The Master’s thesis explores the meaning of representations of political figures and states, that emerge on social media through bottom-up processes, for the development of soft power in international relations. Drawing on the concept of soft power and the methodological approach of multimodal discourse analysis, the study examines the meaning of visually and aurally coded informal representations, created by individuals, the civil society, corporations or other independent actors, that co-construct images of states and political figures, shaping conceptions of legitimacy, symbolic capital and the attractiveness of culture, political values and foreign policies of international actors. In the empirical part, within the conceptual framework of soft power, the Master’s thesis analyses the processes through which informal representations are produced, highlighting the role of platform functionalities, political systems, algorithms and fake news in the formation and visibility of dominant narratives. A case study based on multimodal discourse analysis investigates the meaning of the top liked TikTok videos retrieved under the search terms ‘China’, ‘United States of America’, ‘Donald Trump’ and ‘Xi Jinping’ in the context of soft power development. The findings reveal that social media platforms are key arenas of digital diplomacy, where the distribution of power is horizontal but subject to unequal structures of visibility and control shaped by ownership and governance frameworks, commercial interests and algorithms driven by collective user behaviour. Contemporary platform functionalities enable visual aesthetics and the visibility of certain narratives to create conditions for effective transnational cultural exchange, as well as for the simplification and trivialisation of political discourses.
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