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International Political Sociology (2019) 13, 409–429
The Politics of Twitter: Emotions and the

Power of Social Media
C O N S TA N C E D U N C O M B E
Monash University
Social media is becoming a key medium through which we communicate

with each other: it is at the center of the very structures of our daily interac-
tions. Yet this infiltration is not unique to interpersonal relations. Political
leaders, governments, and states operate within this social media environ-
ment, wherein they continually address crises and institute damage con-
trol through platforms such as Twitter. A question arises here as to what
the turn to Twitter means for conventional structures of power and differ-
ent levels of communication. This article analyses the emotional dynamics
of Twitter, illustrating how emotion is implicated in the power of this so-
cial media platform. I argue that Twitter can both represent emotions and
provoke emotions, which can play an important role in the escalation or
de-escalation of conflict. The emotional conditions Twitter facilitates are
implicated in how shifts in temporality and functionality of communica-
tion have shaped political discourse so significantly.
Social media pervades our everyday life. From how we communicate with each
other, to acting as key sources of news and information, social media is at the cen-
ter of the very structures of our daily interactions. “Telemediatization” has come
to define how the proliferation of Information Communication Technology (ICT)
influences the “quotidian rhythms of social life” (Hutchins 2011, 240). Some 328
million people actively use Twitter on a monthly basis, with around 500 million
tweets posted each day. Yet this infiltration is not unique to the personal, or domes-
tic, sphere. Governments and states operate within a similar environment, wherein
they are continually addressing crises and affecting damage control through social
media platforms such as Twitter. As of 2018, around ninety-seven percent of UN
member states had an official Twitter account, with 951 heads of state and govern-
ments and foreign ministers in 187 states operating Twitter accounts (Twiplomacy
Study 2018).
Twitter accounts affiliated with governments, state leaders, and policymakers are
ostensibly used to communicate directly to domestic and foreign publics, as a key
public diplomacy or “#DigitalDiplomacy” outreach strategy. Yet such Twitter han-
dles have been increasingly used to target specific individuals in ways that often
belie appropriate conduct and can amount to “trolling”: posting inflammatory mes-
sages directly to other users to provoke an equally reactionary response. Exam-
ples abound: consider Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s 2011 Twitter spat with
Guardian journalist Ian Birrell over claims regarding human rights abuses, during
Constance Duncombe is a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University, Australia. Her research
interests include critical and interdisciplinary engagements with contemporary world politics, particularly how recog-
nition, emotions and social media shape international relations. Her work has been published in International Affairs,
European Journal of International Relations, and Global Change, Peace and Security.
Duncombe, Constance (2019) The Politics of Twitter: Emotions and the Power of Social Media. International Political Sociology,
doi: 10.1093/ips/olz013
Corresponding author e-mail: Constance.Duncombe@monash.edu
© The Author(s) (2019). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
410 The Politics of Twitter
which Kagame tweeted Birrell had “no moral right! You give yourslf the right to
abuse pple and judge them like you r the one to decide”;1 or Kerala Chief Minister
Pinarayi Vijayan’s tweet to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, follow-
ing his visit to Kerala in 2017, “dear I am sure this break (BEAUTIFUL-HAPPY-
PEACEFUL KERALA trip) would help you to get rejuvenated for facing various
issues in UP.”2 Even the 2017 image tweeted by Sweden’s deputy prime minister,
Isabella Lövin—showing her signing a new climate law surrounded by seven female
colleagues3 —was seen to be a “cheeky nod” (rather than overt trolling) to an ear-
lier image tweeted by US President Donald Trump, in which he signed an executive
order blocking US aid to foreign organizations providing or discussing abortions,
surrounded by an all-male staff.
Twitter is often dismissed as perpetuating unmoderated, irrational communica-
tion, characterized by a simplistic and overly negative engagement between one
actor and others (Ott 2017). The perceived anonymity that Twitter can provide
through disguised handles is also a factor in the greater instance of expressions of
damaging views and content via this social media platform. Going negative on Twit-
ter has been linked to greater success in electoral campaigns (Ceron and d’Adda
2016), underscoring a strong correlation between negative sentiment expressions
and tweets. Twitter is also often represented as carrying an inherent risk to both in-
dividual and group reputation. This risk carries over into how terror groups use this
technology for recruitment and mobilization purposes, with governments increas-
ingly concerned with its capacity to facilitate militant communication and promote
terrorism (Friis 2015; Klausen 2015). This increased concern with nonstate-actor
violence has also led governments to use Twitter for surveillance purposes; there
are even instances where states have employed Twitter to disrupt and suppress civil
society debates.
Yet the role of Twitter in world politics remains largely undertheorized. While the
political effects of social media (Seib 2012; Bjola and Holmes 2015),4 and Twitter
specifically (Barberá and Zeitzoff 2017; Duncombe 2017), are ever more discussed,
explanations for how Twitter has become so central to politics provide limited in-
sight beyond its use as a technological communicative tool. Why? Such studies have
largely failed to fully appreciate the affective nature of social media. Statements
on Twitter have the capacity to both represent emotions and also provoke strong
emotional reactions from other users, leading to large-scale debates that become
integrated into offline political outcomes. The role of social media in facilitating
emotional expressions such as anger, disgust, sympathy, or empathy arguably raises
questions as to the shifting power dynamics between states and their publics and
what this change in communication means for state responses to political crises. The
power of Twitter derives particularly from this expansion of a platform on which
political contestation and negotiation can take place. The collapsing of time and
space and in-the-moment changes in the speed of communication that social me-
dia provides blur our online and off-line social lives, which has manifest significantly
through the overlap of “the cultural, the political and the popular” (Shepherd 2017,
217; Der Derian 2003, 444). Twitter use is arguably challenging the relational dy-
namics between states and their domestic and foreign publics and is implicated in
the power and proliferation of nonstate actors in international relations. In doing
so, social media, and Twitter particularly, has the capacity to challenge the conven-
tional acceptance of what politics is—in formal state-centric terms—and who can
participate, both expanding and hardening entrenched political perspectives.
1
Https://twitter.com/PaulKagame/status/69425770015100929.
2
Https://twitter.com/vijayanpinarayi/status/915606434871521280.
3
Https://twitter.com/IsabellaLovin/status/827457588094758912.
4
The European Research Council-funded project “DIPLOFACE: Between Confidential Negotiations and Public
Display,” directed by Rebecca Adler-Nissen, illustrates the growing academic and policymaker interest in the overlap
between digital diplomacy and conventional diplomatic practices.
CONSTANCE DUNCOMBE 411
The aim of this article is to examine the emotional dynamics of Twitter, illustrat-
ing how emotion is implicated in the power of this social media platform. I argue
that the politics of Twitter unfolds through the complex emotional conditions facili-
tated by the platform itself, which go beyond conventional understandings of power
politics. Users employ Twitter to both represent emotions and also provoke emo-
tions, which can play important roles in the escalation and de-escalation of conflict.
