by majoritarian sentiments4 (Chaturvedi & Dwivedi 2019). There has also been a link between religion and online extremism. In fact, all contemporary networked countries are facing an internet space which is increasingly employed to direct particular religious conversations, expose religious intolerance, and promote discourses which are non-secular in character. There is, no doubt, a growing tendency towards religiosity around the world. A Pew Research Center survey (2021) found that some Americans clearly long for a more avowedly religious and explicitly Christian country. This tendency is visible in India as well. The religious identity-driven right-wing hardliners in India have been aggressively deploying new media platforms to frame messages in line with their Hindutva commitment,5 which the political leadership has found difficult to control, underscoring a major challenge of digitalization. This is rather distinct and reflects a microsphere and a macrosphere – both vulnerable to the effects of digital disinformation, shaped by social media–facilitated fake and ‘junk news’, often suppressing the voice and participation of political opponents or even vulnerable populations online (Bradshaw & Howard 2018). The BJP workers and volunteers – encouraged to co-opt digital media in their communication – often aggressively convey ‘hardcore’ sentiments on Twitter, particularly for pushing ‘enterprise Hindutva’ (Udupa 2018). Personifying extreme Right views and posing as Fraser’s (1992) counter public, they exhibit great passion on issues such as ‘love jihad’6 and Kashmir and circulate posts on Twitter and other platforms, not sparing even their ‘own’ leaders like the former Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj and Home Minister Rajnath Singh (Sanghvi 2018), who were trolled for their moderate positions on these issues. In fact, a legislation like the CAA – regarded as anti-Muslim and discriminatory – has not only been amplified online but has been employed to push the Hindutva agenda, adversely influencing international perceptions of India as a secular nation. India’s perceived illiberal tendencies are attracting international attention as the

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Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB)7 is seen as a ‘dangerous turn in wrong direction’ (Pratidintime 2019). The NaMo app, the personal mobile application of the Indian PM, was also identified ‘as vulnerable to communal propaganda and fake news as Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter’ (Bansal 2019). Given its user-generated content, it was seen as particularly vulnerable to the ‘religiously inflammatory variety’ (Thaker 2019). These kinds of anti-Muslim propaganda have immensely compromised India’s foreign relations, including with Bangladesh (Sarkar 2019) – an important country in India’s ‘neighbourhood first’ policy8 – thereby damaging India’s PD strategy. Digital media–fed nationalism has characterized Trump’s tenure in the US as well. In the US, it is through the propagation of hyper-partisan fake news narratives that the rightist bulwark of US digital nationalism garners expedient material and political gains, damaging the critical civic discourse within the country (Green 2021). ‘Critical incidents’ like BLM not only highlighted the ‘return’ of nationalism but also provided Trump and his allies a ‘fake news’ platform of legitimacy (Green 2021), throttling Washington’s PD efforts and damaging its global soft power image. Posting and circulating nationalistic sentiments have indeed been a major driver for fake news in both India and the US. Interestingly, when it comes to nationalism and circulation of disinformation, China’s online space is no different. However, what stands out is that while in India and the US, most fake news is internally driven, mostly targeting the domestic minorities, the counterpart Chinese online posts have external targets and are distinctly anti-West. A new crop of Chinese bloggers known as the ziganwu, who rose to fame on Chinese social media while being inextricably linked to the ascendancy of Chinese nationalism, became known for their anti-West nationalist posts (Wong 2021). They not only criticize Western countries and media outlets but attack issues like feminism, human rights, multiculturalism, and democracy – deemed Western in origin and seen as Western influences ‘corrupting’ Chinese society (Wong 2021). It is interesting how China strategizes technology to further its own nationalist objectives. The state employs local online digital platforms like Weibo to criticize the West while deploying Western platforms like Twitter and Facebook (FB) – which it has otherwise rejected – to communicate Chinese perspectives on issues of PD and foreign policy targeting the non-Chinese public, who they realize have become an imperative in contemporary International Relations (IRs), as highlighted in Chapter 5. These typical Chinese tendencies are distinct in demonstrating Beijing’s post-imperial ideology which often influences its diplomatic strategies.

Circulation of Extreme Content and Fake News during Crisis During the Pulwama attack in 2019, social media platforms were incessantly circulating hate-driven messages and systematic warmongering posts, demanding tough government action against the perpetrators Jaish-e-Mohammed, including nuclear attacks on their neighbour (Chakrabarty et al. 2018). The communications

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demonstrated the capacity of the common digital public for ‘undoing diplomacy’ (Manor 2019) and highlighted technology’s ability to cause social instability: The rumours and fake news that swirled around Pulwama/Balakot fall into a category of wedge-driving rumours that can have a long-lasting effect on the society, with the propensity to fuel social instability. (Rao 2019) The aftermath of the Pulwama attack was also notable for the deluge of doctored and mislabelled fake news9 that spread across India and extended beyond its borders at a menacing speed, facilitating their escalation. The usual mix of defence and political analysts, along with the online public, became echo chambers calling for revenge, which adversely impacted India’s national image. The crisis that followed in Kashmir, after revocation of Article 370, also saw a flurry of online disinformation by users from the rest of India,10 and even Pakistan. With internet blocked in J&K, the users from outside the state filled up the information vacuum created in the state, fuelling the spread of misleading information and perspectives for manipulating PO regarding developments on the ground (Kaul 2019). In fact, India witnessed a growing and visible intolerance shaping its digital political environment after the abrogation of Article 370, even extending to certain segments of journalists, thereby limiting room for criticism. Many Indian journalists joined social media trolls to criticize Western outlets, like the BBC and the New York Times, for reporting Kashmir’s anger and disaffection after abrogation (Mishra 2019), thereby harming India’s global reputation as a country known for encouraging criticism, heterodoxy, and toleration (Sen 2005). The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is the latest occasion when disinformation campaigns became severe in India, much like in the rest of the world. Multiple misleading narratives and conspiracy theories originated around the role of China in spreading the pandemic (Mandavia 2020) in its early days, inciting distrust further between China and India. Experts even suggested that ‘India’s frayed ties with China, as well as their history of military conflicts and mutual suspicion is in part fuelling the rise in xenophobic posts’ (Purohit 2020). Subsequently, the ­pandemic-related disinformation campaigns for stoking Islamophobia11 – also a regional phenomenon12 – and upticking hate attacks targeting Muslims took over the Indian digital space. Thus, the Indian discourse around China gradually ‘changed to Muslims and religion more significantly’ (Pal 2020). An analysis by the fact-checking website BOOM in April 2020 revealed, as India battled the virus, that communally charged disinformation targeting Muslims became more widespread (The Indian Express 2020a). Online fake news, fuelling communal tensions which could jeopardize India’s ties with the Arab world – ­relations worked upon assiduously by the Narendra Modi government – and having profound implications for thousands of Indians in the Gulf (Bagchi 2020), compelled the PM to tweet his displeasure and concern, as mentioned in the previous chapter. His tweet was backed up by India’s Ambassador to Oman cautioning Indians living

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in the country to steer clear of online fake news. The Indian Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates also took to social media to reach out to the Indian diaspora with a message of communal harmony after several tweets surfaced quoting Hindus blaming Muslims for spreading the virus in India (Bagchi 2020). COVID-19 also gave rise to the circulation of disinformation in China as Beijing exploited the crisis to spearhead its influence campaigns worldwide. Since August 2019, ProPublica – a newsroom that investigates abuses of power – tracked more than 10,000 suspected fake Twitter accounts involved in a coordinated influence campaign with ties to the Chinese government (Kao & Li 2020). Among those were the hacked accounts of users from around the world who had posted propaganda and disinformation about the coronavirus outbreak and other topics of state interest. In fact, to counter allegations that China had spread the virus worldwide, Beijing even created an internet persona claiming to be a Swiss biologist to mislead the foreign audience about the origins of the virus using FB (Collier 2021) – part of China’s deliberate online disinformation campaign during the pandemic. The fake persona – a creation of a Chinese cybersecurity company – wrote on FB that the US was pressuring the World Health Organization to blame China for the epidemic (Collier 2021) in an effort to manipulate global PO. In fact, the Hong Kong protests were another crisis situation that the Beijing leadership had to deal with. The protests, as discussed in Chapter 5, not only drew international attention but highlighted China’s authoritarianism as well. China’s online disinformation campaigns against pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong (Palmer 2019) had already caught global attention. While most of the posts were in Chinese and seemed to influence the millions of ethnic Chinese who lived abroad, others were in English (Palmer 2019) to manipulate foreign perceptions. The Chinese government’s embrace of Twitter and FB to communicate with the public outside China to run influence operations is a notable dimension of the Chinese state’s external engagement strategy (Sinha Palit 2022).

