Countering Extremists on Social Media:Challenges for Strategic Communication and Content Moderation

Extremist exploitation of social media platforms is an important regulatory question for civil society, government, and the private sector. Extremists exploit social media for a range of reasons-from spreading hateful narratives and propaganda to financing, recruitment, and sharing operational information. Policy responses to this question fit under two headings, strategic communication and content moderation. At the center of both of these policy responses is a calculation about how best to limit audience exposure to extremist narratives and maintain the marginality of extremist views, while being conscious of rights to free expression and the appropriateness of restrictions on speech. This special issue on "Countering Extremists on Social Media: Challenges for Strategic Communication and Content Moderation" focuses on one form of strategic communication, countering violent extremism. In this editorial we discuss the background and effectiveness of this approach, and introduce five articles which develop multiple strands of research into responses and solutions to extremist exploitation of social media. We conclude by suggesting an agenda for future research on how multistakeholder initiatives to challenge extremist exploitation of social media are conceived, designed, and implemented, and the challenges these initiatives need to surmount

Keeping the arctic 'cold': The rise of plurilateral diplomacy?

At a time when the Arctic region faces significant climatic transformations, a triple governance gap threatens to fuel major diplomatic tensions among regional actors over natural resources, navigation rights and fishery management. This article argues that a plurilateral diplomatic approach could help close these gaps by establishing an effective 'web of contracts' involving institutional networks defined around the Arctic Council as the central node of Arctic governance and NATO, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) / the Global Environment Facility (GEF) as supporting agencies. In so doing, the article makes a twofold contribution to the literature on global governance. It explains how governance gaps could be closed in a manner that does not require extensive institutional frameworks or rigid legal mandates, and it highlights the role of institutional networks in sustaining regional and global governance

The ethics of secret diplomacy: A contextual approach

Under what conditions is secret diplomacy normatively appropriate? Drawing on pragmatic theories of political and ethical judgement, this paper argues that a three-dimensional contextual approach centred on actors' reasoning process offers an innovative and reliable analytical tool for bridging the ethical gap of secret diplomacy. Using the case of the US extraordinary rendition programme, the paper concludes that secret diplomacy is ethically unjustifiable when actors fail to invoke normatively relevant principles of justification, inappropriately apply them to the context of the case and when the actors' moral reasoning process suffers from deficient levels of critical reflection concerning the broader implications of secret engagements for diplomatic conduct

Introduction: making sense of digital diplomacy

The recent spread of digital initiatives in foreign ministries is often argued to be nothing less than a revolution in the practice of diplomacy. In some respects this revolution is long overdue. Digital technology has changed the ways firms conduct business, individuals conduct social relations, and states conduct governance internally, but states are only just realizing its potential to change the ways all aspects of interstate interactions are conducted. In particular, the adoption of digital diplomacy (i.e., the use of social media for diplomatic purposes) has been implicated in changing practices of how diplomats engage in information management, public diplomacy, strategy planning, international negotiations or even crisis management. Despite these significant changes and the promise that digital diplomacy offers, little is known, from an analytical perspective, about how digital diplomacy works

Understanding enmity and friendship in world politics: The case for a diplomatic approach

This article invites diplomatic scholars to a debate about the identity of diplomacy as a field of study and the contributions that it can make to our understanding of world politics relative to international relations theory (IR) or foreign policy analysis (FPA). To this end, the article argues that the study of diplomacy as a method of building and managing relationships of enmity and friendship in world politics can most successfully firm up the identity of the discipline. More specifically, diplomacy offers a specialized form of knowledge for understanding how to draw distinctions between potential allies versus rivals, and how to make and unmake relationships of enmity and friendship in world politics

Keeping the arctic 'cold': The rise of plurilateral diplomacy?

At a time when the Arctic region faces significant climatic transformations, a triple governance gap threatens to fuel major diplomatic tensions among regional actors over natural resources, navigation rights and fishery management. This article argues that a plurilateral diplomatic approach could help close these gaps by establishing an effective 'web of contracts' involving institutional networks defined around the Arctic Council as the central node of Arctic governance and NATO, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) / the Global Environment Facility (GEF) as supporting agencies. In so doing, the article makes a twofold contribution to the literature on global governance. It explains how governance gaps could be closed in a manner that does not require extensive institutional frameworks or rigid legal mandates, and it highlights the role of institutional networks in sustaining regional and global governance

An enduring diplomatic dilemma: to be feared or to be loved?

“If one of them has to be lacking, it is much safer to be feared than loved” Machiavelli once famously contended after taking note of the presumed fickleness of promises of friendship as opposed to the allegedly enduring magnetism of fear: “for love is sustained by a bond of gratitude which, because men are exclusively self-interested, is broken whenever they see a chance to benefit themselves; but fear is sustained by a dread of punishment that is always effective”. Setting aside the stringency of Machiavelli’s dichotomy (binary oppositions are, after all, co-constitutive of each other’s meaning), one cannot stop wondering about its enduring relevance in international politics, in general, and in diplomatic relations, more specifically. This brings up an interesting question: does fear always prevail over love as Machiavelli adamantly suggests and if so, what can be done about it when diplomatic relations are at stake

Understanding enmity and friendship in world politics: The case for a diplomatic approach

This article invites diplomatic scholars to a debate about the identity of diplomacy as a field of study and the contributions that it can make to our understanding of world politics relative to international relations theory (IR) or foreign policy analysis (FPA). To this end, the article argues that the study of diplomacy as a method of building and managing relationships of enmity and friendship in world politics can most successfully firm up the identity of the discipline. More specifically, diplomacy offers a specialized form of knowledge for understanding how to draw distinctions between potential allies versus rivals, and how to make and unmake relationships of enmity and friendship in world politics

The ethics of countering digital propaganda

How can a state react to being a target of disinformation activities by another state without losing the moral ground that it seeks to protect? This essay argues that the concept of moral authority offers an original framework for addressing this dilemma. As a power resource, moral authority enables an actor to have its arguments treated with priority by others and to build support for its actions, but only as long as its behavior does not deviate from certain moral expectations. To develop moral authority, an actor engaged in combating digital propaganda must cultivate six normative attributes: truthfulness and prudence for demonstrating the nature of the harmful effects of disinformation; accountability, integrity, and effectiveness for establishing the normative standing of the actor to engage in counter-intervention; and responsibility for confirming the proportionality of the response