In doing so, this paper contributes first to a growing body of work that situates the
everyday, the “banal,” at the heart of political practices (see Innes 2017; also Acuto
2014). Second, this paper contributes to debates on power and space. Rather than
focusing on securitization of sovereignty or the interplay between governmentality,
territory, and borders, including the securitization of online space, I recognize the
importance of social media platforms as spaces that facilitate emotional conditions
that make possible contestations of material and political power (Dunn Cavelty and
Jaeger 2015; McGahern 2016; Callahan 2018). Illustrating the dimensions of emo-
tion and affect in social media communication has important implications for how
we understand discursive identity formation and political contestation. We should
not dismiss Twitter as artless communication occurring outside the sphere of “high
politics.” We must pay attention to Twitter precisely because emotions expressed in
tweets are implicated in how shifts in the temporality and functionality of commu-
nication have shaped political discourse so significantly. This has, in turn, had an
effect on how easily states can control and legitimize their political messages and
has fundamentally blurred the lines between “low” and “high” politics.
The paper begins by providing a brief overview of how Twitter has transformed
from a personal sharing platform to a key tool of political communication. In the
second section, I examine the links between emotion and the circulation of af-
fect, demonstrating how Twitter both represents emotions and also provokes them,
which can play important roles in the escalation and de-escalation of conflict. Fol-
lowing on, in the third section, I illustrate how the social transmission of emotion is
therefore possible via online social media platforms such as Twitter. I then demon-
strate in section four that the supposedly neutral technological space of Twitter
is nevertheless experienced by the user within a particular social context, which in
turn structures and is structured by emotions. I then turn in the fourth section to ex-
plore how this online space has facilitated the shift toward emotional authenticity—
public displays of emotional dispositions to represent oneself as genuine, honest, or
truthful—as a mode of political power. Finally, I discuss how the emotional registers
Twitter affords are implicated in scale-shifting changes to state power and control
over information. Understanding the emotional dynamics of Twitter will go a long
way toward comprehending how social media is implicated in changing conven-
tional understandings of power and what this signals for how politics may unfold
in the future. I conclude with brief suggestions for potential next steps for research
into the politics of Twitter.
The Political Becoming of Twitter

This section provides a brief history of Twitter, illustrating the growing role of the
platform in international politics. While initially developed as a new social media
sharing platform for communication between friends, since its inception, Twitter
has become the preferred medium through which diplomats and political lead-
ers communicate with their counterparts and wider domestic and foreign publics.
Despite the popularity of other social media platforms such as Facebook and Insta-
gram, which are themselves utilized by governments for political communication,
Twitter has nevertheless remained the central technological tool in diplomacy.
Created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone, Twitter is an on-
line microblogging site that allows users to “tweet,” or post, short statements about
“what’s happening.” Twitter was developed initially as a way of keeping in touch with
friends, using the structure of instant messaging to locate others and be updated as
to their whereabouts and activities. Users can follow other Twitter users—via the
@name handle—and use its private message or @mention functions to communi-
cate with each other. Another element of the Twitter platform is its hashtag (#)
function, a brief identifier which acts as a sorting function for the most-tweeted
topics of the day by marking a tweet as contributing to an already unfolding on-
line discussion (Bruns and Burgess 2012, 801). The retweet (RT) function allows
users to repost tweets from other users to their followers: users can simply retweet
posts, replicating the message, or they can quote the tweet and add a statement of
their own in a more interactive version of the retweet. Users can also use hyperlinks,
pictures, memes, and short videos embedded in their tweets.
Twitter has slowly evolved into the preferred social media platform for digital
diplomacy. The first indication that Twitter would evolve beyond a social media plat-
form that broadcast only personal reflections occurred in January 2009, with Twitter
users documenting first-hand the emergency landing of a commercial airplane on
New York’s Hudson River. That same year, Twitter emerged as an important political
tool when the US government requested its creators postpone a scheduled software
update to enable communication around the Iranian Green Movement protests. In
2011, Twitter was again employed as a key communication tool for protest move-
ments in the Middle East during the “Arab Spring.” While the “Twitter revolutions”
narrative of the Green Movement protests and “Arab Spring” uprisings overplayed
the role of Twitter in these movements, the use of this platform as an organizational
tool to mobilize civil society within the Middle East and beyond is nonetheless clear
(Bruns, Highfield, and Burgess 2013). By the first Twiplomacy study in 2012, over
two-thirds of all world leaders had a Twitter handle (Twiplomacy Study 2012).
States have therefore since recognized the importance of Twitter in enhancing
the communicative outreach of digital diplomacy strategies. Tom Fletcher, former
British ambassador to Lebanon, has argued that Twitter is indispensable to the core
tasks of the diplomat: “information harvesting; analysis; influence; promotion of
English as the code for cyberspace; crisis management; commercial work” (Fletcher
2012, 43). Yet it is the structure of Twitter itself that makes the social media plat-
form so attractive for political leaders and diplomats. By posting short messages,
users can communicate directly with one another, but the publicly accessible na-
ture of the platform allows tweets to be viewed not just by followers but by anyone
who visits the site. The restricted size of tweets—initially 140 characters, this was
increased in December 2017 to 280 characters—allows for scanning and tracking
of conversations at a glance. While political leaders and diplomats can communi-
cate directly with one another, this goes beyond personal interaction, as tweets are
broadcast to a much wider audience. For instance, when the President of the Mar-
shall Islands, Hilda C. Heine, communicated directly with US President Donald
Trump about the Paris Climate accord—“@realDonaldTrump: From one President
to another, staying in #ParisAgreement is best way to create jobs & grow economy.
US has most to gain”5 —this tweet was visible to Heine’s 1,925 followers and Trump’s
52.3 million followers. As a representative of a smaller world power, the @mention
function of Twitter allowed President Heine direct contact with the US president,
circumventing conventional communication practices that might have prevented
such a speedy broadcast of information from one leader to another.
Key here is the binary between Twitter as an egalitarian social media platform and
one that retains the hierarchies present in offline communication. Any Twitter user
can @mention another, thus allowing for open and dynamic communication. Indi-
viduals can contact political leaders and diplomats directly via @mentions. Such is
the nature of Twitter as a public forum that a New York district court judge ruled
Trump could no longer block Twitter users from contacting him (Wolfson 2018).
5
Https://twitter.com/President_Heine/status/859012594249719808.
Yet the visibility of tweets largely reflects a hierarchical user relationship: first, the
kinds of power asymmetries present in real life are also mirrored in Twitter relation-
ships (Usherwood and Wright 2017, 2). For instance, a Twitter user can follow an-
other Twitter user with no reciprocation—while one might hope or expect a recip-
rocal follow, this is not necessary for the medium to work effectively, and users can
simply ignore tweets and @mentions. Second, individuals in positions of power—
political leaders, diplomats, celebrities, journalists, and media personalities—have
a far greater reach with their tweets by virtue of their larger number of followers.
Tweets by such users have far more propensity to go “viral” and move from online to
offline spaces via the hybrid media system connecting social media and traditional
news media, which amplifies the spread of tweets (Wells et al. 2016, 670). For in-
stance, two of Barack Obama’s tweets appear in Time Magazine’s ten most popular
tweets of all time: his 2012 tweet, “Four more years,” with an image of his embrace
with Michelle Obama, was retweeted 897,327 times and liked 602,325 times6 ; and
his 2017 tweet on leaving the presidency, stating “Thank you for everything. My
last ask is the same as my first. I’m asking you to believe—not in my ability to cre-
ate change, but in yours,”7 was retweeted 839,028 times with over 1.8 million likes.
