A Failure of the Network News Star System

Jim Rutenberg, New York Times; on the United States Information Agency (USIA, 1953-1999), headed by Murrow during the Kennedy administration, and which carried out public diplomacy during the Cold War, see.

Murrow image (not from article) from, with caption: "September 1961 issue of Newsweek with headline 'USIA's Murrow: Is Truth the Best Weapon'"

Excerpt:

The notion of anchor as authority — a stubbornly male prototype that goes back to the pre-feminist days of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite — was flawed to begin with. ...

The networks bear extra responsibility because they did so much to make them into the larger-than-life — and, therefore, not-true-to-real-life — characters they became.

Mayor damages Osaka’s image by cutting ties with San Francisco

Nancy Snow, The Japan Times

Image from article, with caption: San Francisco's memorial for 'comfort women' is unveiled on Sept. 22.

KYOTO – The headline reads, “Osaka mayor to terminate six-decade ties as San Francisco designates ‘comfort women’ memorial city property.” No, this isn’t fake news. It’s a personal affront voiced by the mayor of one of Japan’s largest cities. “The sister-city relationship of trust is gone. I’ll undertake measures to dissolve it.”

This capricious act by 42-year-old Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura will not hurt nation brand Korea or nation brand America, but he is hurting city brand Osaka, a city that yearns to be as famous and loved as its “big sister” San Francisco.

San Francisco holds the iconic City by the Bay nickname. Seaport cities are proverbially known for comprising more open-minded and tolerant dwellers, in part because of the comings and goings of diverse people from all walks of life that one must engage with in business and daily life. The mayor of Osaka has personal opposition to the installation of a comfort women statue, but that matter is done. His feelings shouldn’t drive the business and diplomatic ties between these two cities.

The statue in dispute is located in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It consists of three girls — Chinese, Korean and Filipino — standing hand in hand with a grandmother survivor looking on. The term “comfort women” refers to women and girls who were sent to work in Japanese wartime military brothels.

Just as Civil War memorials are coming down, this comfort women memorial is among a growing number going up in the United States, to include Glendale’s Central Park in California, a Comfort Women Memorial Peace Garden in Fairfax County, Virginia, and Brookhaven, Georgia, one of the most activist cities against human trafficking.

San Francisco is the first major international city to embrace the comfort women cause for recognition and remembrance.

This is a tale of two cities through the eyes of two mayors.

Sixty years ago, the Greek-American immigrant George Christopher led the mayoral effort to establish the San Francisco-Osaka Sister City Association in 1957. The association is San Francisco’s oldest sister-city relationship.

Christopher was a liberal Republican mayor whose legend is attached to his bringing San Francisco into the big leagues, figuratively and literally. He convinced the New York Giants baseball team to move to the “New York of the West Coast.” The warmer climate was one appeal, along with the diverse and competitive business environment, and the promise to build Candlestick Park, which was erected next to San Francisco Bay. He presided over much city revitalization, including Japantown (“Little Osaka”), in the Western Addition district.

At the time of Christopher’s death, former San Francisco mayor and now senior stateswoman in the U.S. Senate, Dianne Feinstein, said: “As mayor, George set a course for the city as an international destination, a Major League Baseball city and a financial center for the west.”

Now Osaka’s mayor is behaving like the miffed little brother in this city relationship by picking up his marbles to go home. This is sibling rivalry with nation brand image implications, much worse for Japan than for the United States or South Korea. Like some of his kin in the Diet, the Osaka mayor doth protest too much. His words serve well the cause to criticize Japan for not giving full airing to the comfort women. The more Japan complains, the more attention it draws to the activism around the issue.

Comfort women is an internet meme as much as a horrible episode in history. If one wants to use a short-circuit version of information war attacking, Google these two words and see who comes out the victor in the rhetorical battle. It’s not Japan. Why? Because people in power, like Osaka’s mayor, continue to use self-defeating persuasion tactics to suppress debate and dialogue.

It’s time for a change in Japan’s demeanor regarding its position against the comfort women activism and memorials. Japan would be better served by using the big league city charm of Christopher combined with the Edward R. Murrow approach to public diplomacy and nation branding: Air the truth, even if that truth isn’t always good or puts you in the best light. This “warts and all” approach to nation branding resulted in one of Murrow’s most famous credos to emerge from the Kennedy administration: “To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that.”

You don’t win a persuasive appeal or argument by leaving the room, giving the cold shoulder or charging that all your opponents are led by one-sided arguments and emotional appeals. You stay, collect your marbles and keep competing. This is how Christopher won over the Giants. Yoshimura is now keen to win the Osaka bid for the 2025 World Expo, a six-month event expected to attract 28 million visitors from across Japan and the world. Let’s hope he will have a change of heart and follow Christopher’s path.

Nancy Snow is Pax Mundi Professor of Public Diplomacy at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies and author of “Japan’s Information War.”

Shadowy Israeli App Turns American Jews Into Foot Soldiers In Online War

Josh Nathan-Kazis, forward.com [Original article contains links.]

Image from article, with caption: Pictures of Sheldon Adelson projected on a screen at the Israeli-American Council’s convention in Washington, D.C.

