Recent years have seen the migration of Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs) to social media in a practice referred to as digital diplomacy. Social media enable MFAs to craft frames so as to influence audiences’ perception of foreign affairs. Such framing is especially relevant during times of war as states seek to legitimize their policies. Notably, given that social media are inherently visual platforms, MFAs are now visual narrators. Few studies to date have extended the reach of framing theory to that of digital diplomacy during conflict. This study addresses this gap by analysing 795 tweets published by the Israeli MFA during the 2014 Gaza War. The authors’ analysis demonstrates that the Israeli MFA crafted 14 linguistic frames that were used to legitimize Israel’s policies. Notably, the MFA used images to support these frames and it is through images that the linguistic frames were made to resonate with Israeli strategic narratives. The authors pay attention to how images published by the Israeli MFA constitute three visual tropes and highlight how images function to augment frames (which focus on the present) to broader narratives that involve the past, present and future. Here, they explore how images invoke the past to illuminate the present and future, and create a shared identity in the context of the Gaza War.

The single biggest challenge facing journalism today is the continued unregulated growth of social media platforms and associated ways in which they have been gamed by political actors for their own ends. This is contributing to the steady erosion of independent journalism and a deterioration of democratic politics. Finding a solution to these problems requires not only concerted political will but also state regulation of social media platforms to ensure greater privacy, data protection and transparency. A few important steps towards a solution include effective monitoring of the deployment of targeted advertising for political purposes; ensuring that their algorithms do not promote the circulation of racist, sexist, homophobic and other extremist content; and making social media companies editorially responsible for the content they publish and circulate.Recent revelations surrounding the use of social media to target and influence voters in elections across the world point to the single biggest challenge facing journalism today; the unregulated rise of social media platforms. This problem is not simply one of nefarious actors using social media to spread 'fake news'. The problem is much bigger and it concerns how social media platforms themselves contribute to a toxic news media ecology by their very design, business model and lack of accountability.The true story underlying the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for example, is not that of a shadowy company exploiting Facebook user data to influence people, it is that the exploitation of user data is Facebook's business model. In the age of 'platform capitalism' (Srnicek, 2016), users of social media platforms and the data trails they create have become the very product by which social media platforms make their profits through advertising. Targeted advertising represents 98 per cent of Facebook's revenues which were $40 billion last year. That this advertising has been exploited by corrupt and suspect

Recent scholarship claims that narratives and images of war have political effects, not simply because of their content and 'form', but because of their affective and emotional 'forces'. Yet, International Relations scholars rarely explore how audiences respond to narratives and images of war in their research. Addressing this gap, this paper combines discourse analysis of RT (formerly Russia Today) 'breaking news' YouTube videos of Russian military intervention in Syria with analysis of 750 comments and social media interactions on those videos. Our findings demonstrate how RT layers moral and legal justifications for Russian intervention in multiple audio-visual formats, within a visual narrative of the conflict that relies on affective representations of key actors/events. Viewers largely approve of the content, replicate its core narratives and express emotions coherent with RT's affective representation of the Syrian conflict. Audiences' responses to these narratives and images of war were shaped by their affective investments in the identities and events portrayed onscreen. These affective investments are therefore crucial in understanding the political significance of images of armed conflict.

If this document is identified as the Author Accepted Manuscript it is the version after peer review but before type setting, copy editing or publisher branding From Russia with lols: Humour, RT, and the legitimation of Russian foreign policyThe Russian state funded international broadcaster RT (formerly Russia Today) is accused of pedalling misinformation, influencing foreign elections, and pursuing an agenda that claims legitimacy for Russian foreign policy. Whilst studies have so far analysed the content of RT's broadcast and social media output, they have yet to interrogate how Russian legitimation claims are often expressed on RT through a humorous form that blurs the lines between the genres of news reporting and comedy. This paper addresses this gap and places humour at the centre of analysis, arguing that humour, comedy and satire are fundamental to how RT claims legitimacy for Russian foreign policy. The article begins by introducing theories of legitimation to recent studies of comedy in global politics. It builds upon work that suggests that narrative and representation are key to contemporary legitimation processes, and highlights the important role that humour plays in such processes. We then examine RT's social media outputs and audience responses to those, and demonstrate how humour is central to how RT claims legitimacy for Russian foreign policy. From military intervention in Syria, to the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, humour shapes how RT's legitimation claims are interpreted by audiences.

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