Understanding EU’s Digitalised Public Diplomacy: Socio-Semantic Network Analysis of European External Action Service’s Official YouTube Channel

Abstract

Since the Internet revolution, global actors have actively employed digital diplomacy as a tool for promoting their values and priorities to broader audiences. In this light, this study specifically looks at the European External Action Service (EEAS)' official YouTube channel to examine the status of the Union’s digital performances for its public diplomacy. This paper employs an analytic method―Socio-Semantic Network Analysis―to explore the information diffusion structures and the impact of the Union’s messages to the world. The monitoring period of this paper is from January 2013 to May 2022. Based on this, the results offers some suggestions for improving the EU’s current status as a global actor. The results indicate that there are three major characteristics of EEAS’ official YouTube channel. First, the EU is highly likely to focus on its internal issues like EU institutions, major figures and normative values in disseminating its message through videos. Second, the EU’s neighbouring regions as well as Russia turned out to be its major target of its digital public diplomacy although the production was mainly made in English. Finally, the EU attempted to make localised approaches by producing the videos in Arabic or Georgian. Subsequently, there are three suggestions to be made for enhancing the EU’s global reach of digital diplomacy efforts. First, the EEAS could consider extending its target of digital promotion from the Union’s neighbours to wider regions like Asia or global South. Second, it could increase more video contents created in different languages other than English for strengthening its localisation strategy. Finally, it could develop more customised contents that contain more local contexts.