Does Digital Make the Diplomat? On Game of Thrones, Memes, and Twitter Wars.

From the Arab Spring in 2011, to the US Presidential election in 2016, to clap backs on Twitter between countries like Israel and Iran in 2018, world leaders, MFAs and diplomats have realized that what they share online can shape events offline.

According to Twiplomacy, 93% of all UN member states have an official presence on the platform and between May 2017 and May 2018, world leaders sent more than 250,000 original tweets. It takes a lot less than 280 characters to realize that digital diplomacy is here to stay.

This special episode of Persona Grata features Yiftah Curiel who heads the Israel MFA's Digital Diplomacy department which manages more than 30 social media channels in 5 languages including English, Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, Russian and Hebrew and Ilan Manor, a PHD student at Oxford University specializing in Digital Diplomacy.

Ilan and Yiftach sat down to discuss the challenges and opportunities for diplomacy in the digital age and what the future holds for the ever evolving field that is digital diplomacy.

You can follow Yiftah on Twitter at  https://twitter.com/yiftahc  and Ilan at  https://twitter.com/Ilan_Manor.