However, regular users are nonetheless capable of producing similar viral tweets.
An example of this is another entry on Time Magazine’s ten most popular tweets of
all time: the tweet of a screenshot of the exchange between sixteen-year-old Carter
Wilkerson and US restaurant chain Wendy’s:
“Yo @Wendys how many retweets for a year of free chicken nuggets?”
“18 Million”
“Consider it done”8
This was accompanied by “HELP ME PLEASE. A MAN NEEDS HIS NUGS.”9 This
exchange was retweeted 3.68 million times and received one million likes.
A question arises here, which has implications for understanding the power of
Twitter, as to what the connection is between the popularity of these two different
series of tweets. I suggest that emotion is key to the diffusion of information on
Twitter. Twitter has the capacity to communicate emotions that are implicated in
how statements circulate and are viewed by others.
The Emotional Conditions of Twitter

Here, I examine the links between emotion and the circulation of affect, as the
first step in demonstrating how Twitter both represents emotions and also provokes
them, which can play important roles in the escalation and de-escalation of conflict.
It is important to note here that I am not reducing the politics of Twitter to an “in-
strumental relationship” between social media and emotion (Van Rythoven 2018).
Rather, I seek to provide a “broader, and more contentious” (Van Rythoven 2018)
view of the emotional conditions that allow a more comprehensive understanding
of the different levels of emotion analysis, from the individual to the group, and
how we might best conceptualize this within the online space of Twitter. I employ
perspectives from psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and international relations
to illustrate the micro and macro processes at stake in the politicization of emo-
tions. What is missing in these accounts, I suggest, is an understanding of how
emotional conditions (Anderson 2017) are mobilized within the online space of
Twitter.
Emotions have long been seen as irrational, transitory, contra the sphere of
reason—state leaders and policymakers make decisions by relying on cool-headed
6
Https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/266031293945503744.
7
Https://twitter.com/POTUS44/status/819044196371800065.
8
Https://twitter.com/carterjwm/status/849811828766949376.
9
Https://twitter.com/carterjwm/status/849813577770778624.
rationalism or cost-benefit analysis or by abiding by the normative constraints of

international law and institutions so as to uphold the reputation of their state
(Hutchison and Bleiker 2014, 494). Coupled with the difficulty in examining emo-
tions because of their nebulous, subjective nature is the reliance of many studies
in IR on inferring emotions from archival documents (Renshon, Lee, and Tingley
2017, S191). Even recent work in neuroscience and international relations illustrat-
ing how decision-making processes are informed by emotion, via fMRI studies and
mirror-neuron studies, emerges from culturally and physiologically narrow research
designs (Jeffery 2011, 160; Åhäll 2018).
How do we avoid reifying emotions in the study of international relations? First,
we must recognize that emotions are in themselves “multidimensional ‘complexes’
of biological, cognitive, and social forms of human experience” (Van Rythoven
2015, 462). Social frameworks are integral to the transference of emotions from
the individual to the group, which allows us to understand how emotions are first
embodied and then circulated politically.
Emotions are embodied: they are personal, conscious bodily feelings that are cen-
tral to our reasoning processes. Cognition is fundamentally inseparable from emo-
tion; we can speak of action in world politics as “emotional action” (Bially Mattern
2014, 591) precisely because the rational/emotional binary that has informed pol-
itics scholarship over time is a misconception of the operationalization of reason.
Emotion is therefore a subjective and visceral bodily experience of “some diffuse
physiological change” (Mercer 2014, 516) of which a person is aware, informing
the value judgements we make about objects and events. The decisions we make
every day are informed in some way by emotions, which structure our experiences.
Emotions help to apprise us as to whether a potential decision is likely to be good
or bad, and what our next steps might be; they also inform how we perceive our
individual role in our group and our group’s position in the wider world (Sasley
2011, 453; McDermott 2014, 558).
Emotions signify a connection between a feeling—“a conscious awareness that
one is experiencing an emotion” (Mercer 2014, 516)—and a judgement. They are
not simply “‘things’ that humans just ‘have,’ they are experiential capabilities that
we acquire as the ‘neuroplastic’ human brain co-evolves with social environments”
(Bially Mattern 2014, 590; see also Crawford 2014, 535–57). For instance, feeling
afraid and deciding to turn left at a corner instead of right is situated within a past
experience or a history of how we are conditioned to be afraid of certain objects
or environments (Fattah and Fierke 2009, 70). “The stranger” is an example where
our feeling about an object—a person, unknown to us—influences our judgement
that this object is unsafe, due to the social construction of danger in relation to
unknown objects or persons (Åhäll 2018, 40).
Here we can see the role of unconsciousness and affect, wherein affect is central
to emotions. Whereas emotion is a conscious embodied experience, affect, on the
other hand, goes beyond the individual to influence the social construction of an ac-
tor’s subjectivity and how they interact with other actors as objects (Solomon 2014,
722). Affect is consequently understood as preceding emotion because it operated
“on less than conscious registers” (Solomon and Steele 2017, 269). What is impor-
tant here, however, is that affect is a relational experience. Take the example of
“the stranger,” discussed above: “to recognize somebody as a stranger is an affective
judgement . . . some bodies are ‘in an instant’ judged as suspicious, or as dangerous,
as objects to be feared, a judgement that can have lethal consequences” (Ahmed
2014, 211 cited in Åhäll 2018, 40). Thus, judging another person as dangerous is an
affective process; emotions as judgements are informed through affect, which is in
turn socially constructed. We fear “the stranger” because this person represents an
object to be feared; their body is recognized as something fearful because of socially
constructed meanings about who, or what, poses a danger to ourselves. Much like
positioning cognition and emotion as separate, almost dichotomous, considering

affect and emotion as distinct “risks reinforcing a binary, gendered logic between a
mobile, impersonal, masculinized affect and a contained, feminized, personal emo-
tion” (Åhäll 2018, 40). We must conceptualize emotion as intertwined with affect
such that one cannot be separated from another.
At a broader group level, we can also speak of a “circulation of affect”: the “con-
scious or unconscious transmission of emotion in a social environment” (Ross 2014,
21). If we see others display an emotion, this experience can engender an emotional
response within ourselves that shares, at the very least, “threads” of that initial, wit-
nessed emotional display (Graham 2014, 534; Ross 2014, 21). Emotions can become
collectively diffused and performed through their public display, such as during
memorials, protests, parliamentary debates, or public and media appearances by
state leaders (Crawford 2000, 313; Sasley 2011, 454, 470; Hutchison and Bleiker
2014; Ross 2014, 21). Such public displays of emotion are both socially and politi-
cally powerful precisely because they are recognized as sites of emotional resonance:
they can constitute the parameters of identity and consequent representations of
self and other at the group and state level and circumscribe what political actions
are possible in relation to specific actors and events (Sasley 2011, 457; Graham 2014,
534; Ross 2014, 31).
This is not to say that individuals explicitly replicate the feelings circulated within
the broader social sphere; as Andrew Ross argues, “those exposed to emotion con-
tagion do not somehow become affective carbon copies” (Ross 2014, 32). There is
always an element of interpretation that feeds into the transmission of emotion be-
tween one person and another or from one group to another. What is important
is the political significance attached to particular feelings about events, groups, or
individuals: the circulation of affect is part of a socialization process wherein nor-
mative and ideational structures inform identity and an emotional attachment to a
particular community (Ross 2014, 33).
