Internationalizing Social Media: The Case of 'Twiplomacy' in India and Russia

The borderless social media spheres have challenged the conventional concepts of national media systems and international communication theories. Unlike the traditional media outlets, social media could blur the intra/international boundaries across the world including India and Russia. Among a host of social media platforms, the 140-character based Twitter has become the popular microblogging space among social and political spheres in these countries. While the common man to statesmen are now part of the so-called twitterati, this paper tries to explore how Twitter is now widely used for political communications within and without national boundaries. Given the conceptual void in theorizing the national/international/global structure and style of social media, this paper compares the case of political/diplomatic use of Twitter by two major countries from the so-called Global South like India and Russia.

Introduction
The pivotal role of social media in mediating the globalizing world order can be theorized through exploring the concepts and theories that defined the nature and practice of conventional media in national/international and global contexts. Though the globalizing impact of media was noted by numerous authors during the period of the early growth of mass circulation newspapers, globalization theorists like Giddens¹ have acknowledged Marshal McLuhan for proposing the seminal concept of global village. Appadurais² conceptualization of mediascapes pointed to the role of the media in globalizing the national and international mediascapes. Similarly, Thompson³ elaborated the concept of globalization of communication by pointing out that one of the salient features of communication in the modern world is that it takes place on a scale that is increasingly global.

Stressing the centrality of the media in globalization, Rantanen⁴ questioned the theoretical bias towards media and communication, while most globalization theorists agree that there is practically no globalization without media and communications. Rantanen proposed the concept of mediated globalization suggesting that "one of the salient features of globalization in the modern world is that it takes place increasingly through media and communications." Rantanen further argued that "the role of media and communication in globalization theories remained vague and unspecified while media studies missed the big picture of globalization contributing little to theoretical discussions on globalization". More than the conventional medias role in mediating in the globalizing process, the social media has revolutionized the concept of networking and made the world really interconnected beyond national boundaries.

Media Debate: International vs. Global
Unlike the globalization theorists, a host of scholars⁵ addressed the cross-border character of media considering its role in international communication and relations. Taking the relationship between nations as central, these scholars theorized international rather than global media and communication. Mowlana⁶ developed a new framework to explore global information and world communication order that considers culture and communication as the fundamental aspects of new international relations. In the context of global communication and world politics and the underflow of domination, development and discourse, Tehranian⁷ argued that global communication could redefine the power in world politics in ways that traditional theories of international relations have not yet seriously considered.

Countering the nation-state centrism, Rantanen⁸ argued that since communication studies mainly originated from the US, they preferred the term international communication realizing that media and communication can play an important role in wars. And the first generation of scholars saw international communication as international relations, while the second generation paid attention to the imbalance in these relations. In a post-Soviet world order, which intensified the debates on globalization, scholars tried to frame theories and concepts on global media and media globalization and its impact on national and international politics.

Similarly McMillin⁹, despite the title of her book International Media Studies, also tries to shift the debate from international communication to media globalization. The media globalization, according to McMillin, did not get sufficient attention even in undergraduate textbooks on international communication and international media studies. Engaging in this debate, Thussu¹⁰ proposed the emergence of global contra-flows that can affect national, regional and even international political dynamics.

However, the theories of globalization, especially media globalization, are not free from critical questions as a framework for studies of media across the world. Hafez11 has questioned the very concept of emerging global public sphere, arguing that the means of communication, the media, remain dominated by the nation and the state and its impact is international rather than global. Though the media from the East and West have global reach, they are basically grounded in national or state boundaries representing or rejecting certain characteristics of the political system. McQuail¹² already did assert this point suggesting that the media was born into an era of competing nation-states and global ideologies and little has changed in the basic dynamics, although the mass media has greater independence from national control. Meanwhile, Ampuja¹³ raised questions on globalization theory criticizing the media-centrism that lays too much emphasis on the importance of media and communication technology which leads to technological determinism.

