Does the rich man’s club employ social media to advance digital public diplomacy? Mapping the interactional network dynamics and influence hierarchies of OECD leaders’ cross-border communication on X

This study investigates how OECD leaders utilize X (formerly Twitter) for digital public diplomacy, treating leader-to-leader interactions as a site where symbolic power through platform-specific practices and diplomatic hierarchy are negotiated. Employing directed network analysis, RoBERTa-based sentiment analysis, and TF-IDF profiling across 21,716 tweets from 38 OECD leaders during the 2023–2024 OECD Ministerial Council Meeting cycle, the study develops a tripartite typology of diplomatic engagement strategies—Proactive (PDES), Reserved (RDES), and Strategic (SDES)—operationalized through engagement rate, breadth, focus ratio, and mentions per diplomatic post. Findings indicate hierarchically patterned, uneven engagement despite broad platform connectivity. Network centrality correlates with crisis salience and alliance structures, with Zelenskyy and #Ukraine being the most mentioned figure and hashtag. Sentiment analysis indicates predominantly positive and neutral tones (78.82% combined), suggesting X primarily facilitates coalition maintenance and reputational governance rather than confrontation, with neutrality functioning as a strategic diplomatic stance rather than an absence of meaning. Integrating Castells’ network power theory, Bourdieu’s symbolic capital and framing-based meaning construction, the study conceptualizes digital diplomacy as a field of networked recognition where network position, framing capacity, and engagement strategy collectively produce visibility, making hierarchy more observable yet contingent on private platform infrastructures. Diplomatic recognition thus operates as the mechanism through which network position and symbolic capital become mutually constitutive.