The dozen or so Israelis sitting around a conference table at a Jewish community center in Tenafly, New Jersey, on a recent Wednesday night didn’t look like the leading edge of a new Israeli government-linked crowdsourced online propaganda campaign.

Tapping on laptops, the group of high school students and adult mentors completed social media “missions” assigned out of a headquarters in Herzliya, Israel. Later, some planned the shooting of a pro-Israel video that weekend. At the end of the evening, adult mentors filled out a form to send a report back to the office in Herzliya.

Call it a pro-Israel human “botnet.”

The Herzliya headquarters is the base of Act.il, a hybrid Israel advocacy effort and online information operation. A joint project of two Israeli not-for-profits, it is led by former Israeli intelligence officers and has close ties to Israel’s intelligence services, its Ministry of Strategic Affairs and American Jewish casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Act.il’s leaders frame the program as an effort to counterbalance anti-Israel attitudes online.

Act.il aims to “build a strong and effective online community that will act to change the narrative,” said the project’s founder and CEO, Yarden Ben Yosef. The project comes amid a wave of Israeli and American-Jewish efforts to push back against the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

As Russian bots and hackers demonstrated in 2016, governments and other actors are increasingly interested in seeking ways to distort the information landscape and mold online discourse. Act.il is a new entry into this online propaganda war. But instead of Russian-style bots and hackers, it has thousands of mostly U.S.-based volunteers who can be directed from Israel into a social media swarm.

Act.il’s tools include a mobile app and volunteer teams in America. Fully operational only since June, its work so far offers a startling glimpse of how it could shape the online conversations about Israel without ever showing its hand.

It’s an effort in which Israeli security officials are playing a strong supporting role, at the very least. Ben Yosef, an eight-year veteran of Israeli army intelligence, initially told the Forward that Israel’s military and its domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet, “request” Act.il’s help in getting services like Facebook to remove specific videos that call for violence against Jews or Israelis.

Later, Ben Yosef walked back that statement, saying that the Shin Bet and the army don’t request help on specific videos but are in regular informal contact with Act.il. He said that Act.il’s staff is largely made up of former Israeli intelligence officers.

“We know each other,” he said of his group’s relationship with members of Israel’s intelligence community. “You don’t get [sent] a link to [a specific video]. We talk with each other. We work together.”

Act.il is a joint project of the Israeli university IDC Herzliya, the private Israeli university, and the U.S.-based Israeli-American Council. Begun as a community group for Israeli Americans, Sheldon Adelson has sought since 2013 to turn IAC into a hard-line alternative to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The Maccabee Task Force, the Adelson-backed fundraising group for anti-BDS efforts, is also a major funder of Act.il.

At the center of Act.il’s operations is an app, made public in June. The app assigns Israel advocacy “missions” to its users, which they complete for points.

In November, one of those missions was to comment on a specific post on the Facebook page of the pro-Palestinian website Electronic Intifada. The post linked to an article that criticized the Dutch Embassy in Israel over a promotion it was running in the Israeli supermarket chain Shufersal, which has locations in the West Bank settlements.

Act.il asked users to “Leave a COMMENT to uncover ei’s biased reporting,” and to “Feel free to LIKE other comments you agree with.” The mission offered sample text to leave on the page. 

Electronic Intifada’s Facebook post quickly drew an odd array of comments, many of which consisted of the same stilted language from the samples.

“Promoting different cultures and foods in Israel is a great way to bring people closer to one another,” two commenters wrote, using the app’s sample text.

“Shufersal and the Dutch Embassy take public diplomacy to the next level,” three more wrote. Electronic Intifada’s executive director, Ali Abunimah, said that he hadn’t noticed the strange commenting pattern. Even if he had, there would have been no way for him to know that Act.il had targeted his site.

The tactic resembles a well-documented online propaganda strategy called “flooding,” employed at a much larger scale by states like China. According to David Pozen, a professor at Columbia University’s law school, “flooding” constitutes blasting a large amount of content into a particular web space.

“You just distract attention away from messages that you don’t want to get focused on, and take advantage of the scarcity of listener attention to dilute the force of messages,” Pozen said. He cited a study by a Harvard political scientist that found the Chinese government pays workers to post hundreds of millions of pieces of content a year to flood Chinese social media sites.

Act.il, of course, is not operating at anything close to that scale. Volunteers acting of their own volition, not paid workers, do its work. Ben Yosef said that the involvement of real activists is key to the concept. Companies in Israel had offered to build him a botnet to automate the sort of social media tasks his app assigns to users. He said he chose not to do so. “We believe in real people,” he said.

Despite the project’s limited scale, Act.il’s ambitions are large.

Other outlets whose Facebook posts Act.il has recently targeted include RT, ABC News, The Kuwait Times and The Telegraph. The app has frequently requested that users “like” comments by a poster named “Wendy Wa,” whose Facebook profile identifies her as a student at IDC Herzliya, and whose writing at times reads like a diplomatic communiqué.

Other missions ask users to report videos that calls for violence against Jews or Israel. Ben Yosef told the Forward that Israeli government officials have told him the Act.il app is more effective than official government requests at getting those videos removed from online platforms.

The Act.il app has also assigned missions that go beyond cyberspace. In one recent instance, a mission asked users to contact their U.S. senators to support a federal anti-BDS law. Ben Yosef said that Act.il does no lobbying, and that the “mission” was likely a mistake.

