1. Time to reflect: Multilateralism Day (Jovan Kurbalija – Diplo Blog)
Two hypotheses can help us understand the current situation and discuss the future of multilateralism.
One: Humanity’s very existence depends on cooperation between tribal and national borders.
Two: Greater social and economic interdependence will result in less war and more diplomacy.
2. Russia Is Being Hacked at an Unprecedented Scale (Wired)
The orders are issued like clockwork. Every day, often at around 5 am local time, the Telegram channel housing Ukraine’s unprecedented “IT Army” of hackers buzzes with a new list of targets. The volunteer group has been knocking Russian websites offline using wave after wave of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which flood websites with traffic requests and make them inaccessible, since the war started.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced diplomats to embrace virtual platforms and to learn to combine virtual and physical meetings in their work. In this article, we investigate how this process has taken place and with implications for the conduct of diplomacy. Specifically, we ask how diplomats have adapted to the transition to the virtual medium, what lessons have they learned from this, and how these lessons may inform the conduct of diplomacy in the post-pandemic period?
4. 4 Reasons Why Putin’s War Has Changed Big Tech Forever (Foreign Policy)
While digital platforms have long faced pressure from governments around the world to take down content, block political critics, and open local offices on which government control can be more easily exerted, Western pressure and Russia’s crackdown are accelerating a paradigm shift for how tech firms operate. Major fault lines have arisen, with far-reaching consequences for how internet platforms do business.
5. 4,000 letters and four hours of sleep: Ukrainian leader wages digital war (The Washington Post)
31-year-old Mykhailo Fedorov is building wartime apps and recruiting an IT army to beat Russia in what he calls ‘World Cyberwar I.
6. EU plans Silicon Valley base as tech crackdown looms (Politico)
The European Union is planning to open a San Francisco office to engage with Silicon Valley tech giants under close scrutiny from new digital rules, EU officials close to the matter have told POLITICO.
7. Digital governance and diplomacy 2025: A cheat sheet (Jovan Kurbalija – Diplo Blog)
The year 2025 will be a landmark year for digital diplomacy and global governance. It is the year of wrapping up the UN cybersecurity OEWG and the negotiations on cybercrime at the Ad Hoc group. It’s the year UN member states will decide on the future of the World Summit of Information Society process and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). 2025 will also flag the ‘last mile’ toward the realisation of the Agenda 2030 and 17 SDGs that are increasingly dependent on digital developments.
The cheat sheet should help diplomats navigate better the next few years in global digital governance.
8. Disinformation and Democracy Reading List (Barack Obama)
I’ve been reading up on this issue, sitting down with academics, researchers, industry leaders, and former regulators, and listening to young leaders who are working to make progress.
Below is some of what I’ve read that offers useful context, solutions we can learn from, and interesting perspectives.
9. AstroSam: Italian astronaut takes TikTok to space (Wanted in Milan)
Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti is preparing to take the social media platform Tiktok to space, inviting people to follow her “to boldly go where no TikToker has gone before!”
10. Google, Meta, and others will have to explain their algorithms under new EU legislation (The Verge)
The bloc agreed on the broad terms of the Digital Services Act, or DSA, which will force tech companies to take greater responsibility for the content that appears on their platforms. New obligations include removing illegal content and goods more quickly, explaining to users and researchers how their algorithms work, and taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation. Companies face fines of up to 6 percent of their annual turnover for noncompliance.
11. Digital Diplomacy: AI As A Tool To Strengthen International Relations (Naveen Joshi)
Unbeknownst to most people, several nations today have national AI strategies in place to use the technology for various developmental purposes. Accordingly, AI is the perfect tool to facilitate digital diplomacy in the current landscape. Here’s how AI plays its part in creating and strengthening digital diplomacy around the world.
This Declaration represents a political commitment among Declaration partners to advance a positive vision for the Internet and digital technologies. It reclaims the promise of the Internet in the face of the global opportunities and challenges presented by the 21st century. It also reaffirms and recommits its partners to a single global Internet – one that is truly open and fosters competition, privacy, and respect for human rights.
While effective strategy is essential for mobilizing power and winning strategic contests, effective diplomacy is necessary for garnering support for the strategy. This article contributes to stepping up to this challenge in three innovative ways.
This article explores the transformative role of practices of countering digital disinformation in European Union diplomacy. It argues that an overlooked dimension of the change brought by the rise of digital disinformation is located in the emergence of everyday countering practices.
TikTok has become an enormously influential medium that reaches over one billion people worldwide. Having control over its algorithm or content moderation means the ability to set the terms of global debate and decide what people see. And what they don’t.