Foreign Ministry aims at online younger generation in new digital public diplomacy efforts

Following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to the UN General Assembly on Thursday, the Foreign Ministry is concluding a five-week digital campaign aimed at one of the most challenging audiences for Israeli public diplomacy: the younger generation.

Data from the UNmasked UN campaign shows that one of the most prominent age groups it reaches is people aged 25 to 35, with significant success in English-speaking countries, led by the US and UK. Some content has attracted hundreds of thousands of views, while meme-based posts have reached up to one million views across all platforms.

But the challenge is not only reaching young people who disagree with Israel. It is also reaching those who simply are not familiar with the facts, institutions, and terminology at the center of the debate. You could call it a knowledge gap, or, less politely, a wave of ignorance.

A 25-year-old who encounters a claim about UNRWA or a UN commission of inquiry does not necessarily know what the body is, what authority it has, or what lies behind the controversy surrounding it. It is impossible to start the conversation on page three when part of the audience hasn't read page one.

For that reason, UNmasked UN decided to speak to young people in their own language, deliberately simplifying subjects usually left to the language of diplomats and lawyers. Commissions of inquiry, UNRWA, votes, and complex UN mechanisms are turned into graphics, short videos, memes, or questions posed to Grok. Some of the team members behind the campaign are themselves part of the same age group.

Memes hook younger viewers into Israel campaign

In that sense, the campaign has also become a real-time content laboratory, testing which formats make young people stop scrolling, react, and keep reading. Memes, in particular, have stood out.

They are not used as a substitute for content, but as a hook. A meme can make an audience stop, smile, or become irritated, and then want to understand what lies behind it. Such posts have reached up to one million views across all platforms.

Alongside memes, the campaign uses videos, short posts, and the Ask Grok feature. Instead of telling users, "believe us," it asks the AI tool questions and allows its response to lead the conversation.

Over five weeks, the campaign moved through a range of topics, including the way UN bodies report on Israel, the responsibility of the organization and its senior officials, UNRWA, the commission of inquiry, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. The timing was planned in advance so that the campaign would peak during the week of the General Assembly and Netanyahu's UN address.

Foreign Ministry's campaign on UN reaches hundreds of thousands 

The Foreign Ministry views the figures so far as an indication that the approach is working. The campaign has reached a younger audience, generating exposure ranging from hundreds of thousands to as many as one million views for its most prominent content and, above all, reaching audiences in English-speaking countries that would not necessarily have sought out content about the UN on their own.

Since the campaign was launched, its messages and the discussion surrounding them have expanded, with organizations, international figures, and additional media outlets joining the conversation and amplifying some of the issues it raised.

For those behind the campaign, the lesson is simple: In the battle for young people's attention and opinions, it is not enough for information merely to exist. Young people have to want to engage with it. And when trying to combat ignorance, sometimes the answer is not to say more, but to speak their language.