Federal law in the United States requires that individuals trying to influence American policy on behalf of foreign principals register with the Department of Justice as foreign agents. Legal experts told the Forward that Act.il’s activities as described likely would not require registration under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

“Even if it did, it’s not the kind of case historically that would raise the government’s dander,” said Steve Vladeck, a law professor at The University of Texas at Austin.

In addition to its informal ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus, Act.il has an even closer relationship with Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, a relatively new office that focuses on opposing the BDS movement. The minister, Gilad Erdan, promoted the app’s impending launch at the Celebrate Israel Parade in February, and the ministry placed paid articles boosting the app in the Jerusalem Post and The Times of Israel.

A spokesman for the ministry said that Act.il “is a separate entity from the Ministry of Strategic Affairs.”

Ben Yosef said that the Ministry of Strategic Affairs is a partner but does not order specific missions. He said that his team is on a Ministry of Strategic Affairs email list that highlights issues selected by the ministry.

Act.il says that its app has 12,000 signups so far, and 6,000 regular users. The users are located all over the world, though the majority of them appear to be in the United States. Users get “points” for completed missions; top-ranked users complete five or six missions a day. Top users win prizes: a congratulatory letter from a government minister, or a doll of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister.

In addition to the app, Act.il produces pro-Israel web content that carries no logo. It distributes that content to other pro-Israel groups, including the Adelson-funded Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi and The Israel Project, which push them out on their own social media feeds.

As its app continues to get off the ground, Act.il is also building a network of local “media rooms” in cities across the United States. The media rooms are the human side of the Act.il operation, community-building efforts for local Israeli Americans. But they also serve as ways to bring Act.il’s online tool to local activists, and local fights.

In November, the Boston media room created a mission for the app that asked users to email a Boston-area church to complain about a screening there of a documentary that is critical of Israel. The proposed text of the email likens the screening of the film to the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, and calls the film’s narrator, Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, a “well-known anti-Semite.” While some Jewish activists had campaigned against the film screening, local Jewish establishment groups, including Boston’s Jewish Community Relations Council, pointedly did not.

Tammy Levy, an IAC employee, runs the Act.il “media room” in Tenafly. On the Wednesday the Forward visited, Levy opened the evening session with a PowerPoint presentation. Going around the room, Levy asked the adult and high school student volunteers for advice for a few of their number who were being sent out that weekend with a hired professional videographer to shoot a pro-Israel video in Washington Square Park.

“Enjoy the mission,” one adult mentor said.

The Boston and Tenafly “media rooms” are two of five planned or active in the United States. The Boston wing operates in cooperation with the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston; another, soon to open in New York City, will be hosted in Manhattan by The Paul R. Singer Foundation, funded by the Republican hedge fund billionaire. In New Jersey, Levy also runs regular Act.il advocacy-training sessions at The Frisch School, a local Jewish day school.

“We go a little bit deeper so they actually understand everything they’re doing,” Levy said.

Much of the work of the “media room” seemed to be managed closely by Ben Yosef’s headquarters in Herzliya. Levy said that ideas and material for the weekly sessions come from staff at headquarters. One adult volunteer was busy filling out a spreadsheet sent from Herzilya with time slots for posting content on the local “media room’s” social media feeds. And at the end of the weekly session, the adult mentors fill out a “weekly update” form that is sent back to the headquarters in Israel.

Act.il is difficult to contextualize within traditional frameworks of online propaganda campaigns. Ido Kilovaty, a cyber fellow at Yale Law School’s Center for Global Legal Challenges, said that it seemed to be a “form of information operation, enabled by crowdsourcing techniques, paired with a strong ideological motive, backed by authoritative appeal.” In other words, an attempt to manipulate online media with the help of a large number of ideological volunteers.

Despite early hiccups, it could be the future of Israel’s online efforts to improve its international image. The Ministry of Strategic Affairs has been embracing secretive data-focused programs in its efforts against BDS. Initiatives in cyberspace seem likely to increase.

“It’s a beautiful initiative that brings the supporter of Israel to the same place under the same vision of helping the State of Israel online, and doing it in a simple and smart way,” Ben Yosef said.

Shadowy Israeli App Turns American Jews Into Foot Soldiers In Online War

Josh Nathan-Kazis, forward.com [Original article contains links.]

Image from article, with caption: Pictures of Sheldon Adelson projected on a screen at the Israeli-American Council’s convention in Washington, D.C.

The dozen or so Israelis sitting around a conference table at a Jewish community center in Tenafly, New Jersey, on a recent Wednesday night didn’t look like the leading edge of a new Israeli government-linked crowdsourced online propaganda campaign.

Tapping on laptops, the group of high school students and adult mentors completed social media “missions” assigned out of a headquarters in Herzliya, Israel. Later, some planned the shooting of a pro-Israel video that weekend. At the end of the evening, adult mentors filled out a form to send a report back to the office in Herzliya.

Call it a pro-Israel human “botnet.”

