😂🌍🇺🇸 Emojis for diplomats
By: Andreas Sandre
Tags: Foreign Policy, Digital Diplomacy, Emoji, Technology, Social Media

“Ultimately, whatever the metric, the adoption rate of Emoji is staggering,” professor Evans writes in his book. “And this provides grist to the mill that Emoji is a truly global form of communication.”

After all — Evans adds — no matter what our mother tongue is, “the smiley face means the same thing in every language.”

We are all, or nearly all, ‘speaking’ emoji now.

EMOJIS FOR DIPLOMACY

According to India Bourke of the New Statesman, “in many ways, emojis are the promised land of diplomatic history: they have the potential to speak across borders to a new, global citizenry. They are the Esperanto of the digital age.”

She adds, however how “emojis can also tend to the crass and immature” and their meanings and interpretations be overly limiting and hazardously slippery.

Despite that, many heads of state or government, foreign ministers, and diplomats, use emojis regularly. And even Malala Yousafzai, which debuted on Twitter this month, has started to use emojis.

And former head of UN Development Helen Clark recently used emojis on twitter, responding to former United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson’s first tweet.

Indeed, like every digital form of communication, some are better than others at embracing it. And when it comes to the foreign policy community, there have been interesting experiments using emojis.

In February 2015, Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop — described by many as ‘emoji enthusiast’ — sat down with Mark Di Stefano of BuzzFeed for “the world’s first political emoji interview,” in which she described Russian president Vladimir Putin with 😡.

During the interview, Bishop also talked about Australia-US relations with 👍 ✔️ 😃; Australia-China relations with 👍 ✔️ 😎; marriage equality 👐; and winding down at home after a long day at work 📚 📀 📺. But everybody seemed to focus on the emoji she used to answer the Putin question.

“Her choice of a red-faced emoticon to describe Putin did not go down well with her country’s Senate: what exactly was she using it to infer, they demanded to know?,” Bourke explains referring to the uproar that the emoji used by Bishop created and how it opened up to many interpretations.

Bishop went even further a few weeks later when, in a nationally televised interview she brought emojis to life and responded to a question: “I’m going to answer in emoji,” she said before pulling a baffled face and shrugging her shoulders.

2015 appeared to be an interesting emoji year also for Argentinian president and social media powerhouse Mauricio Macri. In December that year, shortly after his election, Macri posted on Facebook the entire list of his proposed cabinet.

And he used emojis for every cabinet position.

In naming Susana Malcorra as his foreign minister, he used the following emoji: 🚻

Earlier in 2015, the British daily The Guardian posted a translation into emojis of Obama’s State of Union address — while launching at the same time the Twitter handle @Emojibama.

“Barack Obama said his address to Congress this year was all about ‘finding areas where we agree, so we can deliver for the American people’,” The Guardian wrote. “And if there’s one thing we can all agree upon, it’s emojis,” The Guardian continued.

Now, if we look at the full list of emojis — a total of 2,666 in the Unicode Standard as of June 2017 — there’s at least one that might not look appropriate for diplomacy: what I call the poop emoji or 💩.

And yet, together with 🚽, it was featured quite successfully in the November 2016 #WorldToiletDay campaign by the World Health Organization.

EMOJIS FOR COUNTRY BRANDING

One country has gone the extra mile in the use of emojis: 🇫🇮 Finland.

Finland is in fact the first country in the world to publish its own set of country-themed emojis — launched, also in 2015, by the Finnish ministry for foreign affairs. According to finland.fi, an online portal produced by the foreign ministry and published by the Finland promotion board, “the Finland emoji collection contains 56 tongue-in-cheek emotions, which were created to explain some hard-to-describe Finnish emotions, Finnish words and customs.”

They even include some emojis related to the role of Finland in the international community with the ‘peacemaker’ emoji (inspired by the work of former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari), and as a pioneer in gender equality, as it is the first country in the world to give women both the right to vote and stand for election in 1906, with the ‘girl power’ emoji.