By Patricia H. Kushlis
On February 11, USA Today reported that the State Department had just launched a controversial new approach to connect directly with opposition movements in Iran and the Arab World via Facebook and Twitter. The same thrust is found in Marshall Kirkpatrick's post with the titilating title "Will Twitter Become the New "Voice of America" Propaganda Arm?"
The goal of this initiative? To become “part of the conversation” –“to reach out to people where they spend their time online to listen, to present US views and values, and to engage as we work to advance a better and more prosperous future” – in Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Judith McHale’s words.
Coincidentally, McHale’s announcement came just before violent clashes broke out in Tehran a day after the Department began its first Tweet in Farsi and as anti-government copy-cat rebellions spread like wildfire from Tunis and Cairo across the Arab world
The locus of McHale’s new endeavor is the Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP). The social networking component is part of a larger reorganization or realignment of the bureau under Coordinator Dawn McCall. Contrary to the AP report and Kirkpatrick's essay, however, this supposedly controversial assignment may also not be all that new or all that controversial - depending upon the direction it takes.
The State Department already has over 290 Facebook pages and four of the five most popular are IIP’s. So the Bureau must be doing something right – and more right than most of the rest of Department in social media terms.
Anyway, the Department has already been using Twitter feeds and other Share mechanisms for some time - check out the icon in the right hand column of the Department’s own website. And it has run a blog called Dipnote for several years.
A Bureau in Search of a Mission
For the past decade, the Washington-based unit that handles America’s overseas information efforts has been underfunded, understaffed, poorly led, questionably effective and, for the most part, not surprisingly, anemic. It has been a bureau in search of a post-Cold War mission. (Personal disclosure: My final assignment was in the Information Bureau – IIP under a different name.?)
A hall mark web page begun during the Bush administration called America.gov which the Department is dismantling as part of the realignment (their word, not mine) is emblematic of the problem.
I could never figure out America.gov’s intended audience so its demise is fine with me. Its readability score must have been at the level of VOA Special English. Yet before America.gov, IIP’s audience consisted primarily of foreign professionals – ministry officials, academics, think-tank foreign policy experts and reporters and editors.
And its materials – reports, articles, magazines and e-zines – were high quality, highly targeted and distributed in several foreign languages.
America.gov: form over content
Strangely, however, America.gov’s contents – especially during the Bush administration - had little, if anything to do with US foreign policy or national security. In fact, the Bureau seemingly and deliberately rid itself of its foreign policy and national security experts: abolishing the office and shedding the staff left and right over the years in favor of tech rich, content poor young contractors.
The Replacement: Info Central or Discovery Channel Model
Now America.gov is to be replaced by a webpage or internet platform whose content is - for all intents and purposes - only accessible by US Embassies. Call it the Info Central model where US embassies can go to find substance they need but no one else can enter those hallowed halls.
The materials chosen for public consumption from the larger menu will be made by the State’s public affairs and information officers at those embassies – not as in the past – by the Bureau.
You could also call what’s about to be introduced the Discovery Channel model. Both the Mcs (McHale and McCall), after all, were Discovery Channel executives. The affiliate stations are viewed as customers and the central organization exists to fill their orders.
Don’t get me wrong, a webpage (or platform) for grown-ups that provides timely information about American foreign policy, US society and insight into the policy debate in this country in English and other major foreign languages is an excellent idea. The fact that it is to include more than just State Department offerings of texts, transcripts and press briefings - also makes sense – especially if the materials posted on the page are chosen by experienced officers who know what they’re doing.
The Needless Embassy Filter
My problem is walling off that information from foreign publics when it doesn't need to happen. Why should Embassies become the new gatekeepers when they don’t need to be?
In pre-Internet days, they filled that role by necessity. Embassy staff provided the bridge between Washington driven policy announcements and foreigners abroad who the US government sought to influence. Because of logistical and technological limitations, the information was filtered by public affairs officers in our embassies and missions and dished out in small bites to the few folks selected by the embassy to receive it because of their positions of influence. Been there, done that both in Washington and overseas.
What is incomprehensible to me, however, is that this special care can still be proffered on the few while also making the webpage (or platform) readily available to anyone and everyone with a mouse and a modem – like a public access library.