The Herzliya headquarters is the base of Act.il, a hybrid Israel advocacy effort and online information operation. A joint project of two Israeli not-for-profits, it is led by former Israeli intelligence officers and has close ties to Israel’s intelligence services, its Ministry of Strategic Affairs and American Jewish casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Act.il’s leaders frame the program as an effort to counterbalance anti-Israel attitudes online.

Act.il aims to “build a strong and effective online community that will act to change the narrative,” said the project’s founder and CEO, Yarden Ben Yosef. The project comes amid a wave of Israeli and American-Jewish efforts to push back against the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

As Russian bots and hackers demonstrated in 2016, governments and other actors are increasingly interested in seeking ways to distort the information landscape and mold online discourse. Act.il is a new entry into this online propaganda war. But instead of Russian-style bots and hackers, it has thousands of mostly U.S.-based volunteers who can be directed from Israel into a social media swarm.

Act.il’s tools include a mobile app and volunteer teams in America. Fully operational only since June, its work so far offers a startling glimpse of how it could shape the online conversations about Israel without ever showing its hand.

It’s an effort in which Israeli security officials are playing a strong supporting role, at the very least. Ben Yosef, an eight-year veteran of Israeli army intelligence, initially told the Forward that Israel’s military and its domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet, “request” Act.il’s help in getting services like Facebook to remove specific videos that call for violence against Jews or Israelis.

Later, Ben Yosef walked back that statement, saying that the Shin Bet and the army don’t request help on specific videos but are in regular informal contact with Act.il. He said that Act.il’s staff is largely made up of former Israeli intelligence officers.

“We know each other,” he said of his group’s relationship with members of Israel’s intelligence community. “You don’t get [sent] a link to [a specific video]. We talk with each other. We work together.”

Act.il is a joint project of the Israeli university IDC Herzliya, the private Israeli university, and the U.S.-based Israeli-American Council. Begun as a community group for Israeli Americans, Sheldon Adelson has sought since 2013 to turn IAC into a hard-line alternative to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The Maccabee Task Force, the Adelson-backed fundraising group for anti-BDS efforts, is also a major funder of Act.il.

At the center of Act.il’s operations is an app, made public in June. The app assigns Israel advocacy “missions” to its users, which they complete for points.

In November, one of those missions was to comment on a specific post on the Facebook page of the pro-Palestinian website Electronic Intifada. The post linked to an article that criticized the Dutch Embassy in Israel over a promotion it was running in the Israeli supermarket chain Shufersal, which has locations in the West Bank settlements.

Act.il asked users to “Leave a COMMENT to uncover ei’s biased reporting,” and to “Feel free to LIKE other comments you agree with.” The mission offered sample text to leave on the page. 

Electronic Intifada’s Facebook post quickly drew an odd array of comments, many of which consisted of the same stilted language from the samples.

“Promoting different cultures and foods in Israel is a great way to bring people closer to one another,” two commenters wrote, using the app’s sample text.

“Shufersal and the Dutch Embassy take public diplomacy to the next level,” three more wrote. Electronic Intifada’s executive director, Ali Abunimah, said that he hadn’t noticed the strange commenting pattern. Even if he had, there would have been no way for him to know that Act.il had targeted his site.

The tactic resembles a well-documented online propaganda strategy called “flooding,” employed at a much larger scale by states like China. According to David Pozen, a professor at Columbia University’s law school, “flooding” constitutes blasting a large amount of content into a particular web space.

“You just distract attention away from messages that you don’t want to get focused on, and take advantage of the scarcity of listener attention to dilute the force of messages,” Pozen said. He cited a study by a Harvard political scientist that found the Chinese government pays workers to post hundreds of millions of pieces of content a year to flood Chinese social media sites.

Act.il, of course, is not operating at anything close to that scale. Volunteers acting of their own volition, not paid workers, do its work. Ben Yosef said that the involvement of real activists is key to the concept. Companies in Israel had offered to build him a botnet to automate the sort of social media tasks his app assigns to users. He said he chose not to do so. “We believe in real people,” he said.

Despite the project’s limited scale, Act.il’s ambitions are large.

Other outlets whose Facebook posts Act.il has recently targeted include RT, ABC News, The Kuwait Times and The Telegraph. The app has frequently requested that users “like” comments by a poster named “Wendy Wa,” whose Facebook profile identifies her as a student at IDC Herzliya, and whose writing at times reads like a diplomatic communiqué.

Other missions ask users to report videos that calls for violence against Jews or Israel. Ben Yosef told the Forward that Israeli government officials have told him the Act.il app is more effective than official government requests at getting those videos removed from online platforms.

The Act.il app has also assigned missions that go beyond cyberspace. In one recent instance, a mission asked users to contact their U.S. senators to support a federal anti-BDS law. Ben Yosef said that Act.il does no lobbying, and that the “mission” was likely a mistake.

Federal law in the United States requires that individuals trying to influence American policy on behalf of foreign principals register with the Department of Justice as foreign agents. Legal experts told the Forward that Act.il’s activities as described likely would not require registration under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

“Even if it did, it’s not the kind of case historically that would raise the government’s dander,” said Steve Vladeck, a law professor at The University of Texas at Austin.

In addition to its informal ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus, Act.il has an even closer relationship with Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, a relatively new office that focuses on opposing the BDS movement. The minister, Gilad Erdan, promoted the app’s impending launch at the Celebrate Israel Parade in February, and the ministry placed paid articles boosting the app in the Jerusalem Post and The Times of Israel.

