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The leaders of South Korea and Japan met with U.S. President Joe Biden final month in a “historic” trilateral summit aimed toward increasing strategic cooperation. Images of South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio smiling at one another on the Camp David retreat close to Washington, D.C. have been accompanied by press statements and joint declarations of bonhomie.
However tensions have been operating excessive between the East Asian neighbors in the summertime of 2019. Whereas Japan imposed curbs on high-tech exports to South Korea, Seoul refused to resume an intelligence-sharing pact and put its armed forces on discover. This was commonplace; the 2 international locations have had an acrimonious relationship since Japan’s colonization of Korea a century in the past.
Curiously, the escalating feud that yr discovered no point out within the social media posts of both the Japanese embassy in Seoul or the South Korean embassy in Tokyo. As a substitute, it was the South Korean mission to Washington, D.C. that tweeted concerning the dispute. The explanation: South Korea depends on U.S. backing to carry its floor towards Japan. The embassy tweet, whereas not formally a criticism, signaled South Korea’s intent to attract U.S. consideration to the row – and maybe additionally an expectation that Washington would intervene on Seoul’s behalf.
Quasi-Official Alerts
Digital platforms, and Twitter (now X) particularly, have gained forex over the previous decade or in order channels of public diplomacy – a way for diplomats and overseas missions to work together straight with the native public and affect their opinions and perceptions. However because the South Korean mission’s tweet signifies, these platforms additionally enable international locations to ship quasi-official alerts to one another’s policymakers about their points and issues, intentions and motivations. In doing so, they reveal the vicissitudes of worldwide relations that lie behind the veil of official statements and even unbiased information protection.
To higher perceive these dynamics, we analyzed tweets from the South Korean embassies in Tokyo (@KoreanEmb_japan) and Washington, D.C. (@RokEmbDC) in addition to the reciprocal embassies of Japan (@JapanEmb_KoreaJ) and the US (@USEmbassySeoul) in Seoul, posted between January and December 2019. Our research, revealed within the newest challenge of the peer-reviewed Coverage & Web journal, sheds new mild on how “digital diplomacy” capabilities and its wider ramifications.
Certainly one of our most important findings is that tweets of the 2 South Korean missions – to the US and to Japan – are fairly totally different from one another. Furthermore, every Korean embassy’s tweets tends to reflect, in some essential methods, how the corresponding U.S. or Japanese mission in Seoul posts on Twitter.
Tradition or Politics?
As an example, the reciprocal South Korean and Japanese embassies tweeted ceaselessly about cultural occasions whereas avoiding political variations. Almost 40 % of the 374 tweets from the Korean embassy in Tokyo have been about asserting or inviting individuals to festivals, exhibitions, and competitions. The Japanese embassy in Seoul posted far much less usually – solely 38 tweets over the yr – however greater than a 3rd of those tweets have been additionally associated to cultural trade. No different matter got here shut.
Tourism was one other focus of the South Korean embassy in Japan and the topic of slightly below half of its tweets. Many tweets included hyperlinks to the social media posts of Japanese college students that the embassy sends yearly on brief journeys to South Korea with the intention to enhance their data of Korean tradition and historical past. These “SNS reporters” produce movies of their excursions and put up them on-line for different Japanese to observe and be taught from; @KoreanEmb_Japan promotes them assiduously.
Even because the Korean embassy’s posts evinced an eagerness to signify South Korea as a culturally wealthy vacationer vacation spot, the Japanese embassy assumed a fairly disinterested posture whereas acknowledging their cultural ties.
Aside from a Japanese tweet mentioning South Korea’s ban on Japan’s marine merchandise, the mounting bilateral tensions hardly registered within the Twitter posts of both mission.
In distinction, about 60 % of the 657 tweets from the Korean embassy in the US raised political points and safety issues associated to China, North Korea, and, certainly, Japan. Almost a 3rd of the 913 tweets from the U.S. embassy in Seoul have been additionally about politics and safety – greater than another topic. Though the U.S. mission prevented making direct references to the Japan-South Korea feud, its posts confused the necessity for trilateral cooperation – indicating how a lot Washington wished Tokyo and Seoul to fix fences with the intention to stand collectively towards China.
Emoji Diplomacy
Among the visible and interactive parts of Twitter additionally mirrored these stark variations. Nearly 80 % of the tweets from the Korean embassy in Japan featured photographs, and most of those have been photographs of places in South Korea. The mission additionally used emojis ceaselessly, particularly within the tweets about tourism and SNS reporters. The photographs and emojis served to strengthen South Korea’s picture as a enjoyable place to go to, significantly for younger vacationers. However regardless that emoji tradition has its roots in Japan, the Japanese embassy hardly ever used them – according to the strict posture it assumed within the textual content of its tweets.
Each these missions retweeted accounts belonging to their respective governments or posted hyperlinks to their webpages. However they hardly ever interacted with one another or with the accounts of their host governments. Often although, the Korean embassy’s tweets would hyperlink to the Japanese embassy’s Instagram account when it featured a vacationer vacation spot in South Korea.
Emojis weren’t too frequent within the tweets of the South Korean embassy in Washington or the U.S. embassy in Seoul. These accounts used photographs ceaselessly. However in contrast to the pictures from the reciprocal Korean-Japanese missions, the pictures from the reciprocal Korean-U.S. missions have been extra more likely to function individuals fairly than locations. A few of these photographs additionally depicted Korean and U.S. residents collectively – which was by no means the case within the Korean-Japanese tweets.
The tweeting patterns we recognized have two essential implications. First, diplomatic social media accounts are usually not merely a way of interacting with native publics, as generally assumed. As a substitute, diplomats and missions deploy them to signify their nation, and its intentions and motivations, to their counterparts. Tweets can sign settlement or dissent, a want for peace, or a name for motion. Even the usage of photographs, hyperlinks, and emojis can at occasions be vital.
Second, in as far as digital diplomacy displays the intricacies of worldwide relations, it could function a window to the dynamics of worldwide energy politics. However these dynamics are sometimes complicated they usually must be interpreted with regard to bilateral and multilateral context. On social media, battle is typically conspicuous solely by means of its absence.
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