U.S. diplomacy in the digital age
If there’s one thing the Internet has given us, it’s a treasure trove of data about ourselves. We now have access to terabytes of information on the way we interact with our favorite brands. All this information is crunchable in countless ways — and, for better or for worse, collected automatically. For years, few people cared, aside from marketers and advertisers. But that may be changing, as U.S. officials shift gears to a digital-first diplomatic strategy in the face of rising anti-Americanism worldwide.
America’s reputation abroad has reached a new low. In the Middle East, America is even less popular now than when President George W. Bush occupied the White House. Washington’s image has suffered the most in Turkey, plummeting from a high of 52 percent in 2000 to a dismal 10 percent in 2011.
With a rash of pressing issues on the domestic front, President Obama has mostly left the unenviable task of repairing America’s image to State Department diplomats. Since 2009, much of that work has been done through social media channels as part of the Obama administration’s drive toward digital diplomacy. U.S. State Department officials now operate 230 Facebook accounts, 80 Twitter feeds, 55 YouTube channels and 40 pages on Flickr, according to the Lowy Institute for International Policy. Digital diplomats broadcast messages and multimedia, attract commenters to specially designed forums in foreign languages and monitor trending topics in an attempt to take the world’s pulse. But whether conducted online or off, public diplomacy has always been an inexact science. How do diplomats know whether their efforts are paying off?