Can Facebook and Twitter change the world? Can all the nifty new social-networking sites promote democracy and a better understanding of American values around the world? The potential is certainly there -- as was seen in the invaluable Twitter updates during the post-election protests in Iran. The U.S. government is embracing Web 2.0 for an ambitious strategy of reaching previously untapped populations around the world -- call it Public Diplomacy 2.0. While the potential progress is undeniable, so is the potential danger. Public diplomacy expert Helle Dale explains the recent developments, strategies, benefits, and risks of cyber diplomacy.
Public diplomacy and strategic communications experts within the U.S. government are exploring the potential of the new social media in the effort to win hearts and minds abroad, especially in the Muslim world where today's war of ideas is being fought. Enemies of the United States are already expert in using these low-cost outreach tools that can connect thousands, potentially even millions, at the touch of a computer key or cell phone button. As public affairs blogger Matt Armstrong writes,
In this age of mass information and precision guided media, everyone from political candidates to terrorists must instantly and continuously interact with and influence audiences in order to be relevant and competitive. Ignoring the utility of social media is tantamount to surrendering the high ground in the enduring battle to influence minds around the world.[1]
There is, however, no doubt that a matchup between the federal government and the new media will require strategic thinking, training, and critical analysis in order to function optimally. Where the U.S. government is rather stodgy and often far behind the private sector in employing technological innovation, the new social media is cutting edge, nimble, constantly changing, and interactive on a personal level. "It doesn't make sense to be using Web 2.0 tools for the sake of using Web 2.0 tools," Sheila Campbell, co-chair of the Federal Web Managers Council, told the National Journal in February. In other words, many federal agencies have yet to demonstrate the ability to create videos or Web sites that attract and maintain the interest of the public.[2]
In the absence of a National Communications Strategy and in the absence of capacity to measure the impact of various communications platforms, the new media's effectiveness for public diplomacy and strategic communications purposes will remain limited. The potential for reaching large audiences is certainly there, but there are many gaps in the understanding of the nature of Public Diplomacy 2.0 that have to be addressed before the new social media can become a primary vehicle with which the U.S. government addresses world audiences (in addition to more traditional means, such as shortwave and FM radio, television, libraries, or student exchange programs).
The History of Internet Diplomacy
The trend toward new media outreach within the U.S. government began in the early 1990s, when the Internet quickly became an everyday tool in businesses and homes. In the past few years, online social media have also become accessible worldwide. Facebook, for instance, was until recently merely a social-networking site for high school and college students, launching its debut in 2004. It was a tool for teenagers to connect beyond the reach of parental supervision. Now, however, Facebook has become a means of easy mass communication around the globe, used by teens and adults, government, ordinary citizens, and businesses alike.
The Obama Administration came into office with a keen sense of the potential of the new media, having run the most tech-savvy campaign in American history. In fact, new media outreach is today the main thrust of the public diplomacy innovations of the State Department under Judith McHale, the new Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. Yet, in part because of the newness of this policy thrust in public diplomacy (which essentially dates back to President Obama's Cairo speech to Arab audiences this past June accompanied bythe U.S. government's electronic mass distribution of his speech, and coinciding with McHale's taking office), and in part because of the diffuseness of new media outreach within various government agencies, there is little data to quantify and analyze the U.S. government's new media effectiveness and impact.
Discussions of the State Department's need to embrace emerging technology, specifically harnessing the Internet's remarkable capacity for effective public engagement, go back little more than a decade. Early steps were taken by Joseph Duffey, director of the United States Information Agency (USIA) under President Bill Clinton: To save money, Duffey moved certain USIA activities to computer platforms, closing down some of the agency's costlier print publications. Change, however, began in earnest in the year 2000, following the absorption of USIA by the State Department, where USIA's cultural and exchange programs became the International Information Programs (IIP) and its public diplomacy officers became staff for the State Department area desks and worked in the field in U.S. embassies.
In 2000, Ira Magaziner, President Clinton's "Internet czar" briefed State Department officials on the need for the United States to become more engaged in public diplomacy. As the Internet was quickly becoming more deeply integrated into everyday life, he argued that the average person could now be linked to near-unlimited amounts of information, necessitating greater openness and engagement on the part of government.