Challenging Nation-State Centric Media Theories
Through the de-westernizing media projects of Curran and Park¹⁴, the erstwhile four models of media systems were challenged academically and ideologically since these normative theories¹⁵ from the US and Western Europe were accused as product of Cold War mindset.¹⁶ In the wake of the fall of European communism, Hallin and Mancini¹⁷ reconstructed the comparative method to three models of media and politics whereas they responded to the critiques call to make the comparative studies comprehensive integrating Media Systems Beyond the Western World in 2013.

Inspired by such de-westernization projects, a host of scholars¹⁸ advocated internationalizing media studies through theoretical and empirical researches on post-colonial and post-Soviet media developments in the wake of globalization. Thussu¹⁹ argued that he preferred Internationalizing Media Studies rather than globalizing media studies since there is continuing importance of the nation-state in the contemporary media world both in the West or Rest. Consequently, we can find that most of the comparative media studies promote the typical media system framework giving primary focus to the structural nature of the nation-state where the media is working.

Therefore, nation-state-centric media system approach has its limitations in defining the nature and functions of social media outlets which are in certain sense national, international and global. Unlike in the age of systematic media operations under particular nation-state structure, the media converging era has delimited the scope of mediascapes to blur beyond conventional boundaries. Though most of the social media platforms including Twitter are based in certain countries like the US, their socio-political character and impact are hardly confined to such national boundaries. At the same time these media outlets like the conventional media are subject to most rules and regulations of each and every country. Though the role of the nation-states and territoriality remain unchecked, there is enough scope to reframe the mediascapes regarding its interplay across global/glocal, international/transnational and national/intra-national boundaries.

Thus it is unfair to analyze any social media under the media system approach that focus on the socio-political nature of the country to define the structure and style of the media. Based on the media system approach, we cannot define that social media outlets like Twitter are working in accordance to the socio-political and ideological character of the country it originated. How can we judge the functions of US-based Twitter working in countries like Russia or India which were respectively listed in Soviet and social responsible models of normative media theories? And it would be really awkward to define the social media structures and transformations in India and Russia unless the post-colonial or post-Soviet contexts are perceived in an internationalizing frame. Thus we are trying to conceptualize the internationalizing function of social media comparing the cases of social media diplomacy especially Twiplomacy in India and Russia.

Social Media Diplomacy/Twiplomacy
Before entering into analyzing the Twiplomacy practices in India and Russia, we have to define the concepts of social media, diplomacy in general and Twiplomacy in particular. Introducing the soft power concept in international politics, Nye²⁰ has pointed to the media and culture as a major element that can attract the public beyond borders and keep spheres of influence near and far abroad of nation-states. Since diplomacy is all about making the communication channels open within and without countries and keeping the spheres of influence in touch, the media always worked as the medium of soft power. Like conventional media, social media outlets are widely used by both officials and audience/stakeholders as the new diplomatic channel to exchange the messages and implement the mission. However, the social media made diplomacy more or less a two-way process of communication rather than the typical one-sided message dumping through media.

As Ahmed²¹ noted diplomacy is now so challenging that has to respond to changes in the international and domestic environment whereas the character of societies at home and abroad is reflected in this process. Being a social institution and more visible than ever, diplomacy has impacts of societal transformations and the authority of elites and governments is being questioned via social media. The social media has developed to that extent that it can easily perform diplomacys core functions, including negotiation, representation and communication. Unlike in the era of suitcase diplomacy, the public diplomacy has enhanced its functions and practices in various forms like e-diplomacy, digital diplomacy, cyber diplomacy and Twiplomacy.

To address new diplomatic trends, Hocking and Melissen²² constructed a new framework integrative diplomacy that covers forms and practices in international relations in the digital age. This framework, according to Hocking and Melissen defines "the global environment as characterized by relationships between states and non-state entities, producing complex webs of diplomacysometimes competitive, sometimes collaborative". Given the central role of mutual dependency in network diplomacy, the networking through digital format especially social media has become the conceptual basis of modern diplomatic practice. As the media itself went through transformations in accordance with the emergence and evolutions in communication technologies, the diplomacy also adopted the hybridity in its forms and practices. The hybridity of the old and new technologies has reflected both in the media and diplomacy in the form of offline and online methods of mediating the messages.