Ordinary Citizens Posting Extreme Content A great deal of research indicates that ordinary people are more likely to share fake news than real news (CITS dna), and as trolls and bots proliferate the digital space, this aspect of fake news swinging PO exposes vulnerabilities of modern networked nation-states like India, the US, and even China. However, until now, digital communication has been studied more from an elite/leadership perspective, and the role of ordinary citizens in spreading fake news and its impact domestically and across borders remain underexplored. This subsection focuses on how digital media, while emancipating marginal social voices (Coleman 2017; Dahlgren 2006), has also made the public ‘lose sight of the liberal components of modern democracies’ (Reinemann et al. 2017), thereby compromising a nation’s PD and soft power efforts. Positioned firmly within the communication network, the common man has become a parallel player in PD, making the entire process much more complex. These tendencies have become conspicuous in both India and the US – the two

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democracies where fake news has been dominant in the public space, accelerated and amplified by the ordinary online publics. In fact, governments and leaders have been unable to ‘control the narrative’ (Hayden 2018) as ordinary online citizens direct PD conversations and disseminate rabid content across borders. Despite democratizing information, maximizing public engagement, and empowering citizens, Web 2.0 has indeed put liberal democracies under stress in the two abovementioned countries. Mediated by algorithms and bots (often inadvertently or otherwise), extreme content marked by hate-driven speeches is being promoted, followed by violence. These algorithms are responsible for driving the youth and others – the rapidly expanding group of smartphone users in India fuelled by the cheapest mobile data in the world (BBC 2019) – to videos glorifying violence, promoting conspiracy theories, and disinformation. Extreme content posts and tweets by ordinary netizens have been particularly damaging for India’s diplomatic relations while harming its global soft power image. The proliferation of the number of fake news reports in India deeply stained its international reputation: 265 fake local news websites in more than 65 countries are managed by Indian influence networks with the aim of influencing international institutions along with elected representatives and swaying the public perception of Pakistan. (Bhargava 2019) While pushing emotional and extreme online posts and tweets, the ordinary public is also likely to engage with unreliable content having a conservative bent (Stewart 2020), once again damaging the country’s international image with ramifications for PD. In the US, racist and majoritarian feeds proliferate extensively in the digital space. In fact, social media has made political polarization worse as people no longer agree even on basic facts (Stewart 2020). The perpetrators of white supremacist attacks not only circulate racist content among communities online but also have adopted digital media to publicize their acts. For example, the Charleston church shooter, who killed nine black clergy and worshippers in June 2015, engaged in a ‘self-learning process’ digitally that led him to believe that the goal of white supremacy required violent action (Laub 2019). As far as the proliferation of fake news in China is concerned, this dimension of technology is complicated given that the media is tightly controlled there. It is difficult to ascertain whether a particular disinformation is state-fed or is a genuine rumour circulated inadvertently by a Chinese netizen. But studies do indicate that the Chinese government has ‘contributed to the perpetration of misinformation’ (Guo 2020). Even the national official media was responsible for advancing some rumours while inducing other media outlets to do so (Guo 2020).

Fake News Deliberately Circulated during Elections In India and the US, regular elections shape governments while reflecting the peoples’ free political choices. These are occasions which are celebrated and regarded

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with pride. However, contemporary politics in modern liberal democracies have transformed to take occasional illiberal turns. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s caution: ‘The big thing that we know from John Stuart Mill is that democracy is government by discussion, and, if you make discussion fearful, you are not going to get a democracy, no matter how you count the votes’ (Chotiner 2019) can be applied to the digital media landscape, where less-liberal tendencies are becoming the new normal even in leading democracies. The democratic digital politician’s discursive and narrative strategies now enlist the people’s capacities ‘to influence the opinions and attitudes of mass audiences’, thereby composing the new public in the Digital Age (Chakravartty & Roy 2015) who do not hesitate to circulate fake news and disinformation to set narrow political agendas while pushing unverified content to benefit their political leaders. Many scholars have argued that fake news has become a part of the social media narrative in India (India Today 2017); Time magazine reported how political Parties used misinformation, religious provocation, and caste-based profiling on WhatsApp (India Today 2017; Jaiswal et al. 2018; Perrigo 2019) to influence elections in 2019. The Pulwama terror attacks, which took place before the elections in 2019, were seen by many opposition political leaders as a ploy to win election by the BJP (Sandhu 2019). Several doctored videos and false information were circulated digitally at a time when India’s 900 million eligible voters – including 340 million FB users and 230 million WhatsApp users – were waiting to vote in the general election. This once again underscores social media’s role in propagating fake news during elections to influence and manipulate public perceptions while underlining these developments as glocal. The blurring of borders facilitated by technology, was responsible for transmitting these developments across India’s borders in no time and was all set to influence the perceptions of the international media which was eagerly watching India’s elections (Bradshaw & Howard 2018). Coverage of India’s elections was exhaustive, and many scholars analyzed how misinformation might impact the people’s choice (Poonam & Bansal 2019). The US also witnessed a surge in the circulation of fake news in 2020, when incumbent Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden were contesting the election during the 2020 presidential election. Most of the fake news, however, could be traced to the Republicans and President Trump himself. Before and after the election, they shared tweets, unsupported by substantial evidence, that Biden was ‘stealing’ the election (Putri 2021). This online circulation of false information, along with politically charged posts, travelled beyond the American borders and several conspiracy theories emerged as well (Byler 2021), highlighting yet again the dangers associated with technology. These online information malfunctions that highlighted America’s social and cultural divisiveness enabled its adversaries to suggest that the US was no more ‘synonymous to a stable, civilized and consensus-based society anymore’ (Shinkman 2020).

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President Trump further added to the digital chaos. His refusal to accept the election results dealt a severe blow to America’s democratic credentials. America’s adversaries like China and Russia not only rejoiced in the confusion and uncertainty around the US election but also highlighted these disruptions ‘as a sign of the inherent flaws in the world’s oldest democracy and hypocrisy of its rule of law’ (Shinkman 2020). China even declared what it perceived as an end to the American system of government (Shinkman 2020).

Alternate Voices, Fact-Checkers, and Government Response While this section examines the proliferation of alternate voices and fact-checkers in India (Sinha Palit 2019b), it also discusses the US and China contextually. The section also examines how the three countries deal with the flow of inaccurate information circulating in their cyberspace while identifying their distinctness, if any. It also analyzes similarities and differences in national approaches to combating the fake news phenomena during a significant global health crisis like the COVID-19. Alternate voices characterize ‘free’ nation-states. These parallel voices of discursive participation13 counter possibilities of domination while communicating citizens’ expectations and concerns to authorities. In India, alternate voices or homegrown sites like ShareChat and Youth Ki Awaz (‘Voice of the Youth’) have all been active, struggling to positively shape the Indian PO while busting disinformation. These different voices, apart from leveraging the lower barriers of entry that digital media provides and reaching a significant online audience, which often has ‘an appetite for new and sometimes highly ideologically charged angles on news and public affairs’ (Aneez et al. 2018), have assumed great importance in India and the US, where many social media users effectively and successfully pose as active political participants. Twitter trolls, indignant bloggers, and far-Right groups posting on YouTube, while distorting the truth in political communication, also underline a democracy-­ distorting public sphere. In such a scenario, alternate voices assume significance by communicating the ‘right’ message to the people. Their emergence in India is not only a celebration of the ‘other’ perspective in Indian politics but also an affirmation of the values that India has represented historically. The voices comprise quite a few digital start-ups like Neta14 (‘Leader’) which enable voters to rate local leaders and politicians. Similarly, the homegrown ShareChat, available in 14 different Indian languages, is an app that offers alternate political views, mostly to nonEnglish-speaking audiences in smaller Indian towns and cities.15 In a country with around 600 million youth, online portals like Youth ki Awaaz (‘Voice of the youth’) – claiming to be a ‘social justice media platform’ and resonating concerns and perceptions of a young India – are extremely popular. While BOOM and AltNews are committed to bringing verified facts – as opposed to opinions to readers – Jan ki Baat (‘Conversation of the People’) shapes opinions

