Multilingual public diplomacy: Strategic communication of Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in Twitter during Operation Guardian of the Walls

Abstract

Operation Guardian of the Walls was the most serious military conflict between the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and Palestinian armed groups since 2014. This article aims to explore the Organized Persuasive Communication (OPC) made by IDF, in English, Spanish and French, during the 11 days of the escalation of the war. For this purpose, it has resorted to techniques typical of computational science, specifically the unsupervised machine learning Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and sentiment analysis (multilingual). The data show that there are no significant differences between a range of official Twitter accounts giving a process of information uniformity. The results of the study allow us to know the scope of IDF’s communication within the framework of the so-called new Israeli diplomacy. In addition, this text attempts to demonstrate the usefulness of text mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to strategic studies and international relations.