Most theorizations of emotions and affect relate to a defined geographical space
within which individuals interact, such as within a lab, museum or other site of
memorialization, state, or region. Yet the spread of emotions, or the circulation of
affect, is not necessarily related to proximity—you do not have to be physically near
one person to experience their emotions, which in turn influence your own feel-
ings. All emotions are catching, and how you feel can influence my own emotions.
In Jon Mercer’s words, “my excitement at a decision can influence your appraisal
and make you more excited” (2014, 524).
Consider neuroscience studies on empathy. Empathy is classified as the experi-
ence of “feeling along with” or to “feel one’s way into” others (Andreychik and
Migliaccio 2015, 275; also Sherman 1998, 104, 110). It is a crucial emotional state
that allows us to understand others and how they feel (Sherman 1998, 104; Marlier
and Crawford 2013, 401; Mercer 2014, 525; Andreychik and Migliaccio 2015, 275;
Head 2016, 175). In one well-cited study, participants were given short written sen-
tences about an everyday activity (one example was forgetting to lock the toilet door
and having someone enter the room) and asked to imagine how they and their
mothers would feel about that experience (Sherman 1998). Reading a description
of a real-life situation and visualizing personal feelings, and someone else’s, trig-
gered enough brain activity that researchers could distinguish between emotions re-
lated to self and other in these neuroimaging studies. In another study, researchers
asked two groups of students to listen to a statement by another student about los-
ing her parents in a car accident, with one group instructed to imagine how she
felt and another to focus on the technical details of her description (Sherman
1998, 115). Those students who imagined how the bereaved student felt, experi-
enced “vicarious emotion and, when asked to help, offered significantly more assis-
tance than the students who listened as more active observers” (Sherman 1998, 115;
Crawford 2014, 541). Even just imagining how oneself and another might feel in a
given circumstance activated similar areas of the brain and produced comparable
psychophysiological responses (Decety and Grèzes 2006; Decety 2011, 98). Imag-
ining oneself in the place of another allows us to imagine another’s perceptions,
which in turn helps to facilitate our own intuition as to how another person might
be thinking or feeling and how they may act as a result. This process of identi-
fication, of “imaginatively experiencing the feelings, thoughts and situations of an-
other” (Davis cited in Pedwell 2012, 282), can contribute to the positive recognition
of another’s subjectivity and agency (see also Halpern and Weinstein 2004, 568), as
is the case with empathy.
The social transmission of emotion is therefore possible via online social media
platforms such as Twitter. Users can represent emotions via their tweets, and this
can also provoke an emotional response. For instance, tweeting about one’s grief
over the loss of a parent is likely to impel other users to respond with sympathy
tweets. This was the case with a brief 2015 exchange between US Secretary of State
John Kerry and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, when Rouhani conveyed his sor-
row over his mother’s death via Twitter. Kerry tweeted US condolences directly to
Rouhani, which Rouhani acknowledged by retweeting Kerry’s post. Such exchanges
might signify empathy between users even if they had not met in person. Addition-
ally, much like in real-life, some studies suggest that Twitter users adjust their emo-
tional states depending on the kind of online discussions they are involved in to
more closely reflect those of their Twitter friends (see He et al. 2016, 1). This pro-
cess of entrainment—wherein people “‘feel themselves into’ another’s emotional
episode” (He et al. 2016, 2)—is an important factor in the cultivation of a particu-
lar emotional culture, which can occur via “massive-scale emotional contagion” (He
et al. 2016, 2, 12).
Yet the context of socially agreed emotional expressions and behaviors—such
as expressions of sympathy in response to grief—has arguably changed alongside
the medium of communication. Previous practices of emotional expression have
evolved online, such that the representations and provocations of emotions are
structured differently. This has a direct implication for how we receive and assess
information as legitimate or false.
Twitter, Technological Space and Emotion

In this section, I examine how Twitter, while existing as a supposedly neutral tech-
nological space and social media platform, is thus, nevertheless, experienced by the
user within a particular social context, which in turn structures and is structured
by emotions. While emotion and affect are intimately connected, affect and space
are also closely related to one another, although they retain distinct ontologies. As
Solomon and Steele (2017, 69) argue, understanding space as socially produced
and therefore not neutral or “empty” illustrates the role affect plays in shaping
identities in that space. These identities are, in turn, made meaningful through
emotions connected to feelings of belonging to a particular group.
By altering the material context of social interaction, new media technologies
can broaden the scope of emotional exchange (Ross 2014, 31). Social media net-
works are particularly susceptible to the development of emotional attachment to
identity, which can infiltrate online relationships, especially between mutual follow-
ers on those platforms, regardless of geographical proximity or offline personal
contact (Bollen et al. 2011, 248; Mercer 2014, 524; Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock
2014, 8788). One way to conceptualize the interplay between affect, space and so-
cial media is through insights from critical geopolitics, wherein the idea that “our
spatial conception of the world is the result of hegemonic discourses that define the
“common sense” in a particular social setting” (Eberle 2018, 4). We can see the in-
terplay between affect and space through the “goes without saying” (Åhäll 2018; Van
Rythoven 2018, 467) social construction of Twitter: the common assumption is that
Twitter, by its very nature, is a space where irrationality, aggression, and ignorance
are markers of communication. This does not mean such communication is always
the case; rather, the shared appraisal of Twitter as fostering this kind of interaction
means users are largely socialized to expect to experience communication with or
about another user in this way.
Yet the structure of Twitter affords certain kinds of emotional registers—via rep-
resentation and provocation—which in turn shape political discourse in ways that
Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms do not. As Daniel Drezner
(2015), himself a prolific tweeter, suggests, Twitter “valorises pithy retorts . . . [and]
makes substantive engagement difficult and snark very easy.” The “tone of commu-
nication” is therefore important, as hostile messages can further inflame conflict
(McDermott, Cowden, and Koopman 2002, 136). Negative or aggressive tweets are
more likely to elicit anger in other users or those who view the post. Such anger can
be a protective measure to prevent one being overcome by humiliation, shame, or
hurt. Tweets are also likely to elicit humor as emotion regulation, as a coping strat-
egy to deal with these powerful feelings (Samson and Gross 2012, 381). For instance,
when news reports circulated that Trump had used the term “shithole countries” to
describe African and temporary protected status nations such as Haiti and El Sal-
vador, a number of political leaders used Twitter to represent their anger over such
a slur. Former Mexican President Vicente Fox tweeted “@realDonaldTrump your
mouth is the foulest shithole in the world. With what authority do you proclaim
who’s welcome in American and who’s not. America’s greatness is built on diversity,
or have you forgotten your immigrant background, Donald?”10 This tweet was mir-
rored by former Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe, who tweeted “SHAME
ON TRUMP! The world is witnessing a new low today with this #ShitholeNations
remark! totally unacceptable! uncalled for moreover it shows a lack of respect and
IGNORANCE never seen before in the recent history of the US by any president!