A spokesman for the ministry said that Act.il “is a separate entity from the Ministry of Strategic Affairs.”

Ben Yosef said that the Ministry of Strategic Affairs is a partner but does not order specific missions. He said that his team is on a Ministry of Strategic Affairs email list that highlights issues selected by the ministry.

Act.il says that its app has 12,000 signups so far, and 6,000 regular users. The users are located all over the world, though the majority of them appear to be in the United States. Users get “points” for completed missions; top-ranked users complete five or six missions a day. Top users win prizes: a congratulatory letter from a government minister, or a doll of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister.

In addition to the app, Act.il produces pro-Israel web content that carries no logo. It distributes that content to other pro-Israel groups, including the Adelson-funded Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi and The Israel Project, which push them out on their own social media feeds.

As its app continues to get off the ground, Act.il is also building a network of local “media rooms” in cities across the United States. The media rooms are the human side of the Act.il operation, community-building efforts for local Israeli Americans. But they also serve as ways to bring Act.il’s online tool to local activists, and local fights.

In November, the Boston media room created a mission for the app that asked users to email a Boston-area church to complain about a screening there of a documentary that is critical of Israel. The proposed text of the email likens the screening of the film to the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, and calls the film’s narrator, Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, a “well-known anti-Semite.” While some Jewish activists had campaigned against the film screening, local Jewish establishment groups, including Boston’s Jewish Community Relations Council, pointedly did not.

Tammy Levy, an IAC employee, runs the Act.il “media room” in Tenafly. On the Wednesday the Forward visited, Levy opened the evening session with a PowerPoint presentation. Going around the room, Levy asked the adult and high school student volunteers for advice for a few of their number who were being sent out that weekend with a hired professional videographer to shoot a pro-Israel video in Washington Square Park.

“Enjoy the mission,” one adult mentor said.

The Boston and Tenafly “media rooms” are two of five planned or active in the United States. The Boston wing operates in cooperation with the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston; another, soon to open in New York City, will be hosted in Manhattan by The Paul R. Singer Foundation, funded by the Republican hedge fund billionaire. In New Jersey, Levy also runs regular Act.il advocacy-training sessions at The Frisch School, a local Jewish day school.

“We go a little bit deeper so they actually understand everything they’re doing,” Levy said.

Much of the work of the “media room” seemed to be managed closely by Ben Yosef’s headquarters in Herzliya. Levy said that ideas and material for the weekly sessions come from staff at headquarters. One adult volunteer was busy filling out a spreadsheet sent from Herzilya with time slots for posting content on the local “media room’s” social media feeds. And at the end of the weekly session, the adult mentors fill out a “weekly update” form that is sent back to the headquarters in Israel.

Act.il is difficult to contextualize within traditional frameworks of online propaganda campaigns. Ido Kilovaty, a cyber fellow at Yale Law School’s Center for Global Legal Challenges, said that it seemed to be a “form of information operation, enabled by crowdsourcing techniques, paired with a strong ideological motive, backed by authoritative appeal.” In other words, an attempt to manipulate online media with the help of a large number of ideological volunteers.

Despite early hiccups, it could be the future of Israel’s online efforts to improve its international image. The Ministry of Strategic Affairs has been embracing secretive data-focused programs in its efforts against BDS. Initiatives in cyberspace seem likely to increase.

“It’s a beautiful initiative that brings the supporter of Israel to the same place under the same vision of helping the State of Israel online, and doing it in a simple and smart way,” Ben Yosef said.

Pope Demands 'Decisive Measures' to Resolve Rohingya Exodus

Nicole Winfield, usnews.com

uncaptioned image from article

Pope Francis has demanded that the international community take "decisive measures" to resolve the causes of the mass exodus of Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar.

Excerpt:

The Vatican defended Francis' silence in Myanmar, saying he wanted to "build bridges" with the predominantly Buddhist nation, which only recently established diplomatic relations with the Holy See. Spokesman Greg Burke said Francis took seriously the advice given to him by the local Catholic Church, which urged him to toe a cautious line and not even refer to the Rohingya by name. And he denied the pope would lose his moral authority as a refugee advocate for his silence, saying his public diplomacy didn't negate what he had said previously or what he was saying to Myanmar officials in private. ...

The Duke of Cambridge presented with pair of hobbyhorses during his visit to Finland – tailored to Prince George and Princess Charlotte

formin.finland.fi

Press release 208/2017
30 November 2017

Prince William, The Duke of Cambridge, was presented with an unusual gift during his official visit to Finland.

Two handmade hobbyhorses were presented to The Duke during his visit to Slush, the biggest startup event in Europe, which takes place in Helsinki annually.

The hobbyhorses were presented to the Duke by Emma Rispoli from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. Photo: Ville Cantell

Hobbyhorsing has been sweeping the Nordic nation in recent years, with thousands of enthusiasts making and selling horses and riding them at events inspired by real equestrian disciplines such as dressage and show jumping.

Riding hobbyhorses has even taken the form of an organised sport, with the Hobbyhorse Championships held annually in Finland. The sport is estimated to have more than 10,000 followers in Finland alone.