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and connects people on public issues. IndiaSpend is another initiative utilizing open data to analyze political developments and provide the ‘true story’ to citizens to help them assess their leaders. Factchecker.in, launched by IndiaSpend, is yet another dedicated fact-­checking initiative examining statements and assertions of those in public life for both accuracy and context for public consumption. Social media’s high traction in India’s political landscape has also seen homegrown apps being complemented by independent digital journalism initiatives, which had its roots in the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, discussed in Chapter 6. Several independent journalists post online on politics and foreign affairs for wider consumption,16 often taking positions that are critical of the government. Other blogs like Politicalbaaba, the East India Comedy Company, and Wah Sarkar are efforts by individuals and groups to offer online voices on Indian politics. Interestingly, the latter two blogs (The East India Comedy Company and Wah Sarkar) use satire to comment on Indian politics. While the former is a group of stand-up comedians maintaining a dedicated YouTube channel, the latter is an apolitical blog providing balanced insights. There are, of course, other politically leaning news sites, like IndiaFacts (more Right-leaning according to some) and The Logical Indian (more Left of Centre), which attract significant audiences despite a limited name recognition (Aneez et al. 2018). As social media platforms became home to bots and algorithms and as Twitter and FB were being found to be used for mass deception, the Indian government needed to act decisively. Recognizing that posting and circulating online hatedriven speeches are linked to the speed, scale, and volume of transmission across multiple platforms and formats and can be interlinked (Gagliardone et al. 2015), the government realized that these could damage India’s PD efforts and global image. This realization and concern led to some preventive measures. By blocking online content under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act,17 the government is trying to contain the flow of these speeches (Parthasarathi 2018). As the Indian diaspora is increasingly participating in Indian elections (mentioned in Chapter 7), coming down on certain news reports that are deemed inaccurate has become essential, especially during the run-up to elections. In fact, WhatsApp, battling criticism for being used heavily to spread disinformation among its more than 200 million users in India, had launched a service for Indians to check the veracity of information ahead of national elections in 2019 (Ravikumar 2019). India’s Election Commission (EC) has also been compelled to act in this regard. Given the glocal nature of political communication, in 2019, in an unprecedented move ahead of the parliamentary elections, the EC directed social media platforms to draft their own Code of Ethics (Roy 2019) for cracking down on inaccurate and misleading information. The EC stipulated that whatever regulations applied offline would be applicable online as well, thereby bringing social media platforms within the wider electoral purview and limiting their misuse during elections (Sinha 2019a). It also brought the bulk of short message/messaging service (SMS) and voice messages on phones and social media election campaigning within the

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ambit of pre-certification for election advertisements, on par with electronic and radio advertisements. The outbreak of COVID-19 made the Indian government even more determined to fight online disinformation, which was already damaging the government’s global ambitions, reputation, and PD efforts. As the Indian leadership actively started to advocate multi-country cooperation during the pandemic – a role consistent with its responsible power status – the unchecked spread of fake news was identified as a spoiler in its efforts. In international forums like the NonAligned Virtual Summit in 2020 (Mohan 2020), the Modi government decided to raise its anxiety about the spread of fake news, thereby generating international concern regarding the circulation of anti-India ‘doctored videos’ and ‘terrorism’ across the border without naming Pakistan (The Wire 2020). The effort was to flag the ‘Pak complicity’ angle in anti-India messaging on social media. Apart from drawing international attention to Pakistan-fed online disinformation such as fake news and propaganda against India during the pandemic, the government invoked the Disaster Management Act 2005. The aim was clear: to impose a nationwide 3-week lockdown and make the creation of ‘panic’ in India a criminal offence (Rodrigues & Xu 2020). The government also referenced the colonial-era Epidemic Diseases Act 1897 to make misleading publication punishable (Rodrigues & Xu 2020). As the disruptive dimensions of fake news became clear and as information overload confused an already disturbed public during the pandemic, the government created the ‘MyGovCoronaHelpdesk’ – a WhatsApp chatbot for fighting rumours while responding to important queries and assisting citizens – highlighting that technology could be employed effectively (Sinha 2020a) for crisis communication and its management. With new media platforms playing a particularly critical role in widely diffusing inaccurate information during the pandemic, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in March 2020 issued an advisory to all social media companies ‘to disable or remove’ any false news spread from their platforms on a priority basis. They were also asked to initiate a user ‘awareness campaign’ to stop them from circulating any false or misinformation concerning the virus which was likely ‘to create panic among the public’ (Press Trust of India 2020). In a large and expanding market like India’s, these companies can hardly afford to ignore India’s concerns about disinformation spreading through their platforms. FB, as a result, was forced to launch a fact-checking and a messenger chatbot (Tewari 2020) to rein in anti-Muslim posts with geopolitical ramifications (Sarkar 2020) and remove nearly 700 pages, groups, and accounts in India for violating its policies on ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ (News 18 2019). Circulation of disinformation has also been a major concern in the US and so fact-checking operations have expanded to provide factual information. PunditFact and FactCheck.org, for example, try to slow the spread of online disinformation and misinformation while reducing the level of deception and confusion in US politics. While Snope’s investigative reporting lights the way to evidence-based and contextualized analysis, Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) is dedicated to educating

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the public on media bias and deceptive news practices. Its aim is to inspire action and rejection of overtly biased media while occasionally providing fact checks, original articles on media bias, and breaking news stories relating to US politics. Well-known print brands like the Washington Post also run a Fact Checker. There are others like the Hoax Slayer, NPR FactCheck, and Reuters Fact Check, together helping ‘viewers make their own informed decisions’ (Dotson 2022). In fact, the digital media–fed circulation of disinformation around the pandemic in the US has even compelled the White House to increase pressure on social media to tackle fake news (BBC 2021). Fact-checking exercise in China is not only distinct but rather fascinating as Chinese diplomats now claim to be fact-checkers (Chen & Ho 2020). The state and its propaganda officials, uneasy with the digital public and the blurring of borders that has characterized the Digital Age (discussed earlier in the book), asked its media firms to ‘guard against … diluting the party’s leadership [and] prevent the risk of capital manipulating public opinion’ (Baptista 2020). In fact, the central and various local governments, along with state media, are proactively using social media platforms to feed the public with timely and authoritative official news information (Rodrigues & Xu 2020), underscoring the Chinese state’s strong interventionist role in guiding internal political communication. In early 2020, during the early days of COVID-19, China was targeted for the spread of the deadly virus around the world. A wave of online voices – both domestic and foreign – criticized the Party, and many speculated that the ‘pandemic would trigger a legitimacy crisis for the country’s leader, Xi Jinping’ (Cho 2020). However, China was quick to respond to international pressure and criticism – an art it has cultivated over the years given its experience with international pressure which began sometime around the ’90s during its ‘rise’ (Sinha 2017). Chinese Embassies in several countries, including the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the state-backed media, started to regularly publish ‘what they call fact-checks’ (Cho 2010). Its Embassy in Germany published ‘Sixteen myths and truths of China during the COVID-19 pandemic’ on its website and Twitter account, listing the claims (myths), the ratings (all ‘false’), and an explanation (Cho 2010). There were even links to the sources, including highly reputable scientific journals and the World Health Organization (Cho 2010), to corroborate their arguments. Other Chinese Embassies like the one in Malaysia posted ‘the Rumour buster’ on its official FB page. The post highlighted that the city of Wuhan was where the first COVID-19 case was reported but not where the new virus originated (Cho 2010). Apart from Embassies, there were ‘independent’ Chinese journalists – acting more like agents of the government – who felt the obligation to junk the ‘rumours’ inundating the Chinese cyberspace. According to them, busting such online disinformation was imperative at the time given that the Chinese online public was vulnerable in view of their limited knowledge of English and since they had little direct access to the mainstream media (Mai 2020). One such Chinese fact-checker ran Factcheck.com, which was found to be circulating rumours and pro-Trump posts during his presidency, highlighting false claims about voter fraud (Mai 2020).