Enough is enough!!” (Greenwood 2018). Other states and UN representatives also
released statements via Twitter condemning Trump’s remarks. The hashtag #Shit-
holeNations and its derivatives became a key trend on Twitter, with users tweeting
pictures of “what my #Shithole country looks like” using positive humor as a way to
regulate their emotional response to such negative imagery of their state.
While tweets have the capacity to represent emotions, they can also provoke
strong emotional reactions from other users, leading to large-scale debates that be-
come integrated into offline political outcomes. Consider the dispute between the
Netherlands and Turkey in the lead up to both states’ elections, in which Twitter was
directly implicated in the evolution from insult into diplomatic crisis. Dutch Prime
Minister Mark Rutte blocked two Turkish ministers from attending a pro-Erdogan
rally in Rotterdam, ostensibly to speak about new powers slated for Erdogan in an
upcoming election. While one minister was prevented from landing in the Nether-
lands, the other minister, Fatma Kaya, attempted to enter the Turkish consulate but
was prevented from doing so and was later sent back to Germany escorted by armed
police. She tweeted about her movements following the incident and stated that
“the whole world must take action against this fascist practice! Such a treatment
against a woman minister cannot be accepted” (Sanchez 2017). Another tweet that
“we’re not allowed to enter into our Consulate which is part of our homeland. Is this
really the heart of Europe ot the cradle of civilization”11 was met with a response
by far-right Dutch candidate Geert Wilders that Kaya should “go away and never
come back . . . and take all your Turkish fans from the Netherlands with you please.
10
Https://twitter.com/vicentefoxque/status/951586161931235328.
11
Https://twitter.com/drbetulsayan/status/840693227242045440.
#byebye.”12 The continued Twitter spat saw Turkish President Recep Erdogan’s
senior spokesperson tweet that the Dutch government should be ashamed for “suc-
cumbing to anti-Islam racists and fascists”13 and that it was a “dark day for democ-
racy in Europe.”14 Erdogan was less circumspect, calling the Dutch “fascists” and
employing long-held representations of Europe and the West as hypocrites and
meddlers. The diplomatic imbroglio was further enflamed by pro-Erdogan hackers,
who hijacked the Twitter accounts of high-profile Dutch CEOs and politicians, gov-
ernment agencies such as the European Parliament, and news media such as BBC
North America, among others, during the Dutch elections. The hijacked Twitter
accounts posted anti-Nazi messages in Turkish with hashtags such as #Nazialmanya
and #Nazihollanda and Nazi symbols, a reference to Erdogan’s statement that the
Dutch were “Nazi remnants.” While both Turkey and Holland implemented mea-
sures on the ground to reinforce their positions, the use of Twitter as a communica-
tive tool to shore up support amongst the Turkish-Dutch population for Erdogan,
on the one hand, and both centrist candidate Rutte and far-right candidate Wilders,
on the other, suggests Twitter has a powerful role in escalating conflict between
states that may already have problematic relations.
The Turkey-Netherlands Twitter dispute demonstrates how Twitter facilitates pat-
terns of representation of emotional expression. Tweets can have an emotional con-
tagion effect that goes beyond an individual politician or policymaker’s engagement
with their counterparts. Such engagement can capture the imagination of different
publics, including individual Twitter users, domestic lobby groups, diasporas, and
activist groups, who all become invested in the communication dynamic between
diplomats and policymakers. An important aspect of the Turkey-Dutch dispute was
the ability of different publics to mobilize around the narratives produced and per-
petuated through Twitter. Social pressures in support of, or against, the Dutch de-
cision to expel the Turkish minister, and in relation to the consequences that un-
folded subsequently, evolved both on the ground, in terms of protests, and over
Twitter, particularly through the use of hashtags to connect the various online dis-
cussions about the events.
Another unusual aspect of this dispute was the role of imagery in perpetuating
negative identity frameworks. Tweets of images of Erdogan supporters in Turkey
squeezing oranges—fruit the color of the Dutch royal family—and drinking the
juice were picked up by news outlets and reproduced in mainstream media (Estatie
2017), further demonstrating anger at the treatment of minister Kaya. While so-
cial media relationships are fundamentally communicated through images (see
Uimonen 2013; Kharroub and Bas 2016; Shepherd 2017, 217), the political con-
stitution of the image on Twitter is nonetheless intertwined with the intertext of a
wider discourse about the subject or event at stake. Images of Erdogan supporters
drinking orange juice would not have been as provocative outside of the context
of the dispute with the Netherlands. Images shared on social media are powerful
not only because of the emotions they evoke but also because they are made “un-
derstandable” through the discursive framing of how or why particular events are
occurring (Hansen 2011).15 Texts provide meaning to the image (Hansen 2011)—
tweets, news articles, or policy statements help to constitute a particular discursive
reading of an image that attributes particular meaning to it, beyond the immediate
Twitter post. These meanings then circulate off-line, making what was a contained
social media dispute accessible to a vastly wider audience.
12
Https://twitter.com/geertwilderspvv/status/840695139244879872.
13
Https://twitter.com/ikalin1/status/840828903392448512.
14
Https://twitter.com/ikalin1/status/840829620698112001.
15
Hundreds of thousands of images are uploaded to various social media sites every minute, and Twitter posts with
images embedded are much more likely to be retweeted by other users (Khosla, Sarma, and Hamid 2014, 867; Thelwall
et al. 2016, 2576). Alongside direct textual messages, Twitter has the capacity for carrying still and moving images.
Photos, cartoons, GIFs, and short video clips embedded in tweets enhance emotional political discourse.
What must not be overlooked in considerations of the emotional conditions Twit-

ter affords, therefore, is how their circulation does not occur outside of the social
context in which they become politically viable (see Åhäll 2018). Twitter use has the
potential to provide a space for the orchestration of public feeling, wherein “politics
as a scene of emotional contestation” (Berlant 2005, 47; Solomon 2018, 18) evolves
within different Twitter communities that form part of the state. The space of Twit-
ter facilitates emotional conditions, particularly anger, that contribute to conflict es-
calation by virtue of the very space of its communication structure. Power can thus
be understood as relationally produced through the discursive emotional framing
of events and experiences narrated over Twitter.
Emotional Authenticity and Power

Here I explore the shift toward emotional authenticity as a mode of political power
facilitated by Twitter. The collapsing of time and space and in-the-moment changes
in the speed of communication that Twitter provides blur our online and off-line
social lives (Der Derian 2003, 444; Shepherd 2017, 217). Such an overwhelming
amount of information available on Twitter, however, is connected to the limited
ability to process and consider such information, making it increasingly hard to
assess whether a claim is valid. Our judgement about the veracity of such Twitter
information is arguably informed, therefore, by the emotions that structure, and
are structured by, this platform.