Senator George Allen, chairman of the Republican High Tech Task Force, echoed similar ideas at the 2001 NetDiplomacy conference, referring to the Internet as "a modern day version of Gutenberg's printing press," advocating its use to "disperse our ideas," spreading democratic ideals within previously inaccessible societies worldwide, "[hopefully] leading to greater liberties."[3]
Though the need for U.S. diplomatic engagement on the Internet was widely understood, in 2000 and 2001, the questions of what should be posted online and how best to accomplish American diplomatic objectives remained a subject of debate. As Richard Solomon of the U.S. Institute of Peace stated in 2000, "the opportunity is there for State to put out American perspectives on almost any issue, for anybody to pick up, the question is: What should the government be putting out?"[4] It is fair to say that this question is still being debated.
The annual report of the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy in 2004 recommended that State "actively look for ways to use emerging software developments to expand...broadcast reach over the internet," but budget requests as late as 2006, which sought to increase funding for public diplomacy, still did not include funding for newer technologies, preferring instead more traditional tools such as radio.[5]
It was not until 2006 that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared her intention to "set up 'virtual posts,' where people can visit a Web site and chat online with U.S. diplomats."[6] According to Colleen Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy under President George W. Bush, the first State Department blog entry was posted by senior legal adviser John Bellinger III in a guest appearance on the Opinio Juris blog[7] in January 2007. This was followed nine months later when the State Department officially joined the blogosphere with its own blog, Dipnote, on public diplomacy.[8]
The arrival of America.gov, the U.S. government's chief public diplomacy portal, launched by the State Department's Bureau of International Information Programs in January 2007, was much hailed by American diplomats. America.gov provides features on American life as well as the doings of the President and Secretary of State and serves as a platform for a whole host of interactive media -- Webcasts, blogs, videos, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and even Second Life, a 3-D virtual world where users can socialize with free voice and text chat. One of the State Department's latest new media ventures is Co.Nx, a Web conferencing program that connects U.S. experts in a variety of fields with foreign audiences as well as U.S. embassies.[9]
The Obama Approach
In its first months in office, the Obama Administration indicated its commitment to using 21st-century technology in various forms as an integral component of public diplomacy. Similar to strategies employed in last year's U.S. presidential campaign, a wide variety of social networking and communication mediums have been under consideration to maximize the exposure and resonance of U.S. outreach. On his first day in office, President Obama signed a memorandum of "Transparency and Open Government,"[10] which stated that the Web 2.0 technologies are necessary to "tap into the vast amounts of knowledge...in communities across the country."[11] It became clear very soon that the Administration aspired to tap into the knowledge from communities around the world as well.
As part of the effort to make the U.S. brand more marketable and accessible to foreign populations, President Obama appointed Judith McHale, former president and CEO of Discovery Communications, as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. The selection of McHale -- who molded Discovery into a global giant with 1.4 billion subscribers in 170 countries and 35 different languages -- speaks volumes about the shape that President Obama envisions for public diplomacy.[12]
When asked about what made Discovery so effective in the global market, McHale stressed the need for understanding target audiences and conveying information in user-friendly ways. During her May 13, 2009, confirmation hearing McHale stated:
New technology, used effectively and creatively, can be a game changer. Communications advances provide unprecedented opportunities to engage people directly, to connect them to one another, and to dramatically scale up main traditional public diplomacy efforts. They provide the opportunity to move from an old paradigm, in which our government speaks as one to many, to a new model of engaging interactively and collaboratively across lines that might otherwise divide us from people around the world. We must create an institutional framework that can take full advantage of new media, with an understanding that these new tools must be carefully tailored to particular circumstances and always used in the service of a larger strategy.[13]
The most important example of President Obama's commitment to technology as a vital mechanism of public diplomacy and to McHale's initiative was the mass distribution of the President's speech in Cairo. In an effort to disseminate President Obama's call for improved U.S.-Arab relations to as large an audience as possible, U.S. government agencies used a variety of Internet applications, including social-networking sites, podcasts, and a live Webcast on the White House's Web site. Text-message and Twitter updates reached more than 20,000 users worldwide.[14]
The focus of this particular service, funded by the State Department, was on the citizens of nations abroad -- the text messages were unavailable to U.S. citizens, as in principle are all the products of U.S. public diplomacy, because of the restrictions on disseminating propaganda toU.S. citizens embodied in the Smith-Mundt Act. The text messages were available in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and eight other languages, reaching people in more than 200 countries.[15] Translated versions of the speech in both text and video were available on YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace, as well as the popular South Asia networking site Orkut.[16]
The White House also started an international discussion on Facebook, which has over 20 million Arab users, and responses to the speech submitted via text messages were compiled and posted on America.gov.