Prince George’s hobbyhorse, named after his father’s first pony, Smokey, is a dark grey pony with a long, grey mane, friendly eyes and a dark brown bridle. Princess Charlotte’s horse, called Snowflake, is a white Finnhorse with ashen markings on its muzzle and a light blond mane. Its bridle is magenta.

Both hobbyhorses are designed and handmade by Finnish hobbyhorsing superstar Alisa Aarniomäki, who achieved worldwide visibility after she was featured in the documentary Hobbyhorse Revolution.

The hobbyhorses were presented by Emma Rispoli from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland.

ThisisFINLAND, Finland’s official country website, will tomorrow launch a worldwide campaign to promote hobbyhorsing to a global audience. The campaign includes a limited edition, hobbyhorse-inspired urban fashion collection by leading Finnish labels, a website that promotes the art and sport of hobbyhorsing, and a short film written and directed by Finnish filmmaker Viivi Huuska.

“The Duke of Cambridge and his family are known for their love of horses, and with hobbyhorsing a huge phenomenon in Finland, what better present to take home to Prince George and Princess Charlotte than a pair of hobbyhorses tailored to their interests,” says Petra Theman, Director of the Unit for Public Diplomacy at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

Media contacts and interview requests: Petra Theman, Director of the Unit for Public Diplomacy, tel. +358 295 351 558
Photos, videos or other collateral: Emma Rispoli, Specialist, Country Branding, tel. +358 295 350 186

The Foreign Ministry’s email addresses are in the format firstname.lastname@formin.fi.

Serbian Institute for Public Diplomacy

serbianinstitute.org

Rue De Tolouse 23   |   BE-1040 Brussels
Tel.: +32 (0)2 230 74 38   |   Fax: +32 (0)2 230 74 38
office(*)serbianinstitute(.)org

About us

One of the most active Serbs in the French diaspora Zoran Milinkovic, the European affairs consultant and lobbying professor Zoran Djordjevic and business communications post-graduate and nation-branding practitioner Borka Tomic joined their forces to establish Serbian Institute for Public Diplomacy in August 2005. Its original name was the Institute of Serbia & Montenegro. Following the break of the state union of Serbia & Montenegro, a new name was adopted.

Serbian Institute advances the practice of public diplomacy through research, consultation, publications, and professional services.

Located in the heart of Brussels European quarter, in the vicinity of the European Parliament and other European institutions, Serbian Institute for Public Diplomacy provides press center services, roundtable discussions and briefings, promotional material and serves as an info point, promo center and an analytical service.

Serbian Institute aims to develop Serbian public diplomacy initiatives through its practices and in collaboration with other academic and research institutions. To this end, as a quite recent organization, it is seeking to join its forces with Serbian and foreign government officials, Members of Parliament and their staffs, practitioners in non-governmental organizations, and the media.

Serbian Institute aspires to set the trends in the public dimension of Serbian diplomacy, by learning the lessons from successes and failures in public diplomacy to the benefit of both the international community and the Republic of Serbia itself.

Serbian Institute has no government connection and receives no financial support from any government source. It seeks support from foundation grants and corporate gifts.

Your Favorites: November Edition

uscpublicdiplomacy.org

As the next round of holidays approaches and we say goodbye to the month of Veterans Day and Thanksgiving, enjoy some of our top November content, according to our readers:

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ANNOUNCEMENT

6. Meet the 2017-2019 CPD Research Fellows

Our three newest research fellows from Australia, the U.S. and Switzerland bring projects on China-Pakistan relations, Middle East attitudes towards western foreign policy, and enhanced evaluation of country images.

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CPD BLOG

5. Valuing Public Diplomacy

U.S. Advisory Commission's Shawn Powers on why the United States' public diplomacy budget needs more attention.

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EVENT

4. Public Diplomacy from the Heartland

CPD partnered with Gaylord College at the University of Oklahoma to discuss what public diplomacy looks like from the vantage point of Middle America.

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CPD BLOG

3. Russian Disinformation and U.S. Public Diplomacy

A look at some of the tactics the United States can use to respond to disinformation in the 21st century.

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CPD BLOG

2. Part I: Trump's Big Fail (So Far) at the BBG/VOA

In Part I of a two-part series, Dan Robinson looks at recent events involving the Broadcasting Board of Governors' oversight of Voice of America.

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EVENT

1. Conversation with Ma Ying-jeou, Former President of Taiwan

CPD was pleased to host Dr. Ma Ying-jeou for a conversation on cross-strait relations and the vital role of commerce, exchanges and tourism in forging new relationships between mainland China and Taiwan.

Photos (from top to bottom): Photo by Element5Digital I CC0, Image is CPD's own, Photo by geralt I CC0, Image courtesy of iStock, Photo by Jürg Vollmer I CC BY-SA 3.0, Photo by Tim Mossholder I CC0, Image courtesy of Ma Ying-jeou

The Rise of Personalized Diplomacy

Ilan Manor, uscpublicdiplomacy.org

uncaptioned image from article

When foreign ministries first migrated online, they viewed social media platforms as mass media channels. Much like radio and television, Twitter and Facebook could be used to disseminate messages among millions of users. Subsequently, the focus of online activity was mass information dissemination, while the parameter for success was audience reach. MFAs relied mostly on general engagement parameters such as the number of followers they attracted on social media, the number of retweets their messages garnered and their overall reach online.