The speed at which individuals have to contend with the presence of informa-
tion and the growing lack of a geographical gap—given that text and images on
Twitter represent a particular reality of space and time—produce a problem of how
to absorb and comprehend information while at the same time being expected to
respond in kind (Virilio 2006). The concept of telepresence—the idea of “keep-
ing in touch” without actually touching—is a key facet of the development of both
contemporary interpersonal and diplomatic relationships (Hutchins 2011, 241; also
Der Derian 1999, 224). A concern emerges here, which stems from considerations
of normative deliberative discussion as a process of democracy: the sheer volume
of information and the speed at which it arrives suggest Twitter use runs counter
to prudential reasoning, which requires more time in its development (Pond 2016,
143). In the context of interstate relations, the myriad complex rules and proce-
dures that inform diplomatic practice, which has evolved significantly since the
Peace of Westphalia (Melissen 1999), privilege the idea of prudential reasoning and
targeted expression of emotion—whether anger, empathy, sympathy, humiliation—
as key to the art of political persuasion (see Hall 2015). Changes in the flow and
speed of information on Twitter therefore jar with the practice of considered, rea-
soned judgement. Coupled with the emotional pull of tweets, the reflection and
evaluation of validity claims can be superseded by a desire to respond in kind. This
potentially produces a different rationality, wherein claims to the truth are repre-
sented and assessed according to the speed of communication and the emotions
they engender.
The in-real-time speed and ease of contact between Twitter users means so-called
“surface” emotions such as anger—easily accessible and socially acceptable to ex-
press when faced with negative representations of oneself or community/state—are
more frequently expressed outside of contained deliberations. Posting emotionally
charged tweets is a way to ensure they get attention, particularly when repeating
monosyllabic words like good, bad, and sad (Ott 2017, 62, 64). The affective disposi-
tions of anger, disgust, and fear as represented through informal Twitter statements
are much more likely to receive attention online as “‘negative sentiment’ is the key
to popularity on Twitter” (Ott 2017, 62).
Emotional authenticity—the cultivation of genuineness, honesty, or truthfulness
through the public display of emotional dispositions—has therefore become a
commodity of power. Success in Twitter terms is predicated on a greater empha-

sis on transparency as parallel to authenticity and thus trustworthiness. If tweeting
“is coming straight from the horse’s mouth” (Hunt cited in Hutchins 2011, 243)
it necessarily elides the traditional gatekeepers of information, the speech writers,
spokespeople, and media outlets that craft and then interpret the message. Whether
it is an instrumental display or not (Crawford 2000, 118; Pin-Fat 2018, 5), the culti-
vated perception of authenticity lends emotional credibility, which has great appeal
not only to those supporters of the Twitter users in question but also potentially
to the different audiences their tweets might reach. Such credibility developed via
emotional authenticity can provide additional opportunities for state power.
US President Trump’s use of Twitter illustrates this dynamic well: he was able to
cultivate an image of himself and his candidacy as a political outsider not beholden
to the institutional or political status quo through “gut-feeling tweeting” (Enli 2017,
55), lending an emotional credibility to his tweets that was different to that of the
Clinton campaign (Wells et al. 2016). Although the Trump and Clinton campaigns
largely followed similar constituent engagement practices, shared by political cam-
paigns world-wide, a key distinction between them was Trump’s willingness to en-
gage with other Twitter users—the general public, not just his followers. The use
of the retweet function underlines this engagement: around a quarter of Trump’s
tweets were retweets, and of these retweets, around 78 percent were posted by ordi-
nary users (Enli 2017, 54; also Pew Research 2016). This is completely distinct from
the Clinton campaign, which had far fewer retweets—at 15 percent of the total
tweets—and whose retweets were replications of information posted by the Clinton
campaign in the first instance (Enli 2017, 54; also Pew Research 2016). The ability
of politicians to use the retweet function to at least give a modicum of an appear-
ance of access to themselves further entrenches politics as an extension of social life
(Usherwood and Wright 2017, 15).16 These strategies “cultivated the impression of
bare-knuckle authenticity—‘a blue-collar billionaire’”—further endearing Trump
to disaffected voters (Wells et al. 2016, 670). For instance, there is a correlation
between Trump’s “going negative” on Twitter—attacking other candidates in the
lead-up to the Republican nomination—and a significant increase in his poll num-
bers (Thelwall, Buckley, and Paltoglou 2011, 415; Gross and Johnson 2016, 750).
This correlation suggests the cultivation of emotional credibility as key to authen-
ticity and made a significant contribution to his electoral success. Unleashing what
Wells et al. (2016) label “tweetstorms” was a key facet of this authenticity, allowing
users to promote and defend his narrative in Twitter debates with other users.
The cultivation of emotional authenticity by Trump did not cease with his taking
of office: it has continued to unfold in the high politics realm parallel to conven-
tional foreign policy and diplomatic practices. The acrimonious Twitter exchange
between the United States and Mexico over the planned border wall is a key ex-
ample of how the affective nature of social media is employed to signal authentic-
ity. On January 24, 2017, US President Donald Trump tweeted “big day planned
on NATIONAL SECURITY tomorrow. Among many other things, we will build the
wall!”17 While this type of statement had been a familiar refrain from Trump in the
lead up to the US elections, this tweet had a much more powerful effect. Trump’s
tweet signaled a significant decline in US-Mexico relations, presaging a break in the
custom of a formal meeting between presidents following an election. Following
this tweet, when Mexican President Enrique Peño Nieta signaled he was reconsid-
ering his visit to Washington to discuss bilateral security and the NAFTA, Trump re-
sponded publicly on Twitter that “if Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed
wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.”18 Within two days,
16
Trump has also retweeted posts from accounts associated with white supremacy and violent nationalism.
17
Https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/824083821889015809.
18
on January 26, Peña Nieto had tweeted in Spanish “this morning we informed the
White House that I won’t attend the work meeting scheduled for next Tuesday with
@POTUS.”19 Former Mexican President Vicente Fox was even less circumspect with
his tweet that “@realDonaldTrump’s ego monument real cost is around 25 billion
USD. I ask you, America, what would you prefer instead of that # F*****gWall?”20
Trump tweeted back that “Mexico has taken advantage of the U.S. for long enough.
Massive trade deficits & little help on the very weak border must change, NOW.”21
Thus, the heretofore amicable engagement between the United States and Mexico
had evolved into one of acrimony, largely due to public social media posts implying
Mexican immigration to the north was detrimental to US national security. Fun-
damentally, the diplomatic communication between the United States and Mexico
that would normally take place behind closed doors was made publicly available
through the dynamic interchange of political positions over Twitter. In doing so,
the national publics—and arguably a global public—continued the conversation
beyond the Trump–Peña Nieto exchange.
Other states are exploiting this dynamic by employing social media as part of
their broader use of mass media technologies to disseminate “emotionally-charged
messages to induce voluntary compliance with state rule” (Warren 2014, 112). Even
more so, state leaders are employing Twitter to project authenticity in how they
cultivate their leadership. For instance, both the Venezuelan and Ecuadorean pres-
idents, Nicolás Maduro and Rafael Correa, often speak directly to their publics by
appearing on television to read tweets they have received “mentioning by name—
for better or for worse—those who’ve sent them messages” (Latouche 2017). En-
gaging with individual messages facilitates a feeling of belonging, of being heard
in the higher echelons of power: “the citizen who is now also the spectator, in
turn feels he has been served, made part of the political game, become visible”
(Latouche 2017). States are therefore increasingly using Twitter to shape domestic
and international audience perceptions about their activities through information
dissemination and monitoring public support on Twitter, particularly during times
of conflict. However, Twitter use can nonetheless shift the on-the-ground tactics of
conflict actors (Zeitzoff 2018, 50). For instance, in examining the 2012 Gaza Con-
flict, Twitter had a direct impact—through new engagement opportunities with in-
ternational audiences—and an indirect influence—these audiences then pressured
international actors who in turn swayed the actions of Israel and Hamas—on the
outcome of the conflict (Zeitzoff 2018, 50).