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China’s authoritarian political system, combined with strict information control, has helped restrict the circulation of fake news/rumours, particularly during the pandemic outbreak (Rodrigues & Xu 2020). In fact, to restrict the spread of rumours, the government not only offered ‘social responsibility’, ‘public security’, and ‘social order’ as rationales for censoring information on digital platforms but also began to constantly emphasize these principles (Rodrigues & Xu 2020). It is interesting to see how, since President Xi Jinping came to power in late 2012, the state has successfully launched a series of campaigns to combat online rumours (Benny & Xu 2018) and it has done so quite effectively. It is interesting to note how a less-liberal country like China finds it easier not only to control online information which it deems ‘anti-national’ but combats disinformation and extreme contents as well. Under the leadership of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), Weibo, WeChat, Baidu, and Toutiao all joined forces against online rumours, developing a rumour-reporting and refutation mechanism (Rodrigues & Xu 2020). In June 2017, China’s first Cybersecurity Law was implemented along with various regulations on internet group information, online comment, and live-streaming services, providing legal and regulatory grounds for the governance of online rumours (Xinhuanet.com 2019). In August 2018, the Illegal and Unhealthy Information Reporting Centre, affiliated with the CAC, established a national-level rumour-­ refuting platform (Xinhuanet.com 2019). All these measures have not only helped the authorities to control the online rumours during the pandemic but they have also provided a new direction to managing anti-China conversations that were gaining traction worldwide. In fact, many have suggested that COVID-19 was ‘a critical moment for the government to test the capability of its “anti-online-rumour” system and mechanism’. Various local governments – with the support of the propaganda department, health commission, and police bureau – had initiated an anti-rumour campaign, apart from setting up national and local rumour-refuting platforms to combat online fake news (Rodrigues & Xu 2020). Interestingly, by the end of 2020, the Chinese state-­controlled media indeed was able to suppress negative information and successfully rewrite the pandemic narrative (BBC 2020). There is little doubt that authoritarian China’s well-established ‘anti-online-rumour’ mechanism and its rigorous internet censorship have been instrumental in fighting social media-driven fake news, given its control over the mass media. Since late January 2020, popular social media platforms such as WeChat, initiated special rectification campaigns against pandemic-related rumours. Rumours have been swiftly removed, and accounts spreading misinformation shut down (Rodrigues & Xu 2020). Major news apps such as Xinhua News, Tencent News, and WeChat public accounts of the Communist Youth League Central Committee as well as Sina Weibo have all provided dedicated sections for rumour detection and fact-checking. Rumour-mongers, who spread fake news on social media, have been detained by local police in accordance with the Security Administration Punishment Law (Rodrigues & Xu 2020). The news of punishing rumour-­mongers has been widely circulated on social media to deter others. Propaganda banners such as ‘Do not produce, circulate or believe rumours and be law-abiding citizens’ have also been plastered all over cities and villages.

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The relentless circulation of disinformation and misinformation during COVID-19 has pushed every government, whether liberal or less-liberal, to navigate the complicated trade-off between state power and freedom of speech of its citizens. However, as digital platforms and government initiatives struggle to curb fake news through ‘identification, categorization, control, and action’, they have also perpetuated further centralization of power, enriching a relative few and extending new forms of imperialism (Budd 2019), as discussed at length in the previous chapters. *** The peddling of conspiracy theories and circulation of fake news targeting likeminded audiences – to promote extreme online content having emotional appeal – underscore the paradoxical nature of contemporary digital political communication, whether in India, the US, or China. Technologies empowering ordinary citizens and galvanizing democracy activists have also been strategized by networked leaders to influence and manipulate public perceptions in most countries. The future digitalization of PD appears to be ingrained in the logic of ‘influence’ and ‘manipulation’ of PO and attitudes rather than encouraging actual conversations around the nation, the welfare of its people, and consensus-building. It is fascinating to note that contemporary leaderships are ready to ignore and even compromise PD objectives for fulfilling domestic needs. New media platforms have also emerged as tools for mass surveillance and deception as social media feeds are personalized by algorithms to meet users’ interests and preferences, irrespective of their political systems. Digital technology seems to have abandoned the objectives of relationship-­ building, engagement, and conversations with publics and institutions. Rather, it has been leveraged for strategic communication, prioritizing information dominance and influence over people’s behaviours (Manor 2019). Tweets and posts are being weaponized as tools for spreading rumours and turning facts to fiction and fiction to facts. This has led scholars to debunk the notion that the internet is transforming the media system into a ‘democratic infrastructure’ (McChesney 2013). It is not leaders alone who are transforming political conversations in India, the US, and China. The online ordinary citizens in these countries are equally participating in influencing and shaping political discourses, spreading chaos and communication disorder along with the Right-wing groups that have been emboldened considerably in the last few years. Building digital resilience of the public18 is therefore becoming a necessity in this networked world. The fertile media landscape has successfully negated coherent agendas and soundness in political rhetoric, encouraging common citizens to revel in promises that feel momentarily gratifying (Wang 2019) as leaders address grievances and betrayal that citizens share with them, for influencing PO at home and abroad. This has not only compromised their PD efforts but has hurt their global reputations and images as well. While calls to regulate social media sites to ensure accuracy of information has emerged as a priority for most governments, an active civil society has also cropped

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up to respond to one-sided political discourses, narratives and disinformation, propagating one-sided political discourses. Several alternate voices, more objective and balanced, are fighting for digital space, debunking fake news, and providing alternate views on political and religious issues in countries like India and the US which are deeply divided on sectarian and religious lines. In China, though, the experience is distinct.

Notes 1 Post-truth is related to a situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts. 2 Ethnic nationalism is a sense of inherited attachments to a community by which nationhood is defined by race, religion, or ethnicity. 3 Gamification can amplify engagement on social media considerably and instigate a more positive impact on the audience. 4 Hindu majoritarianism – defined as the ‘objectively larger group in a national polity’ striving to close the gap between the minority and ‘the purity of the national whole’ (Appadurai 2006) – has, time and again, asserted the idea of Hindu-first India, combining the cultural pride of a glorious civilization and its potential to rise as a major global power. With internet-driven communication, online Right wing extreme speech, distinct in its gendered intimidation and aggression, and aimed at religious minorities and public figures characterized as ‘pseudo liberals’ (Udupa 2019) has witnessed a sharp increase. After all, scholars argue, that the decentralized nature of online networks has indeed allowed the BJP to benefit from hateful and violent messages sent out by other hard-line Hindu nationalist groups, while diverting blame to WhatsApp or FB (Chopra 2019). In fact, Hindu majoritarianism is driven by extreme speech practices by prominent political leaders of the movement with online celebrity power and enthusiastic online volunteers who largely come from the middle class and affluent classes, and upper caste and intermediary caste groups (Chopra 2019), including some sections of the diaspora. 5 A BJP politician’s ‘controversial’ FB video post a day before Trump’s visit to India in February 2020 – ‘Till US President is in India, we are leaving the area peacefully. After that what we won’t listen to you (police) if the roads are not vacated by then’ – against anti-CAA protestors was not only taken down during the riots in Jaffrabad, north-east Delhi for violating FB’s ‘Violence and Criminal Behaviour Policy’ but was also projected as a yardstick for measuring incitement to violence by the FB leadership while addressing a meeting of its employees (Ajmal 2020). 6 ‘Love Jihad’ is a supposed form of religious warfare against inter-religious marriages. 7 The CAB redefines the way migrants from three countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan) can become Indian citizens. 8 During the election campaign, before Narendra Modi became the PM, he had hinted that one of the core component of his foreign policy would be the administration’s ‘neighbourhood first’ policy to foster cordial relations and synergetic economic development. 9 Aiming to influence public perceptions and manipulate PO, a doctored video of the Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, showed her laughing at a news conference after the incident, while a photo taken out of context showed the PM posing for cameras, instead of paying tribute to the slain paramilitary officers. 10 Kashmir witnessed a blackout of its internet in 2019 after the Centre abrogated the provisions of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution which had provided the state a special status. 11 The rising Islamophobia in India has been attracting a lot of international media attention with fake news spreading hate against its Muslim minorities, especially with the outbreak of COVID-19. India has also suffered a severe blow to its global image in recent

Disinformation, Extreme Content, and Public Response  125

months following a series of other controversial policy moves, including the revocation of autonomy of India-administered Kashmir; the passage of a new citizenship law that critics believe discriminates against Muslims; and the government’s silence in the face of India’s most deadly communal violence in several decades (Kugelman 2020). 12 A study by the South Asian ‘Equality Labs’ revealed that #corona-jihad was used around 300,000 times between 29 March and 3 April 2020, and viewed by as many as 165 ­million people, along with other prominent hashtags such as #BioJihad, #Coronaterrorism, #MuslimsSpreadingCorona, which when translated into local languages gained phenomenal traction online (Mahzam 2020). 13 Discursive participation happens when citizens come together with others in formal or informal settings – face-to-face or via the telephone or the internet – to discuss local, national or international issues. 14 Neta was piloted during the by-polls in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan’s Ajmer and Alwar constituencies in February 2018. 15 Indian language internet user base is growing at an 18 per cent to reach 536 million by 2021 compared with English internet user base growing at 3 per cent to reach 199 million. Indian language internet users are expected to account for nearly 75 per cent of India’s internet user base by 2021 (KPMG 2017). 16 An independent Youtuber, Dhruv Rathee was even employed by the NDTV during the run up to the Indian General Elections in 2019 for flagging controversial issues that cropped up prior to the elections, apart from busting disinformation. 17 Section 69A of the Information Technology Act 2000 mentions that the Central Government or an officer authorized by it may, through a speaking order recorded in writing, block public access to information on a computer resource, by directing any agency of government or intermediary. 18 Ordinary digital citizens need to be trained to be able to distinguish facts from fiction, and make informed and prudent decisions by forwarding and sharing the right message.