While media diplomacy revolutionized the means and methods of diplomacy, social media could add an important real-time dimension which made diplomatic communication ultra-fast and often less precise. Most of the governments and their diplomatic missions across the world have integrated their diplomacy with the social media to make the mission more target-oriented and reach wider audience. Apart from the large scope of communicating to the people within and without the country, the internet-based social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, bring forth real-time response and feedback that even helps to redesign the diplomatic plans and missions.

Thus as Zaharna²³ argued social media diplomacy "has effectively rendered the one-way quest for information dominance and control obsolete" that can bring a new phase of public diplomacy. Social media being central in the third phase of public diplomacy, governments and diplomats had to take the public into serious consideration since they were not merely participants in one-way communication. The social media has given a new power to the public to make their voice heard, whereas diplomatic missions want to keep their relevancy among public. Therefore, social media diplomacy is conceptualized and practiced engaging different stakeholders like civil society that brought new concepts like "relationship building," "mutuality," "partnerships," and "social networks" into public diplomacy. In this phase, Twitter-based diplomacy that is known as Twiplomacy has gained more attraction for its unprecedented role in diversifying the diplomatic mission and practice (Zaharna as cited by Hocking and Melissen).²⁴

Since its beginning in 2006, Twitter is one of the leading social media outlets which enjoys more than 316 million monthly active users and 500 million daily tweets. Once Twitter started to facilitate efficient information distribution and to foster relationships with citizens and other governments, the concept of Twitter diplomacy emerged. Thus Twitter diplomacy is defined as the use of this social network and microblogging website by diplomats, heads of state, and leaders of intergovernmental organizations in order to perform outreach activities.²⁵ Among a host of social media centered events across the world, Arab Spring was a typical moment of Twiplomacy used both by anti-government demonstrators as well as regimes to handle the uprising.

While social media and Twiplomacy fetched new audiences and strengthened relationships with the larger public, it also created nuisance for officials through undesired twitterati thanks to Twitters unrestricted interactive capabilities. As Sobel et al.²⁶ noted Twiplomacy has changed the very nature of traditional diplomacy and the way of interactions between nations and its people. Unlike the traditional diplomacy that kept the boundaries of domestic and foreign issues, Twiplomacy blurred the difference between nationals and foreigners as audience and made them rather than passive recipients as active partners in the diplomatic process. The social media diplomacy in general and Twiplomacy in particular also brought third party mediators such as global media and international social media influencers into the public diplomacy platform.

Why Twitter, Diplomacy, India and Russia?
The case of Twitter, India and Russia is selected for this paper regarding the internationalizing approach of media studies that challenge the nation-state centric media system theories. Here the US-based media Twitter is being studied in totally different national contexts of India and Russia. This approach can bring forth new concepts and approaches towards media in general and social media in particular that work in international rather than global order. And the diplomacy is taken as the study theme because social media diplomacy is a concept that connects with major theories like media system, internationalization/globalization, political communication and social networking.

As we have mentioned earlier, India and Russia deserve special attention in media research considering their socio-historical contexts and the emergence of these two countries as important players in BRICS and other decisive bodies in a multipolar world order. Russia has the legacy of challenging the First World countries and still remains one of the five countries with veto power in the UN. India, on the other hand, being a founding member of the NAM and a leading voice of the Third World countries, has emerged, with its population strength and geopolitical importance, as one of the contenders for a permanent UNSC membership. So the media system, social media practice and public diplomacy of these two countries need to be explored given the importance for the voice of countries from the so-called Global South to achieve a democratic world order. In this regard, this paper tries to look into the social mediated diplomatic practices followed in India and Russia which are yet to overcome the digital divide in socio-political communication field compared to even many Scandinavian and Baltic countries.