Let’s face it, embassies are not infallible in their judgments about who should or should not be on the receiving end of special attention – and they are particularly weak in terms of discerning among youth. Maybe they just shouldn’t try – or at least not so hard.
Furthermore. why limit access to materials to an embassy that may, or may not have staff available to winnow the contents and repost its selected morsels in a timely fashion on its own embassy publicly available web page.
What makes this whole story even more bizarre is that at the same time, this very same bureau is being tasked to backstop American information and cultural centers, corners and storefronts abroad in an endeavor to reach greater numbers of people overseas than happens now - thanks to the proliferation of fortress American Embassies and the short-sighted budget and security driven closings of cultural centers after the Cold War.
Hello there. Does the left hand not know what the right hand is doing?
To be more explicit: on the one hand, the State Department seems to be limiting –and targeting its offerings to foreigners not through necessity, but through its own volition while on the other hand, it seeks to expand its people-to-people contacts through greater reliance on information and cultural centers operating outside Embassy walls.
Moreover, the Centers are also expanding foreigners’ access – especially computer savvy youth - to the Internet via free WiFi connections. Here's a suggestion by Katherine Brown and Tom Glaisyer, two Columbia University PhD candidates in communications, as to how to expand the WiFi reach even further. So why reduce access to what one would hope would be the most relevant collection of articles, webpages and other materials about the US and our values. Does anyone besides me see a contradiction in terms?
My guess is that a more focused, more professional content rich webpage designed for overseas audiences to which readers can subscribe to daily or weekly e-mails along the lines of FP or the Economist would still be useful to foreign journalists, academics and government officials.
Sure increase Tweets, Facebook and other social media tools for self-selecting audiences as ways to draw their attention to the latest offerings. But don’t toss out the baby with the bath.
Social networking's fine line
Yet as far as connecting with Facebook and other social media users is concerned, there are two issues that need to be thought through thoroughly. I wonder if they have.
First is how the connections are made and the second is who chooses the content transmitted in the messages from State.
This is unclear to me. If the connect button is, as is happening now, through the Bureau’s own Facebook pages – or use of Twitter, then well and good. As long as the content, that is, is not left to a college intern operating in a world of his or her own. If, however, the intent is to enter into and engage in personal internet conversations on others pages or chat rooms – then that adds a whole new dimension.
A group of ten people called the Digital Outreach Team that was moved from IIP to the office of Counter-Terrorism recently has been doing just that for several years – not without controversy. This can be beneficial – in terms of setting records straight and correcting rumor-driven fallacies about US policies but it can also be playing with fire.
Here’s the fine line: does the Obama administration really want to be blamed for inciting even one revolution that failed as happened with our radio broadcasts to Hungary in 1956? Not all the protests that now sweep the Middle East will have happy endings – at least from a democratic perspective.
Besides, who’s to say that barging into someone else’s social media conversations is the most effective way to reach the next generation, er, the twentysomethings who founded Egypt’s April 6, Youth for El Baradei, or Muslim Brotherhood’s Youth for instance? If that is the Department’s the goal.
These groups seem to have done quite well on their own - with some direction and training from the Serbs who got rid of Milosevic. This according to Tina Rosenberg in an FP article. They also had access to the ideas of an unlikely American 83 year old thinker-strategist writing on non-violent revolutions named Gene Sharp as profiled in a New York Times article by Sheryl Gail Stolberg.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has made support for Internet freedom a major foreign policy goal. It is, after all, perhaps the most vital information tool of all. It just seems to me , however, that the Department should play by the same rules.
Sure, increase topically based IIP Twitter feeds with the one caveat: Be careful what you Tweet and remember Twitter is not a conversation: it’s a one way headline series.
Increase the number of high quality Facebook pages too. IIP seems to be doing them very well. Maybe cut back on some of the less popular or influential others managed elsewhere. But understand, both Twitter and Facebook are restricted networks that operate within larger networked universes.
How effective the new directions will be, what they will entail and what the potential repercussions will be are question marks. Yet, IIP’s predecessors were information innovators that didn’t shy from trying out the new. This latest bureau realignment, then, should be seen and entered into from that same perspective. Not everything will work – but meanwhile, just don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.