The power of Twitter, facilitated through changes the platform has wrought on
conventional communication practices more generally, is connected to new and
different understandings about what is socially acceptable to express and how emo-
tions should be represented, and by whom, within the platform itself.
Scale-Shifting and Emotional Registers

This section examines the role of Twitter in scale-shifting changes to state power,
illustrating how the emotional registers Twitter affords are implicated in this dy-
namic. States are increasingly adopting forms of media suited to the digital age,
with more and more political crises unfolding over Twitter. Scale-shifting changes
conventional understandings of state power, yet such transformations in temporal-
ity and functionality introduced by Twitter are at the same time being co-opted by
states. Nevertheless, the capacity of Twitter to represent and provoke emotions in-
troduces a new challenge to state control over information.
Scale-shifting introduces a novel problem of state control, whereby, as Livingston
and Asmolov (2010) argue, “state institutions will be bypassed altogether in
19
Https://twitter.com/EPN/status/824660333964824576.
20
Https://twitter.com/VicenteFoxQue/status/824663479122612224.
21
networked flows of images, words, and other symbols” (also Hansen 2015, 273):
Twitter allows states, nonstate groups, and individuals to represent themselves on-
line, across and beyond different online linguistic groups. Diplomats and policy-
makers are thus able to engage directly with the broader population of the states
they seek to influence, rather than focusing on powerful elites as has been the dom-
inant tradition (Fletcher 2012, 43). This shift also engenders a greater engagement
with concerns of low politics, expanding the practice first formed in the Enlight-
enment of diplomats needing to be responsive to public debate (Neumann 2016,
5). Power, then, should be considered more widely than material accumulation,
command, or the attraction of ideas. Rather we need to recognize that the power
of Twitter arises from its technological capacity to reconfigure the space framing
“social-ordering and world ordering” (Callahan 2018, 362). As Lene Hansen (2011)
argues, there is a remarkable alteration in the relationship between producers and
consumers of content, and elites and the general public audience.
An important consequence of increasing Twitter use by states relates to the
mounting difficulty in managing representations of themselves and their leaders.
As Brent Steele has shown, states care deeply about their self-image. In general
terms, the aesthetic representation of a state is connected to how a state “deploys
its material and strategic resources in world politics” (Steele 2012, 9; Bleiker and
Butler 2016, 58). An unusual aspect of this problem with representational control is
found not in cohesive signaling from one state to another but in the ability of diplo-
mats to “go rogue” and post messages undermining the positions or statements of
their government. A key example of this is US diplomats tweeting messages that
contradict formal policy statements and tweets from US President Donald Trump
and his administration. For instance, after Trump criticized London Mayor Sadiq
Khan in the wake of the London terror attacks, US Ambassador to Britain Lewis
Lukens tweeted his support for Khan, using the official US Embassy London Twit-
ter handle to commend the “strong leadership of the @MayorofLondon as he leads
the city forward after this heinous attack.”22 Consider as well the global backlash to
Trump’s “shithole” slur: Jean Manes, the US Ambassador to El Salvador, tweeted in
Spanish that “I have had the privilege to travel around this beautiful country and
meet thousands of Salvadorans. It is an honor to live and work here. We remain 100
percent committed” (Wintour, Burke, and Livsey 2018). Thus, the ability of states
to control the message has been undermined by virtue of fewer gatekeepers me-
diating public statements, opening possibilities for dissent from within the ranks
of their own diplomats. Even more so, political outsiders who challenge conven-
tional representations of state identity benefit from using Twitter to promote their
message. One example of this is the rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). De-
spite being slow to set up their Twitter accounts and not engaging with constituents
as frequently as they could, the party’s antiestablishment, populist, right-wing na-
ture lent itself well to using Twitter, “allowing them to broadcast their message and
bypass the traditional media which they see as distorting their aims” (Usherwood
and Wright 2017, 4). UKIP were able to connect with already existing Twitter Eu-
rosceptic groups such as #NO2EU, Vote Leave, and Leave.EU, which in turn actively
engage with traditional media that have a Twitter presence such as #BBCQT (BBC
Question Time) and #newsnight (BBC Newsnight) (Usherwood and Wright 2017,
4).
Trolling is a formidable example of the links between scale-shifting, emotional
registers and the power of Twitter.23 Trolls—individual Twitter users or collec-
tive bots who employ disruptive behavior and/or transgressive humor to disturb
online debate, provoking in turn emotional responses from their victims—are
22
Https://twitter.com/USAinUK/status/871435629569212416.
23
The term “troll” (or “trolls”) has slightly different connotations across different social media platforms (Bulut
and Yörük 2017, 4096–97). In this essay, I am specifically engaging with trolls, and trolling, in the context of Twitter.
enabled through the architecture of Twitter: the 140 (now 280) character limit
produces a restrictive space that is geared toward the production of short retorts
in real-time (Bulut and Yörük 2017, 4097). Trolls are able to use the #hashtag and
retweet functions to organize around a topical or “trending” issue, enabling the
“spontaneously coordinated mass mobilization” (Malmgren 2017, 10) of aggres-
sive, offensive, and crude posts. An oft-cited example of mass trolling involves “alt-
right” (far-right online movement) figure and former Breitbart News blogger Milo
Yiannopolous inciting alt-right tweeters to racially vilify and harass Ghostbusters star
Leslie Jones (Malmgren 2017, 10). An important point to note here is that Twit-
ter does not necessarily attract trolls as already-made individuals whose identity is
built on harassing or shaming others. While Twitter bots are certainly deployed
through predetermined algorithms, and some Twitter users certainly express racist
and misogynist ideas offline, the structure of the platform facilitates such problem-
atic communication.
Diplomacy itself is not immune to trolling. States are, meanwhile, employing
trolling in attempts to manage representations of themselves online. Consider this
recent Israeli response to a June 2018 tweet by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatol-
lah Khamenei that Israel was a “malignant cancerous tumour in the West Asian re-
gion that has to be removed and eradicated.”24 The Israeli Embassy in Washington
replied directly to Khamenei’s official handle @khamenei_ir with an animated GIF
from the 2004 movie Mean Girls in which the character Regina George asks, “why
are you so obsessed with me?”25 Israel is adept at using social media to mediate its in-
ternational image, having established the Israeli Ministry of Public Diplomacy and
Diaspora Affairs and an accompanying mass media and internet campaign to im-
prove representations of Israel both domestically and internationally (Adler-Nissen
and Tsinovoi 2018, 2). Russia, too, has deployed significant resources to challenge
criticism of its foreign policy and associated behaviors. For instance, during the
Ukraine crisis in 2014, Canadian officials used the @CanadaNATO handle to tweet
“Geography can be tough. Here’s a guide for Russian soldiers who keep getting lost
& ‘accidentally’ entering #Ukraine,”26 with an image of a map with “Russia” in red
and “Not Russia” in blue. Russia tweeted back “Helping our Canadian colleagues
to catch up with contemporary geography of #Europe @CanadaNATO,”27 with an-
other map showing Crimea as Russia.