However, foreign ministries soon learned that social media was quite different from other mass mediums (e.g., radio, television). This was because users could react to diplomats’ content and even hijack that content for their own purposes. One notable example was Sweden’s launch of a virtual embassy on Second Life. Sweden’s goal was to open a global embassy that could showcase Swedish art and culture. However, some Second Life users saw the embassy as a state-sponsored invasion of virtual space and protested the embassy’s presence.

What followed was the realization that social media was a two-way medium with interaction between messenger and recipient. While some diplomats feared the power of online masses, others saw an opportunity to better craft diplomatic messages. By using the feedback of social media users, diplomats could identify which elements of their foreign policy were contested or negatively viewed. Moreover, diplomats could use online comments to better understand how their nation was viewed in various parts of the world.

Thus began the age of digital diplomacy 2.0.

What characterized digital diplomacy 2.0—which began circa 2014—was the transition from targeted to tailored communication. Foreign ministries were no longer occupied with reaching masses of audiences but with reaching specific audiences. Moreover, foreign ministries aimed to tailor their messages to the interests and beliefs of these specific audiences. For instance, foreign ministries sought to interact with opinion makers such as journalists, bloggers and other diplomatic institutions. Thus, they were no longer occupied with how many followers they attracted online but with how many diplomats and journalists they attracted. By 2016, foreign ministries and embassies were using network analysis to identify and interact with specific audiences while adjusting their evaluation parameters.

Yet it was 2017 that has seen the slow emergence of the next stage of digital diplomacy: personalized diplomacy.

Digital Diplomacy 3.0: Personalized Diplomacy

The third and current stage of digital diplomacy is that of personalized diplomacy. It is during this stage that foreign ministries and diplomats will attempt to create a diplomatic experience that is tailored to the individual. Such tailoring may center on the user’s interests, needs or patterns of technology use.

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By offering users a personalized experience, the MEA increases the likelihood of users returning to the application, engaging with MEA content and sharing what they have learned with online contacts.

One interesting example is a smartphone application developed by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). The MEA is not the first foreign ministry to launch its own application; both the Polish and the Canadian ministries have launched apps. However, while the Canadian application focuses on consular aid, the MEA’s application focuses on supplying digital services and information to users. Moreover, unlike the Canadian application which is relevant only to Canadian citizens, the MEA application seems to target both domestic and foreign populations.

The application has seven features. The first is the e-Citizen feature that offers e-services to Indian citizens ranging from telephone directories to employment opportunities at the MEA.

The second feature enables users to track state visits by Indian officials abroad as well as state visits by foreign dignitaries to India. The scope of available information is substantive, ranging from images to bilateral and multilateral documents signed during state visits as well as public statements made by world leaders. The third feature enables users to locate the nearest embassy to them, to read updates from embassies and even to hear podcasts by Indian ambassadors. The fifth feature is the media center which consists of a wide array of documents, press releases, speeches, statements and transcripts of media briefings.

The sixth feature is a consular one. It is in this feature that a user can apply for visas, track his or her application, download forms and even communicate with the MEA. The seventh and final feature focuses on public diplomacy. It is under this feature that a user can hear lectures on Indian diplomacy from former ambassadors, watch documentaries on India or read issues of the MEA’s magazine, India Perspectives.

The review of the MEA’s application thus far suggests that it offers a breadth of information. However, the most interesting feature of the application is its personalization mechanism. Each user can create his or her own MEA application by selecting the specific issues he or she wishes to follow more closely. Users even have a notepad where they can write comments on the information they have reviewed.

This form of digital diplomacy offers users a personalized digital experience that is tailored to their interests and needs. Journalists can follow press briefings and state visits while prospective tourists can follow embassy updates and track their visa application. Users can even interact with the MEA through the various modules. By offering users a personalized experience, the MEA increases the likelihood of users returning to the application, engaging with MEA content and sharing what they have learned with online contacts.

Where to Next?

The practice of digital diplomacy 3.0 will likely continue to take shape in coming years. This process may be facilitated by a host of new technologies. Virtual and augmented reality may soon enable users to virtually travel to other countries and experience their culture and history. Such trips will be personalized and will offer each user an experience that matches his or her specific interests. Artificial intelligence will be employed to communicate with online users and best meet their consular needs while smartphone applications will send users notifications tailored to their occupational needs.

Importantly, foreign ministries should invest in developing personalized forms of digital diplomacy, given that online users are already accustomed to personalized online experiences when logging onto Netflix, Amazon or Pizza Hut. 

Taiwan's Public Diplomacy Under Former President Ma Ying-jeou

uscpublicdiplomacy.org

uncaptioned image from entry

CPD Blog Contributor Gary D. Rawnsley recently published an article on Taiwan's public diplomacy under Former President of Taiwan Ma Ying-jeou's administration.

The article, "Soft Power Rich, Public Diplomacy Poor: An Assessment of Taiwan’s External Communications," looks at how actions such as dissolving Taiwan's Government Information Office have impacted the country's global communications strategy.