9 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Digital Diplomacy in the Post-COVID-19 New Normal

The past few years – the COVID-19 and later the Russia–Ukraine conflict – have witnessed an extensive and aggressive utilization of new digital technologies. Building and shaping online narratives around the crises facing the disconcerted international order, this new communication system not only reflects their significance and relevance but also highlights their tendencies to annihilate space and time during crises. Despite occasional skirmishes breaking out around the world, governments and diplomats have largely been successful in averting major wars since the Second World War. However, the Russian aggression of Ukraine in early 2022, yet again demonstrated that ‘hard’ power of nation-states is here to stay and that diplomacy perhaps has its limits in staving off conflicts. While military prowess will continue to shape international relations (IRs), and nuclear powers like Russia will not hesitate to be aggressive, non-nuclear countries, such as Ukraine, will also resist belligerence, partly by utilizing technology. It is noteworthy how technology has made communication and agenda-building more affordable and simple irrespective of a country’s size, strength or power – an aspect repeatedly highlighted in earlier chapters. Both Russia and Ukraine have tactically and effectively deployed digital tools to control and direct narratives around the conflict, further establishing the role of technology as an amplifier during conflicts and disputes. While Ukraine employed the social networking platforms to rally support and draw international attention, Russia employed them to circulate disinformation, highlighting the disruptive dimension of the new media platforms yet again. While the conflict highlighted the preponderance of military might or hard power wielded by Russia, the pandemic effectively accentuated soft power dimensions as well, that are still largely visible amidst greater insecurities, vulnerabilities, and divisions. The outbreak of the COVID-19 witnessed leaders around the world connecting online, as made possible by technology, DOI: 10.4324/9780429298141-9

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and expressing their intent for cooperation and collaboration to address the global public health emergency. The pandemic reinforced globalization as a reality and was regarded as a non-­ negotiable choice for nation-states. While ravaging the world economy – both rich and poor countries alike – it also shaped a new political discourse underlining enhanced engagement and relationship-building. However, a comprehensive global response to the pandemic and its future occurrences has yet to be fully formalized, and the phrase international community proves more ‘aspirational’ (Haass 2020) than ever before, as the community struggles to adjust to the new normal. Re-emphasizing a waning US leadership, rising incidence of conflicts, faltering global cooperation, and major-power hostility, the pandemic has equally underscored near-complete communication disruptions between partners, allies, and rivals. Allowing more information niches to emerge that are often walled from dissonant messages in competing information streams (Baum & Potter 2019), the new media ecology, during the pandemic, has fundamentally altered diplomacy and communication. New technologies, expected to be positive social forces and the weapon de jour of democratic revolutionaries, appear to have contributed to the growth of prominent state interventions and controls for addressing public health concerns, while consensus and listening take back seats in the global discourse, disrupting the role of soft power during crises and disputes.

The Russia–Ukraine Conflict, the Pandemic, and the Contemporary Information Landscape With the information environment increasingly redefined by the new media, new contested arenas with different actors are constantly creating their own narratives of global events – like the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the COVID-19 – vying for attention and endorsement from the digital public. New media has ensured that the public is no longer placed at the periphery but at the centre of diplomacy and international developments – making cultivation of POs a critical function of states, even for the less-liberal ones, as variously discussed in the book, outside of the context of the pandemic and the conflict.1

The Russia-Ukraine Conflict While the employment of new media platforms surged phenomenally in the wake of the COVID-19, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been hailed as the ‘watershed moment for internet platforms’ (Feldstein 2022). Many have dubbed the conflict as the ‘first social media war’ since Ukrainians were not only streaming scenes from the battlefield in real time but also demonstrated that anyone with a smartphone could fill the role of a ‘war correspondent’ (Suciu 2022). This dimension of social media, whereby digital individuals report in real time, is a reminder of the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, discussed in Chapter 6. The online public today are opting for direct engagement in collecting updates on crisis by sidelining the legacy media. Messages of support and solidarity are seen to be outpouring during glocal events,

128  Concluding Thoughts

overshadowing selfies at an individual level, while networks are foundering in disinformation and conspiracy theories. Twitter, Facebook (FB), and Instagram have risen to the occasion, demonstrating both the willingness and determination to fight disinformation. Doctored videos and misleading contents are being pulled down along with attempts to restrict the pace of forwarded messages for reining in rumours. The Russian aggression toward Ukraine is also a case study of how technology is shaping the power of the domestic public, particularly during conflicts, as states, including aggressors and invading powers, strive to communicate with the digital public. Russia’s attempt to engage with the domestic public and its own diaspora has been fascinating, underlining the new media–enabled blurring of borders, discussed on several occasions in the book. Research suggests that most of the Russia-fed disinformation was designed for online Russians – ‘a campaign to justify the reason for war and rationale, because it’s going to be Russian soldiers, Russian citizens, that are going to go die in that war. That’s just conditioning the audience and providing justification’ (Hendrix 2022). It also targeted those in the diaspora, who have ‘natural sympathies’ to their homeland and constantly receive messages in the Russian language (Hendrix 2022) from families and friends. The conflict equally witnessed the online citizens’ struggle to influence perceptions. On both sides, the public has tried hard to control the online narrative around the discord, targeting the international community. While Russia spread disinformation to justify its invasion or its ‘hard’ power, Ukraine leveraged social media to rally global publics against its aggressor, using memes, slogans, and humour to humiliate Russian President Vladimir Putin while boosting the morale of its own citizens (Feldstein 2022). The digital public, by shifting the information media paradigm, has given rise to a new public sphere which is deeply fragmented. This kind of media ecology, characterized by free-flowing information and news, has made authoritarian leaders uneasy, forcing them to unleash domestic censorship campaigns, as Russia did for blocking independent coverage of the conflict (Tshikhanenka 2022).

The Pandemic and a few Responses to Disinformation As a new world order takes shape in the aftermath of the COVID-19, its contours are being dictated by bots and algorithms which are circulating disinformation and exposing the vulnerabilities of the new media ecosystem. The disconcerted and over-anxious public around the world, unable to discern the right from the wrong, demonstrated a strong tendency to rely more on government sources rather than social media for news on the pandemic. Plagued by an ‘infodemic’ of disinformation around the virus, the governments acted decisively. The previous chapter discussed these in detail with respect to India. Apart from India, South Africa, Indonesia, and Thailand also encountered undocumented explosion of misleading information around the virus and have struggled to contain these. In South Africa, businesses, governments, and vendors have been fighting the virus with a variety of apps and information technology (IT) initiatives in ways that can alter the communication landscape in the country

Concluding Thoughts  129

(Daniel 2020). Indonesia decided to turn to a loosely knit volunteer group of data scientists, the Kawal COVID-19 (The Straits Times 2020), to combat the crisis. In Thailand, authorities are working with the new anti-fake news Centre to police the internet (Mahtani 2020) to dispel rumours around the virus. These online techniques and initiatives for combating disinformation will gain more traction in the post-pandemic world order as countries face new challenges and provocations. The pandemic highlighted interesting dimensions of disinformation and conspiracy theories for Europe. The circulating fake news, originating elsewhere, was deliberately manufactured to erode trust in European healthcare institutions. Unlike India – which encountered mostly locally manufactured disinformation2 during the crisis – many Western countries had to deal with the export of disinformation originating in Russia and elsewhere. Russian channels were deliberately spreading conspiracy theories about ‘global elites’ weaponizing the virus for their own purposes in other countries, including Europe, thereby inducing distrust in their authorities and national healthcare systems as well as in international institutions (Bjola et al. 2020). These have had serious domestic ramifications, indicating the downsides of new media–enabled conversations that now transcend borders, rendering the media landscape complex and vulnerable.