Such passive-aggressive or “snarky” exchanges between Russia and other states is
one part of a much wider social media strategy employed by Russia as part of its pro-
paganda campaign to both mediate its international image and enhance its political
influence, notably in terms of its invasion of Ukraine and ultimately its influence in
the US elections. Apart from stealing private email correspondence from the Demo-
cratic Party and Clinton campaign and offering this information to the Trump cam-
paign, Russian troll farms such as the Internet Research Agency employed hundreds
of people and used thousands of fake Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube
accounts to spread disinformation online in the lead-up to the 2016 US elections.
During the three-year campaign to “disrupt American democracy” (Nechepurenko
and Schwirtz 2018), Russian trolls even made payments to support protests by legiti-
mate civil rights activists and coordinated and organized protests between opposing
interest groups themselves. This operation has been likened to cyber warfare, with
Richard Burr, Senate Intelligence Committee chair, stating that “agents of a hostile
foreign power reached into the United States using our own social media platforms
and conducted an information operation intended to divide our society” (Media
Watch 2017). Recent evidence regarding fake Twitter handles run through Russian
24
Https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1003332853525110784.
25
Https://twitter.com/IsraelinUSA/status/1003670703026135042.
26
Https://twitter.com/canadanato/status/504651534198927361.
27
Https://twitter.com/natomission_ru/status/505052838184370176.
troll farms illustrates how provocative statements posted by fake accounts and bots
can be perceived as authentic, generating intense online and offline debate. A key
example of this link between emotion and authenticity represented via Twitter are
the xenophobic and ahistorical revisionist tweets by @Jenn_Abrams—a fake twit-
ter handle—which went viral and were republished by established media outlets
(Collins and Cox 2017).
Mass media are therefore further implicated in the scale-shifting cultivation of
emotional registers via Twitter through an increasing reliance on tweets as either
the source of, or confirmation for, news reports. Twitter is increasingly forming the
basis of current news stories, and this phenomenon helps to perpetuate the tweet
cycle wherein a report about a particular tweet gets wider coverage than views by fol-
lowers of the tweeter. These news stories then get replicated and discussed online
by others. More significantly, news reports about Twitter reach those who are not
users of the site but who become, nevertheless, exposed to the emotion-social me-
dia nexus by virtue of traditional media.28 Thus, managing identity representations
is increasingly difficult, in part due to the multiple audiences who view tweets. Do-
mestic, regional, and international audiences have access to tweets that are publicly
shared and have different expectations and experiences in receiving and viewing
these posts. Take the historical practice of a visit by a head of state, or the exchange
of credentials by a new ambassador. Whereas crowds would gather to witness the
arrivals of such dignitaries, lining the streets to catch a glimpse of the spectacle
and sharing opinions as to their dress, their vehicles, and the pomp and ceremony
surrounding the event, such comments would mostly be shared with those in the
crowd or neighbors and family on the return home.29 The advent of Twitter has
allowed public comment to be directly attached to any statement or image, which
then becomes co-opted by traditional news media and thus reaches a much broader
audience than might have originally been intended or expected.
The Politics of Twitter

Twitter is becoming increasingly central to world politics. States both employ and
contend with Twitter as part of attempts to ameliorate, or deliberately exacerbate,
political crises (Zeitzoff, Kelly, and Lotan 2015; Duncombe 2017; Zeitzoff 2018).
From tweetstorms, meme wars, and diplomatic trolling, it is increasingly clear that
Twitter does not solely function as a tool of interpersonal communication, as it
was first intended; rather, it has transformed into a significant platform through
which states articulate and develop policy responses. Twitter has been implicated in
noteworthy moments of transformative change and in acrimonious events that have
resulted in the expulsion of diplomats from a state. This social media platform also
had a significant role in the targeted meddling of a state in the domestic political
affairs of another. This article has sought to contribute to the study of emotions in
global politics by examining the emotional dynamics of Twitter, illustrating how the
power of the emotional conditions that structure this social media platform shape
communication between actors. In doing so, this essay makes a further contribution
both to work that situates the “banal” at the center of global politics and to research
examining the political intersection of space and power.
Moving beyond considerations of this technology as a broadcast mechanism or
public diplomacy tool, I have sought to reassess how we understand the role of
Twitter in international affairs: not as simply the unreasonable communication of
“low politics” but as a powerful “high politics” device, fundamentally blurring the
lines between the two. I argued that Twitter both represents emotions and also
28
Such is the traditional media reliance on Twitter that fake handles controlled and produced by Russian troll farms
have been quoted numerous times in outlets such as Sky News, the Washington Post, CNN, BBC, HuffPost, the Daily Mail,
and the New York Times, among others.
29
I am grateful to Iver B. Neumann for this insight.
provokes them, which can play important roles in the escalation and de-escalation of
conflict. The emotional registers Twitter affords not only cultivate emotional au-
thenticity for single users and groups but are also implicated in scale-shifting and
new state propaganda and disinformation strategies. We must pay attention to Twit-
ter precisely because the emotional play of discourse expressed in tweets is impli-
cated in how technological shifts in temporality and functionality of communication
have shaped politics so significantly. This has, in turn, had an effect on how easily
states can control and legitimize their political messages.
My examination of the emotional dynamics of Twitter illustrates that online de-
bates have offline political consequences: the power of Twitter is thus not limited
to the online space of the social media platform but further develops through mass
media interaction with its emotional discourses. Here is where a number of further
questions emerge for international relations, politics, and sociology more broadly.
In relation to emotion and technology, we must have a clearer understanding of
how images are implicated in the circulation of emotion and affect over Twitter.
The visual turn has introduced a wealth of engagement in the politicization and se-
curitization of images in world politics, including the public visibility of violence as
a new phenomenon in world politics (Hansen 2011; Friis 2015,2018). Yet the emo-
tional power of digital imagery has yet to be fully explored. Photographs, videos,
and memes can trigger powerful emotions in the Twitterverse, which can, in turn,
have implications for offline political engagement.
Another pressing question arises in relation to how a state represents itself and
recognizes others via social media, which can make particular foreign policy options
possible, whereas others are not. Digital diplomacy as a key part of negotiation strat-
egy is a crucial demonstration of how social media can shape the struggle for recog-
nition and thereby legitimize political possibilities for change (Duncombe 2017).
However, understanding this complexity requires a continued focus on emotions
and how they frame state identity and difference (Hutchison 2016; Cox and Wood
2017). Further consideration of how Twitter and the emotional registers it affords
have disrupted the processes, interactions, and habits that inform diplomatic prac-
tice (Archetti 2012; Pouliot and Cornut 2015) is necessary to grasp the challenges
of this technology to global politics.
Acknowledgements
I would like to sincerely thank the IPS editors, anonymous reviewers, Re-
becca Adler-Nissen, Linda Åhäll, Helen Berents, Roland Bleiker, Dean Cooper-
Cunningham, Tim Dunne, Lene Hansen, George Karavas, Simone Molin Friis,
Iver B. Neumann, and audience members at the University of Queensland Vi-
sual Politics seminar series, May 30, 2017, and the Lund University Political
Psychology seminar series, October 12, 2017, for their constructive comments
and insightful criticism of earlier drafts and presentations of this article.
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