Inspired by an American diplomat who commented, “Taiwan has grown into a society that represents most of our important values that we try to promote elsewhere in the world,” Rawnsley sought to answer the following question: "if the American diplomat...is correct to correlate Taiwan’s values with those of other liberal democracies, especially the U.S., why is Taiwan still unable to connect with international audiences?"

The full article was published in The China Quarterly and is available online at the Cambridge University Press website.

A Failure of the Network News Star System

Jim Rutenberg, New York Times; on the United States Information Agency (USIA, 1953-1999), headed by Murrow during the Kennedy administration, and which carried out public diplomacy during the Cold War, see.

Murrow image (not from article) from, with caption: "September 1961 issue of Newsweek with headline 'USIA's Murrow: Is Truth the Best Weapon'"

Excerpt:

The notion of anchor as authority — a stubbornly male prototype that goes back to the pre-feminist days of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite — was flawed to begin with. ...

The networks bear extra responsibility because they did so much to make them into the larger-than-life — and, therefore, not-true-to-real-life — characters they became.

Mayor damages Osaka’s image by cutting ties with San Francisco

Nancy Snow, The Japan Times

Image from article, with caption: San Francisco's memorial for 'comfort women' is unveiled on Sept. 22.

KYOTO – The headline reads, “Osaka mayor to terminate six-decade ties as San Francisco designates ‘comfort women’ memorial city property.” No, this isn’t fake news. It’s a personal affront voiced by the mayor of one of Japan’s largest cities. “The sister-city relationship of trust is gone. I’ll undertake measures to dissolve it.”

This capricious act by 42-year-old Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura will not hurt nation brand Korea or nation brand America, but he is hurting city brand Osaka, a city that yearns to be as famous and loved as its “big sister” San Francisco.

San Francisco holds the iconic City by the Bay nickname. Seaport cities are proverbially known for comprising more open-minded and tolerant dwellers, in part because of the comings and goings of diverse people from all walks of life that one must engage with in business and daily life. The mayor of Osaka has personal opposition to the installation of a comfort women statue, but that matter is done. His feelings shouldn’t drive the business and diplomatic ties between these two cities.

The statue in dispute is located in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It consists of three girls — Chinese, Korean and Filipino — standing hand in hand with a grandmother survivor looking on. The term “comfort women” refers to women and girls who were sent to work in Japanese wartime military brothels.

Just as Civil War memorials are coming down, this comfort women memorial is among a growing number going up in the United States, to include Glendale’s Central Park in California, a Comfort Women Memorial Peace Garden in Fairfax County, Virginia, and Brookhaven, Georgia, one of the most activist cities against human trafficking.

San Francisco is the first major international city to embrace the comfort women cause for recognition and remembrance.

This is a tale of two cities through the eyes of two mayors.

Sixty years ago, the Greek-American immigrant George Christopher led the mayoral effort to establish the San Francisco-Osaka Sister City Association in 1957. The association is San Francisco’s oldest sister-city relationship.

Christopher was a liberal Republican mayor whose legend is attached to his bringing San Francisco into the big leagues, figuratively and literally. He convinced the New York Giants baseball team to move to the “New York of the West Coast.” The warmer climate was one appeal, along with the diverse and competitive business environment, and the promise to build Candlestick Park, which was erected next to San Francisco Bay. He presided over much city revitalization, including Japantown (“Little Osaka”), in the Western Addition district.

At the time of Christopher’s death, former San Francisco mayor and now senior stateswoman in the U.S. Senate, Dianne Feinstein, said: “As mayor, George set a course for the city as an international destination, a Major League Baseball city and a financial center for the west.”

Now Osaka’s mayor is behaving like the miffed little brother in this city relationship by picking up his marbles to go home. This is sibling rivalry with nation brand image implications, much worse for Japan than for the United States or South Korea. Like some of his kin in the Diet, the Osaka mayor doth protest too much. His words serve well the cause to criticize Japan for not giving full airing to the comfort women. The more Japan complains, the more attention it draws to the activism around the issue.

Comfort women is an internet meme as much as a horrible episode in history. If one wants to use a short-circuit version of information war attacking, Google these two words and see who comes out the victor in the rhetorical battle. It’s not Japan. Why? Because people in power, like Osaka’s mayor, continue to use self-defeating persuasion tactics to suppress debate and dialogue.

It’s time for a change in Japan’s demeanor regarding its position against the comfort women activism and memorials. Japan would be better served by using the big league city charm of Christopher combined with the Edward R. Murrow approach to public diplomacy and nation branding: Air the truth, even if that truth isn’t always good or puts you in the best light. This “warts and all” approach to nation branding resulted in one of Murrow’s most famous credos to emerge from the Kennedy administration: “To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that.”

You don’t win a persuasive appeal or argument by leaving the room, giving the cold shoulder or charging that all your opponents are led by one-sided arguments and emotional appeals. You stay, collect your marbles and keep competing. This is how Christopher won over the Giants. Yoshimura is now keen to win the Osaka bid for the 2025 World Expo, a six-month event expected to attract 28 million visitors from across Japan and the world. Let’s hope he will have a change of heart and follow Christopher’s path.

Nancy Snow is Pax Mundi Professor of Public Diplomacy at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies and author of “Japan’s Information War.”