Twitter in Russia
Though Russia has made advancements in the digitalization of media and communication services, the controlled-democratic process forced it to be in the margins of highly networked world order. According to Oshkalo²⁷, the social media sector in Russia is on an upward trend, though the global players like Facebook and Twitter have less market share due to the presence of Russian outlets like vKontakte and Odnoklassniki. Quoting GlobalWebIndex (Figure 1), Oshkalo argues that the number of active Twitter users in Russia has been increasing by more than 60% since the second half of 2012.

Apart from the Russian social media outlets, the popularity of Twitter has been increasing in Russia. During the second quarter of 2012, Russia was listed third in the global chart of active Twitter users (Figure 2).

During the same period, Russia has become the 14th country globally in terms of Twitter users (Semiocast data is shown below) (Figure 3).

Oshkalo²⁸ argued that Twitter is getting more followers although Russia has only 5 million Twitter users compared to the US with 107.7 million accounts, followed by Brazil (33.3 million accounts), Japan (29.9 million), the UK (23.8 million) and Indonesia




(19.5 million). Here we should consider the fault line of comparing quantitative results of countries with different population margins. Still, based on the Semiocast report, Oshkalo says that Russians are not exactly active Twitter users since only 27% of Russians logged in and wrote at least one tweet during the period from September 1, 2011 till November 30, 2011. However, the TNS Web Index, November 2014 shows the upward movement in Twitter users in Russia (Figures 4 and 5) whereas TNS Web Index of November 2015 showed a decline in Twitter users among 12-64 age group. Meanwhile, despite being 5th in the list of user activity (Figure 6) with only more than 1 million active users, Twitter is the second largest one with regard to the number of daily messages posted on social network. Moreover, Lubov²⁹ points to another aspect of the popularity of Twitter as it continues to lead by the engagement level with 90 messages a month per author in 2015. Consequently, we can argue that Twitter is one of the popular platforms for Russians who are active in daily social media engagements.

Twitter in India
India is a unique country in the networked world order, enjoying the third largest Internet population in the world, whereas it has only 11% Internet penetration. While IAMAI reports that 60 million of Indias 190 total million Internet users come from the rural areas, Comscore says 86% of the Indian Internet users spend time on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.



Though Twitter popularity dropped 15% on its year-on-year analysis with only 3.8 million unique visitors with the arrival of newcomers like Tumblr and Pinterest, it remains popular among celebrities and politicians in India (Figure 7).³⁰ According to the eMarketer, Twitter shares only 17% of the total social media users, whereas India has the second largest Twitter population with 22.2 million users.³¹ Despite this slow growth, statista.com³² forecasted that in 2016 this microblogging site would reach 23.2 million monthly active users in India compared to 11.5 million in 2013.



Twiplomacy in India and Russia
Twiplomacy, as the term itself denotes, is a combination of two concepts say social media especially Twitter and diplomacy. Though the origin of the concept is marked in 2011, the idea developed in different forms like Twitter diplomacy and hashtag diplomacy that represented the use of social media for political and diplomatic communications. Once the concept got wider attention among researchers and diplomatic community, a website named after Twiplomacy was set up to do research and publish reports in this advancing field of study. This paper mostly depends upon Twiplomacy data to analyze the Twitter use of Indian and Russian leaders and diplomatic missions. Twiplomacy is the leading global study of world leaders on social media, conducted by leading global public relations and communications firm Burson-Marsteller.

