- The Russian Government's use of the internet to spread disinformation, particularly in Germany, is prompting calls for a direct and visible response.
- Why was a Q&A with the US Embassy in Beijing on 'discovering America' scrubbed from Chinese social media?
- Earlier this month ISIS launched a social media campaign involving supporters from European cities, in response citizen-journalists tracked those supporters down.
- New research (pdf) has found China's 50-cent party is mostly public servants who are fabricating almost 490 million social media posts a year, primarily designed to distract the public and deter protests.
- Drenched in hashtags, periscopes and vines, the Israeli Foreign Ministry is aiming for 'less propaganda, more deep and truthful discourse'.
- DFAT is beginning to use social media to publicly advocate for LGBTI rights overseas (h/t Lucy).
- China is doing cross-Straits damage control after a Xinhua op-ed attacked Taiwan's new president for being unmarried. After demanding it be deleted, local media were instructed: 'In the immediate future, all reports touching on the Cross-Straits issue must go through responsible media personnel before they are published'.
- A new Future FCO report by former Ambassador Tom Fletcher contains 36 ideas for modernising British diplomacy, including accelerating digital diplomacy and ramping up open-source data use.
- This NY Times Magazine piece on how Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age sparked a storm of controversy (Rhodes, the NYT and the journalist respond).
- An Australian Army officer blogs on counter intelligence threats in the age of social media, including a warning for the 4675 defence employees on LinkedIn.
- The US Government created a stir by using Weibo to announce and share photos of the same-sex marriage of its Consul-General in Shanghai to his partner.
- The UK's cyber intelligence agency @GCHQ has joined Twitter. It's not the first intelligence agency to join social media (Canada, South Africa & many in the US tweet) and it won't be the last.
