Track: Diversity and Inclusion / Women in Industry and Academia (WIIA)

Abstract

Countries in the world have been trying to encourage digital diplomacy, using social media such as Twitter. The use of Twitter as a diplomatic tool is known as Twiplomacy. Twitter has been widely used by governments in many countries as well as diplomatic officials to gather information and enhance the country's international image. Thus, the Indonesian government encourages diplomatic officials to actively contribute to the utilization of Twitter. Our paper focuses on the role of Indonesian female ambassadors in utilizing Twitter as a diplomatic medium. Where, this paper uses a data collection consists of the Twitter accounts of Indonesian female ambassadors as of 12 February 2021, using descriptive analysis of the extent to which Indonesian female ambassadors can actively contribute to the use of Twitter. Our data shows that, although Indonesian female ambassadors have not yet fully used Twitter, some of them have begun to realize the importance of optimizing Twiplomacy. For the level of engagement, we found that there were differences and similarities for each ambassador's account, where the difference was seen in the contrast of engagement as measured by the number of tweets and retweets, while there were similarities in the use of the same words related to hashtags. We also found that some of the new ambassadors' accounts on Twitter had more followers and some of them had quite a contrasting number of followers.

Keywords

Twitter, Digital Diplomacy, Ambassadors, Indonesia and Women’s Representation