Burson-Marstellers 2016 Twiplomacy study has noted that even after the social media developed to be an effective diplomatic channel, some governments and foreign ministries still ponder the pros and cons of any social media engagement. However, many countries have gone beyond Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to reach their target audiences and stepped into new spaces like Snapchat, WhatsApp and Telegram. Even though many countries are yet to overcome the digital divide in domestic sphere, they are active in twitter sphere for their diplomatic missions. Marsteller underscores that Twitter is the social media channel of choice for governments and foreign ministries as there are 793 Twitter accounts belonging to heads of states and governments in 173 countries that represent 90% of all the UN member states, enjoying 324 million followers (Figure 8). And it found that only 20 countries, mainly in the Pacific and Africa, do not have a Twitter presence, whereas even the Chinese government is slowly breaking the Great Firewall for Twitter for its diplomatic missions.



Based on Twiplomacy data, we can find that India and Russia are not in the leading positions in terms of popular leaders, organizations and celebrities. However, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is among the most followed leaders after Barack Obama and Pope Francis, whereas Prime Minister Dimitry Medvadev is the popular leader from Russia. The former US President Barack Obamas official Twitter account @BarackObama enjoyed 75 million followers in 2016 and approximately 137 million followers when he left office in 2017. Indian PMs personal account @NarendraModi has 20 million followers, whereas his official account @PMOIndia with 11 million followers enjoys fourth place in this category. Institutionally, @PMOIndia has more followers than @WhiteHouse, which is in fifth place with more than 10 million followers (Figure 9).



According to Twiplomacy data, Indian Foreign Minister @SushmaSwaraj is the most followed female world leader with 5 million followers, ahead of Jordans @QueenRania with 4.7 million followers. Swaraj has been much ahead in Twitter space than former US Secretary of State @JohnKerry who got 1.3 million followers. Institutionally, the US State Department (@StateDept) has 3.3 million followers on its multiple language accounts, followed by Indian Diplomacy with 1.3 million followers on its two accounts. Russian foreign ministry account (@MID_RF) and French account (@FranceDiplo) are among the top five with more than 1 million followers.

Twiplomacy study finds that within one year the followers of Indian Prime Minister @PMOIndia and Indian Foreign Minister @SushmaSwaraj have doubled. Although Twitter is known for two-way interaction, the five most followed world leaders used Twitter merely as a powerful one-way broadcasting tool making less conversation may be because of the huge number of their followers. In this regard Obamas personal account @POTUS can be termed as the most effective Twitter account of any world leader getting 12,350 retweets and an average of 19,600 likes per tweet (Figure 10). However, @NarendraModis election tweet "India has won!" was one among 22 world leaders tweets retweeted more than 20,000 times.



From the above data, we can also find that Twitter space allows the populous countries to lead the table and make their voice heard in the social media despite the pathetic digital divide at home. Although the hike in the number of followers to the personal accounts of @NarendraModi and @SushmaSwaraj shows a kind of fanfare at home and abroad, the popularity of PMO and EAM denotes the Twiplomatic success of Indian officials. However, we cannot interpret these numbers as effective and popular among foreign users since the Indian PMO and EAM can be followed by the huge sea of Indian diaspora spread across the world.

In the case of Russian Twiplomacy, Prime Minister Medvadev is the only person who enjoys the top rank in terms of followers, whereas President Putin is yet to win followers internationally. However, Russian foreign ministry is active in Twiplomacy with 112 mutual connections. The English-language account @MFA_Russia is in second place in Twiplomacy with peers like EU External Action Service (@EU_eeas) which is the best connected foreign office, mutually following 122 foreign ministries and world leaders.

And it is interesting that though not being among the top five, Russias Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussia), Australias Prime Minister @MalcomTurnbull and Norways Prime Minister @Erna_Solberg are the mutually following accounts with @BarackObama. And institutionally Russian Twiplomacy is highly connected as Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussia) is mutually connected with @WhiteHouse which permits the same to only the UK Prime Minister (@Number10gov). @MedvedevRussia is third among the most listed world leaders after @BarackObama and @WhiteHouse (Figure 11).



