The unbearable lightness of tweeting
July 1, 2010
To tweet or not to tweet, that is not the question. What to tweet, and what not to tweet, was not supposed to be the question either, but nobody in Washington thought that Alec Ross or Jared Cohen would commit the undiplomatic faux pas of not only liking something about a country they’re just supposed to disdain, but also of tweeting about it.
The irony borders on the comical; US officials, sent to preach about Internet freedom and to plead for the unblocking of numerous social networking sites, used the one site which isn’t banned to sing like birds about the place, putting Foggy Bottom in a cloud of ambiguous Twitterplomacy, and presenting it with a completely imaginary problem.
The real problem, of course, is that the US State Department has apparently begun to believe its own hype. After spinning the entire Iranian election protests into a gigantic Twitter-planned, Twitter-led and Twitter-reported revolution, it was horrified to read tweets of an entirely different nature from one of those other problematic countries … tweets which were not protesting an election or planning an uprising, but, horror of horrors, praising fancy beverages and passing on nice vibes about Syria, of all places.
The bosses of Starbucks and Star Wars were not amused and probably wished that Twitter would take down the network for immediate maintenance; come hell or high water, the road to Damascus would not pass through Silicon Valley, no siree, regardless of the mission's declared goals.
Alas, it was too late; dangerous tweets about Syrian refreshments had already surfaced on the twittersphere, and the damage to American interests was incalculable. With their tweets, US diplomats had already confirmed that Syrians consumed the same beverages and ate the same cakes as Americans did – and they even had a university! Hell, a few more days and the frappuccinos would have gotten to their heads and made them tweet that Americans and Syrians may even share similar values, perish the thought!
Clearly, these envoys had not been properly briefed about the nature of current US "engagement" with Syria, and rather than merely following their official goal of discussing Internet freedom and related developments, they embarrassed their own government by actually enjoying Syrian hospitality and taking engagement at face value.
Of course, a foreign policy (assuming there currently is something approximating an actual policy, let alone a coherent one, in Washington) which includes a Twitter doctrine can do little more than inspire musings on selective American Twitterplomacy and on the unbearable lightness of tweeting.
