Sample Solution

The US Government and Obama Administration’s use of New Media to reach out to public audiences is a good example of how modern-day states can effectively utilise it to their own ends. Furthermore, it also highlights the impact that New Media has had on the domain of public diplomacy and its impact on the requirements and pressures put-on modern-day states to influence, inform and interpret information. Countries such as China have chosen to take a different approach when conducting Public Diplomacy, by means of restricting the use of US-based Social Media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and replacing it with their own version called 人人网 (Renren-wang, literally “people net”) and Sina Weibo. (Fuchs 2015) The question of whether China has actually been successful in regulating its domestic New Media Platforms have been one of debate, but the one thing that is certain is that Chinese New Media Platforms are not required to submit information to any other government. Furthermore, the Chinese Government can and does actively shut down Weibo posts that criticize the State Government. (Fu, Chan and Chua 2013) The Chinese New Social Media Scenario is one where advantages in the Pluralist and Elite perspectives on public diplomacy are very well illustrated.
The Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Sina and Tencent Weibo, has often been hailed by Western media sources as a “Free Speech Platform”. (Fu, Chan and Chua 2013) Although Chinese citizens often take to these sites to voice political opinions, the sophisticated and evolving censorship mechanism that the Chinese Government employs often deletes posts and suspends user accounts. (Fu, Chan and Chua 2013) From the Pluralist perspective, these sources of information and debate would influence the Chinese public domain and ultimately State Foreign Policy, but with the prolific censorship of politically sensitive posts, the Elitist perspective is better supported. Nonetheless, users on these platforms have evolved to keep up with government censors. Certain words that are less likely to be censored are used as replace