New Media-driven Diplomacy after COVID-19: Revisiting Responses by India, the US and China COVID-19 has transformed national narratives around the world as countries struggle to manage the volatile international environment by engaging in brand-building exercises. While all nation-brands have been hurt by the pandemic, this section reflects specifically on impacts for India, the US, and China and their attempt to recalibrate engagement policies in keeping with the requirements of the time. As the virus made its way into India early 2020, the country, given its size, demography and existing comorbidities, became one of the worst-hit countries in the world. Pushed by several factors, including an explosion of fake news poised to damage India’s national brand, the Indian leadership embraced digital technology to refashion its Public Diplomacy (PD) in line with its soft power objectives. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was responsible for laying the foundation for future diplomatic and communication breakthroughs which not only strengthened his international image but boosted India's global brand as well. While engaging in PD 2.0 has been a hallmark of India’s regional and global PD under Modi, new media technology has been extensively deployed in the wake of the pandemic. Modi, while convening the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) leaders’ meetings through online videoconferencing, also pitched for the online G20 summit to invoke cooperation and collaboration – key elements of soft power – to combat the virus. He skilfully deployed the digital medium during his address to the United Nations after India’s election as a non-permanent member of the Security Council to stress

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India’s commitment to fighting the virus (CNBCTV 2020) to rebrand India and project it as a responsible player on the global stage. Such an affirmation was necessary for countering negative perceptions that had emerged around India’s brittle public health infrastructure and poor governance issues around the management of the pandemic. More such initiatives are likely in the future. In keeping with traditional diplomacy, leaders try to keep promises so that they can be relied upon during later crises (Guisinger & Smith 2002). This objective is reemphasized in the new Information Age and is particularly visible during the pandemic. In the new media age, as domestic and foreign publics come together as wholesome global audiences, Modi is not the only leader to have leveraged technology to communicate country positions and strategies with the rest of the world. The former US President Trump, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang adopted digital technology for communication during the crisis. While Trump held a video teleconference with G7 leaders to coordinate national responses to the coronavirus outbreak in April 2020 (Holland 2020), Merkel engaged in a videoconference to discuss the pandemic, economic policy, and international issues with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (Reuters 2020). These leaders were joined by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the President of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, who showed a similar inclination to embrace technology to communicate their ability to control the virus as responsible leaders. It is not liberal leaders alone who have digitally communicated with a global audience on the virus. Chinese diplomats relied on non-Chinese digital platforms to fight their own battle against conspiracy theories targeting the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing-linked diplomats have multiplied their social media output fourfold since April 2020 to counter Western narratives accusing China of spreading the virus (Scott 2020). China’s employment of digital platforms to counter the global pandemic offensive against it has been particularly noticeable as its ‘wolf warrior’ diplomats employed Twitter to ‘defend and promote the Communist-led country’ (The Economic Times 2020b) abroad. The English-language Chinese state media has been tactically using FB posts to communicate a significant share of coverage on positive stories about China and its achievements in controlling the virus while adjusting narratives retroactively targeting the international community (Molter & Diresta 2020). This dual use of the new media platforms reasserts that while engaging with the online public is important, the control of their content, and recasting it in a more positive light, is also possible, thereby underscoring the authoritarian tendencies which might become more visible in the future.

Digital Diplomacy: Pitching ‘Soft’ with ‘Hard’ The predominantly aggressive tendencies of states like Russia and China are responsible for producing an international environment that has become intrinsically hostile, calling for stronger PD efforts by governments. The institutionalization of the new media could be instrumental in this regard.

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Ukraine not only deployed digital tools in an effort to ramp up global disapproval of Putin but was also ‘displaying calls for public diplomacy’ demonstrated by the video appeals of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky before the US Congress and the US media (Lee & Lai 2022). The extensive deployment of technology by the digital public and the states during the India–China standoff at the Galwan Valley in 2020 and the US–China hostilities in the South China Sea in 2020 – in the overall context of all the countries struggling to contain COVID-19 – characterizes tensions that the world might experience more frequently, notwithstanding domestic preoccupations, and heightened concerns over the occurrence of more conflicts. It also calls for a more robust and mature deployment of new media platforms to recalibrate PD 2.0, along with building digital resilience of the public, which together perhaps could be leveraged to mitigate tensions and future crises. As digitalization of diplomacy gains more traction, a stronger PD may emerge, encouraging states to focus more on soft power as relationship-building becomes the core priority. While hard power might dominate IRs, soft power objectives would remain equally important, although they could be applied more selectively and specifically to influence foreign and domestic perspectives – critical in e-diplomacy. As states continue to focus on branding and on collaborating with counterparts to emphasize ‘attraction’ and ‘persuasion’ during peacetime, they are likely to overlook soft power goals during more uncertain and tense occasions. In fact, the moment hard and soft power clash with each other, the former is likely to prevail, for reasons discussed in the book. Both will mostly coexist in overall national foreign policies as digital platforms like Twitter and FB are deployed to communicate both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ intentions – by leaders, diplomats, and the newly empowered publics armed with technology – producing more miscommunication and chaotic diplomacy. The advent of new frontier technologies like 5G will further complicate foreign policy and the dynamics of diplomacy with cyber security emerging as a major issue in a world where cyber criminals are on the loose. With digital communication becoming, to some extent, more about counting ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ for leaders and diplomats, it may fail to assess the scope of interactions between the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and the online public as well as between leaders and the digital publics (Manor 2019). Studies also reveal that foreign ministries utilize social media to influence elite audiences rather than to foster dialogue with ordinary foreign populations (Manor 2016). Despite its weaknesses, the proliferation of communication and information technologies and the application of new media will drive contemporary diplomacy and reshape global objectives. While the current networked leadership practices in the diplomatic arena have often proved inappropriate (as discussed in the preceding chapters), the new technology revolution signals the public’s own intent to participate in national and international decision-making. Such participation needs to be backed by critical thinking and media literacy (Vasu et al. 2018). More judicious and responsible publics, having the natural inclination to fact-check and verify (Vasu et al. 2018), will determine the future of PD 2.0 in India and elsewhere.

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Notes 1 For example, in Hong Kong, online protests of 2019, discussed in Chapter 4, not only amplified the issue as a democratic crisis deploying the digital media for the global audience but was successful in mobilizing support through crowdfunded media campaigns for their cause. 2 However, during the pandemic, there were reports that India too was a victim of foreign-fed disinformation with Russia launching conspiracy theories and disinformation targeting India ( Jain 2021).

APPENDIX I India’s Adoption of New Media Platforms for Public Diplomacy

Initiatives

Comments

August 2003

A new and better structured, comprehensive, and more secure website of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), http://meaindia.nic.in, comes into operation. The Public Diplomacy Division (PDD) is established.

A vital tool in dissemination of information by the Office of the Spokesperson and a source of information related to India and the MEA To explain, on a day-to-day basis, the background of policy decisions in Indian foreign policy, to promote a positive image of India, and to engage scholars, think tanks, and the media through its outreach activities A new initiative aimed at taking the discourse on key foreign policy issues to university campuses around the country To reach out to African countries

2006

2009–2010 2009–2010 2010–2011 2010–2011 2010–2011 2012–2013 2013 2014 2014

The “Distinguished Lecture Series on India’s Foreign Policy” is launched at Banaras Hindu University. The ‘India Africa Connect’ website (http://www. indiaafricaconnect.in) is launched. India.Inclusive@Davos is initiated during the World Economic Forum’s Summit in Davos in January 2011. A closed Google mail group is created. A conference on ‘Public Diplomacy in the Information Age’ is organized. Over 50 Indian missions/posts open accounts on the social media platform Facebook. An integrated Smartphone app for mobile and other handheld devices, ‘MEA India’, is launched. The MEA India mobile app is updated to include a ‘Push Notification’. External Publicity (XP) and PD Divisions are merged to become a single division: XPD of the MEA.

To promote the building of Brand India overseas To facilitate interactions between scholars and PDD officials To create greater awareness about the field of PD and its increasingly important role in foreign policy To engage the young and the influential in cyberspace To provide a single digital platform for citizens to access information on the go To provide regular alert notifications when new information is uploaded at the MEA website Mandated to effectively articulate the position of the Government of India on various foreign policy issues to the national and international media as well as engage with domestic and global audiences to explain India, its foreign policy, and various aspects of India’s engagement with the world

134  Appendix I

Year

The following are introduced: A New ASEAN-India website: http://www.mea.gov.in/ aseanindia/index.htm MEA Online India Global on Radio Interactive World Map MEA website (http://www.mea. gov.in/indian-missions-abroad.htm)

2015–2016

e-books are created.