Similarly, President Obama's speech in Ghana last July was, according to McHale, "a model of creative public diplomacy for the 21st century. I believe that it is embodied in what Secretary Clinton calls 'smart power.' The centerpiece was a creative White House initiative that bridged new media and old."[17] The White House Office of New Media strategy included a texting service throughout Africa and invited people to ask questions of the President in English or French. Nearly 16,000 people from 87 countries did so. The U.S. embassy in South Africa collaborated with a mobile-based social network and received another 200,000 questions from throughout Africa.
New Media and Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Iran
All this flurry of activity has a vision behind it that could bear fruit in the 21st-century media environment. But new media is, in its own way, as vulnerable as traditional media is to government interference in highly controlled societies like Iran, Burma, China, or Russia. While new media has great potential to create and engage political forces, these are just forces that are being used from a U.S. point of view. Such forces may also be deployed by enemies of the United States. Georgetown University's Yahoo! fellow, Evgeny Morozov, noted at an October U.S. Helsinki Commission briefing that promoting new digital spaces "entails the same risk as promoting free elections: it's quite possible we may not like who wins them."[18] Furthermore, authoritarian governments are highly sophisticated in their efforts to control cyberspace, and -- just like democratic governments -- try to build alliances with likeminded online groups. Consequently, other new technologies like cell phones, and old technologies like shortwave radio, will continue to play an important role in resisting authoritarian regimes.
A case in point was the Iranian election in June, when the revolutionary potential of Web 2.0 really came into public focus. The elections and their dramatic aftermath provided the Obama Administration with a unique opportunity to put into action key elements of the U.S. government's public diplomacy strategy -- though that potential was hardly fulfilled. What the example of Iran showed was that Web 2.0 technology has the potential to play a role similar to that played by fax machines in the Solidarity uprising in Poland in the 1980s and cell phones in Ukraine's Orange Revolution in 2005. However, this potential can only be realized if technology is married to an active U.S. official government policy in support of the forces of democracy and self-determination. In and of themselves, the new media may change the technological game, but the political impact will fall short if the message from the U.S. government is not in strong support of American values and democracy. In Iran, the Obama Administration chose an official arm's length approach to the spontaneous public demonstrations.
As Iranian citizens took to the streets, disputing the re-election victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a wave of public protests swept through Iran. In these protests, the role of social networking -- both in organizing activities and sharing updates -- was widespread. The cyber activism surrounding the Iranian protests was unprecedented, driving the global debate.
The use of social-networking tools in Iran illustrates both the opportunities and the downsides of Web 2.0. On the one hand, "citizen reporters" were able to share stories instantaneously with a worldwide audience. Foreign correspondents that were otherwise prevented by the Iranian government from doing their jobs were able to rely on "crowd-sourcing" for their stories, which had to be filed from outside the borders of Iran or from hotel rooms to which the journalists themselves were often confined. Documentation of the brutal crackdown on the protestors appeared on YouTube, Facebook, and Flickr, and in blogs and e-mails. Mainstream media outlets, such as CNN and Fox News, relied on Iranian[19] citizen journalists both for content and the scheduling of events as they were unfolding. In turn, the Twitter revolution became a news story in its own right with the new media in a starring role.
On the downside, false reports were just as easily spread as accurate ones. And the Iranian government deployed a censorship strategy that was clearly well thought out and had been prepared in advance. After the initial surge of Internet activity, Tehran shut down Internet service nationwide, subsequently allowing a gradual but controlled increase in Web activity. This also included blocking access to mobile networks and satellite television. Since the Iranian government owns and operates radio and television outlets and supervises all newspapers and publications, it has a tight grip on information dissemination.[20]
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