The power of visual content in digital diplomacy
Images, photos, and videos are worth more than a 1,000 words, even when it comes to foreign policy
It’s no secret that visual content is becoming an important tool for public and digital diplomacy. Live streams, videos, photos, and infographics are key elements of storytelling, as much as words.
Emojis, animated gifs, and filters are now pervasive throughout social media platforms. And the foreign policy community is taking note.
Here’s a quick look at a few examples on how visual content was used in the first 9 months of 2016.
1.In January 2016, Periscope went live on Twitter, with better integration and the ability to watch broadcasts without leaving the Twitter app. A few weeks later, Facebook started to roll out its Facebook Live to more users for all iPhone users. Two months later, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks at the Brussels airport — and later in Nice — newscasts around the world used Periscope and Facebook Live raw footage streams to report on the attacks.
2. In February 2016, Argentinian President Mauricio Macri, one of the most popular world leaders on social media, traveled to Rome, Italy to meet with Pope Francis. His official Twitter account published a video of the meeting, as well as a selfie of the President with a few tourists before he heads to the Vatican.
3.In March 2016, Pope Francis joined Instagram. “Instagram will help recount the papacy through images, to enable all those who wish to accompany and know more about Pope Francis’ pontificate to encounter his gestures of tenderness and mercy,” Msgr. Dario E. Viganò, prefect of the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communications, said in a statement.
4.In April 2016, Burson-Marsteller published its first ever study on the use of Snapchat by world leaders. The firm’s earlier study on Instagram was released in February 2016.
5.In May 2016, the United Nations Foundation posted on Medium the powerful photos taken by journalist and photographer Patrick Adams during a trip to the Zaatari camp for Syrian refugees in Jordan.
6.In June 2016, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) launched the Facebook page of the first ever Olympic refugee team. The page features many photos and videos of their adventures in Rio.
7.In July 2016, UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, published a photo gallery focused on innovation technology for HIV prevention and early infant diagnosis in Malawi. This is one of the many photo essays published by UNICEF in its Photography and Social Change publication on Medium. In addition to English, it is also available in Spanish, French, and Chinese.
8.August 2016 was all about the Rio Olympics. The White House often posts photos on its social media accounts, including here on Medium, where back in December they even posted a collection of Instagram images to close and recap 2015. In August 2016, the US Presidential delegation to the Olympic games traveled to Rio, led by US Secretary of State John Kerry. Their experience was documented on Instagram and Medium with behind-the-scenes photos.
9. September 2016 marked the anniversary of Aylan Kurdi’s tragic death. A photo by Turkish photographer Nilüfer Demir of the 3-year-old Syrian refugee, whose lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach a year ago, became the symbol of the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean sea. Since then, however, things have only got worse for children in Syria. A few weeks before the tragic anniversary, an image by photojournalist Mahmoud Raslan of 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh, bloodied and shocked after he was pulled from the rubble after airstrikes in Aleppo, jolted once again our collective conscience.
“The fact that this picture went viral gives me hope that it will galvanize attention around Aleppo and ignite a new kind of conversation about what is happening in Syria,” Caroline Vent of UKUN_NewYork wrote in a recent post.
And another war-related image of a child, the iconic 1972 photo of a naked, screaming 9-year-old girl after a napalm attack in Vietnam — a Pulitzer Prize-winning image by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut — went viral on social media after Facebook removed and then reinstated the photo shared by Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg.
Facebook’s statement: In this case, we recognize the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time. Because of its status as an iconic image of historical importance, the value of permitting sharing outweighs the value of protecting the community by removal, so we have decided to reinstate the image on Facebook where we are aware it has been removed.
Let’s see what happens in the next three months of 2016!