Twiplomacy study also reveals that Russia and India are among the countries that keep more than 100 diplomats and missions on Twittershpere. Although most foreign ministries try to enhance their Twitterspace, Russian and Swiss diplomats still face restrictions in personal Twiplomacy. Despite such odds, Russias mission to NATO (@NATOmission RU) is listed as the most-followed mission with 645,896 followers followed by US Embassy in China (@USA China Talk) with half a million followers.

Unlike other diplomatic missions, Russian Foreign Ministry uses different methods like tagging and using the same hashtag to overcome its limitations in population. In a hashtag diplomacy, the @MFA_Russia and @MID_RF accounts used the hashtag more than 200 times, garnering 8,000 retweets. According to Twiplomacy, this was probably the first "hashtag battle" on Twitter. Russian foreign ministry could counter the opposing forces during Ukraine crisis with a popular hashtag #BringBackOurBoys that pressed the release of two journalists captured in eastern Ukraine. Among 50 foreign ministries and a handful of governments that created public Twitter lists, Russian Foreign Ministry has 22 lists on the @MID_RF account and 19 on the @MFA_Russia account.

While Twiplomacy shows the positive aspects of social media diplomacy from Russia and India, it has a few negative impacts on national and international public sphere. In this regard Reynolds³³ argues that the new Russian leadership has inherited the Soviet methods of information war and old methods are replaced with cyber war especially with social networks to meet the requirements of the new information environment. Academically and diplomatically, it is argued that Russia is compelled to wage this cyber war to defend the relentless attack from Western powers and to safeguard its borders of information space. According to Reynolds, Kremlins diverse methods on social media are both overt creating official accounts, channels, websites, comments by opinion leaders and covert using fake identities, botnets, and trolling. To meet the target, Reynolds argues, Russia hires political technologists and internal opinion leaders for grassroots actions and public opinion which is actually organized, conducted and controlled by the Kremlin.

According to social network analyst Lawrence³⁴ who documented Kremlin-directed 'cyber war' there is a chain of pro-Kremlin information channels and Kremlin-sponsored bloggers and commentators. This chain builds a huge network of more than 17 000 Twitter users earlier known as bots by other Twitter users who are closely interconnected and this network was in full force during the Ukraine crisis in 2014. The cyber war, termed as trolling by pro-Russian warriors, is fought with people who want open debate on Twitterspace that gives space for propaganda messages. While preventing alternative voices Russian trollers create real life threat to Russian nationals themselves in diverse ethnic and cultural contexts like in the Baltic region where Russian-speaking people are a minority.³⁵

Journalist Kioski³⁶ also has exposed pro-Russia trolling that targeted experts, administrators of Finnish websites and Finns during the crisis. Analyzing 2,500 propaganda photos connected to the Ukraine crisis from the social media, Riihelinen noted that the Russian propaganda is very organized and systematic than conducted by other countries. In the case of Indian Twiplomacy, this kind of cyber war usually happens during the unrest at the international border shared with Pakistan. The latest version of this cyber war was during Indias so-called surgical strike on militant outposts in Pakistan on September 29, 2016. Indian trollers got international attention when they trolled American President Donald Trump during his election campaign. The case in Assam in July 2012 is an example of how the unchecked and social mediated messages and texts can create internal crisis and mass exodus.

Conclusion
In the era of social mediated world order, the national boundaries have limitations to define the nature and practice of media systems. The known theories of nation-state centric media system and culture are no more capable of conceptualizing the social media sphere which is more international than national or global. To address this theoretical void, it is necessary to develop theories of internationalizing media studies that can consider intranational and international aspects of media and communication.

The Indian and Russian Twiplomacy is the very case that can promote the international aspect of the media and communication process in a networked world order. Though Twitter is an American media outlet, the Indian and Russian diplomatic missions used it for their national purposes without compromising their national interests and security concerns. Therefore, Twiplomacy can be taken as a challenging concept that can recheck the established theories in international politics and media studies. Further researches are needed to make the social media-based studies more integrated into the mainstream researches in social sciences.

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Reference # 55J-2018-01-01-01