2016–2017 2017–2018 2017–2018

India Perspectives goes digital. Consular Services Management System (MADAD) is launched. Ask the Spokesperson’ Moniker

2017–2018

MEA debuts on LinkedIn.

2017–2018

SAMEEP: Students and MEA Engagement Programme

In keeping with the new government’s ‘Act East’ foreign policy: A discussion forum was created for facilitating interactions, sharing, and discussions by officers on a wide range of issues of common concern. All the episodes of the popular programme ‘India Global’, prepared in consultation with Indian Missions abroad, are made available for broadcast on the AIR FM channel as well as podcasts on MEA’s dedicated channel (http://mea.gov.in/mea-campaigns.htm) and the MEA’s SoundCloud page (https://soundcloud.com/meaindia) and YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/meaindia). A user can visit all the integrated web pages of Indian Missions abroad through a single interface, Indian Treaties Database (http://www. mea.gov.in/treaty.htm). This database strives to provide an accessible and searchable link or series of links to the treaties, agreements, and memoranda of understanding which have been entered into by India with foreign countries. To highlight the achievements and key events during the visits of the Indian prime minister to other countries The flagship magazine of the MEA MADAD is available in mobile apps and through social media to redress grievances of the diaspora. A bimonthly Twitter handle that enables the public to interact with the Official Spokesperson With 416 followers, it attempts to publish a periodic blog on various aspects of the MEA. An attempt to connect with students and create awareness about MEA and India’s success stories on the foreign policy front

Source: Compiled from the MEA Annual reports 2003–18, retrieved 10 October 2018, https://www.mea.gov.in/annual-reports.htm?57/Annual_Reports (Sinha 2018b).

Appendix I  135

2014–2015

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INDEX

Pages followed by “n” refer to notes. Aam Admi Party (AAP) 16n19, 20, 90 Act East Policy (AEP) 106, 108n19 adaptive authoritarian 45, 69, 77 algorithm 12–3, 16n17, 23, 52, 109, 111, 116, 119, 123, 128 Alternate voices 110, 118, 124; see also factcheckers 13, 118, 121 Arab Spring 34, 41–2, 46n3, 88 Article 370 14, 16n22 Authoritarianism 14, 42, 68–9, 77, 115; see also centralization of power 4, 20, 45, 123 Balakot 104, 108n17, 114; see also Pulwama; Uri Bangladesh 108n22, 113, 124n7 Beijing 8, 21–3, 26, 31n6, 64–6, 68, 70–7, 78n7, 113, 115, 130 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) 73, 78n11 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 90, 92n11, 94 Biden 48, 61n1, 117 Black Lives Matter (BLM) 14, 26, 57, 113 blurring of borders 11, 17, 39, 52, 54, 57–8, 67–9, 82, 84, 87, 90, 98, 102, 117, 121, 128 bot 13, 16n20, 52, 110–11, 116, 119, 128 brand 3–4, 10–1, 13, 16n12, 20–2, 36–40, 45, 50–2, 55, 61n1, 63, 67, 70, 72–3, 75, 80–1, 83, 86, 92, 94–6, 101–03, 106–07, 107n5, 121, 129–31, 134 Brand Modi 94–6 Brand Obama 51, 61n4

Brazil 3, 16n12, 34, 36, 57, 83 Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy (CDP) 61n1 censorship 66, 76, 78n8, 122, 128 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 106, 108n22, 112, 124n5 China 3–4, 6–9, 11–5, 18, 20–3, 26, 28, 30–1, 33, 37–8, 45–6, 49, 54–5, 57, 59, 60–1, 63–78, 80–1, 92, 105–06, 109–16, 118, 121–24, 129–31; see also Beijing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 4, 23, 66, 78n13, 130 civil society 17, 67, 88, 123 Clinton, Bill 27–8, 50 Colour Revolution 42, 47n11 Commission Report 49 consensus 53, 117, 123, 127 conspiracy theories 114, 116–17, 123, 128, 130, 132n2 Constructivist 5–6 cooperation 2, 30, 60, 71, 72, 88, 107n1, 120, 127 Covid-19 21, 31n11, 35, 66–7, 71–2, 96, 102–03, 107, 114–16, 118, 120–24, 126–29, 131; see also pandemic crisis communication 21, 55, 86, 99, 120; see also Twitter Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) 122 Cyber troops 111

Index  175

Democracy 2, 6, 12–3, 23–4, 31–2, 34–6, 38, 42, 44, 63, 73, 78, 84, 100, 113, 115, 117–18, 123; see also liberal democracies dialogue 2, 5, 9–10, 13, 15n5, 15n6, 45, 48–50, 54, 62n7, 67, 71, 73, 75, 106, 131 diaspora 2, 4, 11, 14, 16, 20–1, 66, 68, 70, 75, 83–5, 89–1, 94–5, 97–2, 106–8, 115, 119, 124n4, 128 digitalization 1, 3, 7, 11, 18, 49, 52, 64, 69, 75, 80–1, 85–6, 107, 112, 123, 131; see also digital diplomacy; e-diplomacy digital diplomacy 3, 7, 13, 16n12, 33, 49–50, 53, 60–1, 61n1, 69–72, 77, 79, 85–6, 89, 91, 92n5, 96, 107, 110, 123, 126, 130; see also e-diplomacy Digital Empowerment Foundation 12 digital media 1–2, 4, 8–11, 13–4, 15n10, 16n12, 16n19, 17–21, 25, 27, 32–7, 39, 41–3, 45–6, 53, 55–6, 59, 65–6, 73, 82–5, 88–90, 94, 96–7, 101, 103, 105–07, 111, 113, 115–18, 121, 132n1; see also digital platforms; digital tools; new media; social media; FB; Twitter; Web 2.0 digital platforms 1–2, 4–8, 11–6, 18–3, 28–30, 32–7, 39–3, 50–3, 55, 60–1, 63–6, 68–9, 71, 73–5, 77, 79–80, 82–5, 87, 89–1, 93–6, 98, 100, 103–5, 107, 109–13, 119–121–3, 126–7, 130–31; see also digital tools; social media; new media; Twitter; Facebook (FB) digital public 2, 13, 19, 30, 34, 71, 85, 87, 96, 121, 125, 127–28, 131; see also networked public digital tools 1–4, 6–7, 11–4, 16–7, 20, 30, 32–4, 37, 40, 44, 46, 52, 55, 63, 65, 67, 75, 77, 80, 84, 89, 91, 94–9, 107, 123, 126, 131; see also social media; digital platforms; Twitter; Facebook (FB); Web 2.0 Disaster Management Act 120 disinformation 4, 12–3, 15n9, 16n18, 21, 31n11, 42, 52, 68, 70, 102, 109–26, 128–29, 132n2; see also fake news e-diplomacy 13, 50, 131 emotion 5, 8–11, 14, 26–7, 40, 75, 83–4, 94–5, 98–100, 104, 107, 112, 116, 123, 124n1 engagement 1–7, 9, 15, 18–9, 21, 28, 32–4, 36, 41, 44–5, 48–3, 58–2, 64, 66–7, 70, 75, 79, 81–2, 84–7, 90–1, 93–4, 96–01, 105, 108

Erdogan 41, 43–4; see also Turkey Ethiopia 26, 43 Extreme content 110–25 Facebook (FB) 1, 19, 32–3, 35–6, 38, 40–1, 44, 46n8, 50–1, 53–4, 62n9, 63–4, 68, 78n3, 84–5, 87, 89–1, 96–8, 101, 105, 109, 113, 115, 117, 119–11, 124n4, 124n5, 128, 130, 131; see also digital platforms; digital tools; tools; social media; digital media; new media; Twitter Facebook-Cambridge Analytica 46n8 fact-checkers 13, 118, 119, 121 Floyd, George 11, 14, 57 Freedom in the World 6, 16n15, 46n7, 47n13, 100 Galwan 131 Germany 25, 59, 60, 121 Glocal 5, 18, 23, 52, 87, 91, 117, 119, 127 Gujarat 95, 97, 107n3 hard power 6, 81, 126, 128, 130–31 hashtags 9, 42, 44, 74, 85, 92n8, 95, 110–11, 125n12 Hazare, Anna 88–9 Hindutva 26, 31n10, 95, 102, 107, 112; see also nationalism Hong Kong 14, 26, 31n7, 34, 46n4, 57, 60, 68–9, 73, 78n7, 78n8, 87, 89, 115, 132n1 ‘Howdy Modi’ 99–100 ICT revolution 9, 23, 80 illiberal 46, 111–2, 117 image 4, 8–11, 15n9, 19–2, 26–7, 33–4, 36–41, 45–6, 48–9, 51–4, 57–8, 60, 62–6, 69, 71–3, 75–6, 81, 83, 90, 94–5, 96, 98, 101, 105–06, 113–14, 116, 119, 123–24, 129, 134; see also reputation ‘infodemic’ 102, 128 INS Sudarshini 83 India Against Corruption (IAC) 84, 88–91, 92n8; see also Hazare Indian Election Commission (EC) 119 Information Technology Act 119, 125n17 Islamophobia 114, 124n11 Israel 35, 55 Japan 30, 77, 105–6 Jinping, Xi 29, 41, 59, 63, 67, 105, 121–22 Kagame, Paul 41 Kargil War 25, 27, 31n5

176  Index

Karimov 42–3 Kashmir 16n22, 21, 25, 31n5, 100, 104–05, 108n17, 112, 114, 124n10, 124n11 Kazakhstan 44, 74 Kerry, John 54 Kony, Joseph 54 Libya 86 Lippmann, Walter 8, 24 listening 15n6, 43, 50, 67, 97, 110, 127 Macron, Emmanuel 40 Make in India 101, 105, 108n8 Mexico 58–60, 62n10 Ministry of External Affairs (MEA-India) 21, 81–6, 96, 99, 134–35 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA-China) 63, 71, 75 Modi, Narendra 13–4, 16n19, 28–9, 40, 80, 90–1, 94–07, 107n1, 112, 114, 120, 124n8, 129–30 Mumbai terror attacks: 26/11 pages 84, 86–8; see also 26/11 monologues 5, 16n21, 34–5, 53, 97, 107; see also uni-directional ‘MyGovCoronaHelpdesk’ 120 nation branding 4, 11, 16n12, 22, 36–8, 45, 72, 75, 101–02, 108n8; see also brand; selfie diplomacy National Register of Citizens (NRC) 106, 108n21 nationalism 8, 14, 16n16, 72, 95–7, 101, 104, 107, 109, 112–13, 124n2 Nehru, Jawaharlal 79 networked leaders 15, 19, 65, 103, 123, 131 networked public 14, 28, 40, 83–4, 105; see also digital public new PD 1, 15n3, 23, 32, 45, 84, 97, 109 Nigeria 12, 35, 46n7; 9/11 4, 15n3, 48–9, 53, 58, 60, 61n3; see also September 11; Commission Report non-state actors 7, 12, 32, 41 Nye, Joseph 5–6, 15n4, 33, 56 Obama, Barack 5, 20, 30, 50–5, 60–1, 91n2, 94 OFBJP 98 Oman 114 Online hate-driven 57, 119; see also extreme content OpGanga 86, 99 Orange revolution 34, 41, 46n2

Pakistan 25, 27–9, 31n5, 35, 46n6 pandemic 10, 21, 22, 31, 35, 65, 67, 72, 96, 102, 107n1, 114–15, 120–2, 126–30, 132n2; see also COVID-19 post-imperial ideology 92n3, 113 propaganda 9, 21, 23, 25, 33, 37, 41, 44, 62n8, 64–6, 68, 70, 91, 106–07, 108n7, 109, 111, 113, 120–22 Public Diplomacy Division (PDD) 81, 84–4, 91, 134 public opinion (PO) 7, 9, 18, 24, 34, 36, 46n4, 50–1, 64, 76, 83, 103, 110, 121, 127 Pulwama 104, 108n10, 108n16, 113–14, 117; see also Balakot; Uri Rao, Nirupama 86, 108n19 relationship-building 19, 21, 61, 98, 127, 131 Religion 79, 103, 112, 114, 124n2 reputation 10–11, 15, 19, 22–3, 36–7, 45, 50–2, 55, 57, 59–60, 63, 69, 72–3, 82, 86, 101–02, 104, 107, 114, 116, 120, 123 Rice, Condoleezza 50 Right-wing 57, 107n2, 112, 123, 124n4 Rising Powers 3–4, 7, 13, 16n11, 22, 34, 75, 77, 81, 83, 91, 93, 109 Russia 6, 15n9, 15n10, 21–2, 25, 31n8, 37, 41–2, 52, 60, 62n5, 62n6, 65, 74, 86, 110, 118, 126–30, 132n2 Russia-Ukraine conflict 15n10, 21, 31n8, 42, 62n5, 86, 126–28 SAARC 107n1, 129 Saudi Arabia 41–2, 71 selfies 94–5, 128 selfie diplomacy 22, 36 September 11 attacks 49, 58, 61n3, 86; see also 9/11; Commission Report sharp power 6, 8, 65 Sina Weibo 64, 69, 78n3, 122 smart power 6, 104 social media 1–5, 8–12, 14–5, 16n12, 19–3, 28–30, 31n3, 31n11, 34–8, 40–6, 50, 52–8, 61, 63–9, 71, 74, 77, 78n13, 80, 83–1, 92n7, 93–5, 97–07, 109–23, 124n3, 127–28, 130–31, 134–35; see also digital platforms; FB; Twitter; digital tools; Web 2.0 soft power 1, 3–6, 9, 11, 15n4, 21–2, 44, 48, 51, 54–7, 60, 64–6, 70–5, 77, 81, 83, 91, 97–8, 100, 103–07, 108n12, 110, 113, 115–16, 126–27, 129, 131

Index  177

South Africa 3, 8, 16n12, 22, 34, 37–8, 83, 128 Sri Lanka 16n12, 22, 37, 46n6 strongman politics 15, 20, 43, 46n6, 65, 104 Swaraj, Sushma 99, 112 Tharoor, Shashi 85–7 Tibet 65–7, 73 touching a chord 5, 95, 98, 100, 102, 104, 107 traditional media 9, 11–2, 18–9, 23–5, 28–30, 32, 34, 37, 41, 55, 70, 73–4, 79–80, 83, 85–6, 88, 94, 97 Trudeau, Justin 40, 94 Trump, Donald 14, 23, 48, 52, 55–61, 62n6, 62n9, 104, 111, 113, 117–18, 121, 124n5, 130 Turkey 20, 43–4, 47n13, 47n14; see also Erdogan 26/11 84, 86–8, 90–1, 119, 127; Mumbai terror attacks Twitter 1–2, 4, 7, 15, 16n19, 19, 21–2, 28–9, 31n3, 31n7, 32–3, 35, 37–8, 40–5, 46n6, 50, 52–61, 62n9, 63–5, 68, 71–2, 78n3, 83–7, 90, 91n2, 92n7, 96–100, 102, 105–07, 109, 112–13, 115, 118–19, 121, 128, 130–31, 135; see also digital platforms; digital tools; FB; Twitter; new media; social media Twitter diplomacy 52, 55, 58, 86, 102 Uganda 54; see also Kony Uighurs 66, 70, 73

United Front Work Department (UFWD) 74 Uni-directional 13, 16n21, 34–5, 40, 56, 59, 66, 97, 110; see also monologues United States (US) 3–5, 7, 9, 11–5, 16n15, 18, 20, 23–4, 26–30, 33–5, 37, 39, 48– 61, 66, 69, 71–2, 76, 78n11, 86, 91n2, 92n5, 94, 98–100, 108n10, 109–11, 113, 115–18, 120–21, 123, 124, 127, 129–31; see also Washington US State Department 19, 28, 50, 53, 61n1, 61n2 Uri 104; see also Balakot; Pulwama US-China trade war 59–60, 69, 71–2, 76 Uzbekistan 42–3, 47n12 Washington 29, 48–50, 50–5, 57–9, 62n5, 71, 76, 80, 113 Web 2.0 1–2, 12, 14, 16n13, 42, 45, 52, 91, 95 WeChat 64, 66, 70, 73, 75, 78n13, 122 Weibo 28, 33, 54, 63–4, 69, 71, 72, 75, 78n3, 105, 113, 122 WhatsApp 15n7, 35–6, 63–4, 113, 117, 119–20, 124n4 Xinjiang 65–7, 70, 72 Yemen 99 yoga 100 YouTube 2, 16n19, 38, 50–1, 74, 84–5, 90, 100, 111, 118–9, 125n16 Zimbabwe 35; see also Karimov