NPR reports that the State Department is engaging in so-called “twitter diplomacy,” using the tools of social media to communicate with audiences overseas. As it should be. If it wasn’t, it would merely be another check on the list of things that modern public diplomacy is lacking.

The important factor about U.S. engagement via web 2.0 is not that that the government is using it, but rather that it doesn’t address the core problems of engagement overseas: fortress embassies, a lack of understanding, and failures to follow through on commitments.

Let’s look at some of the problems with the now-evacuated American Embassy in Syria’s approach to online engagement. Alec Ross, a State Department senior adviser on “innovation,” is quoted by NPR as saying, “Today if somebody is lying about you in the media…we now have the tools to get the real facts out there.” Does this imply we were unable to address disinformation before? Are we now relying on twitter in order to do this? If this is how the State Department is “innovating,” it points to a larger systemic problem.

Former Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, PJ Crowley states, “Twitter is the ultimate tool for one-liners.” This misses the point. The traditional news media is still the ultimate tool for one-liners, and it reaches far more of the population through access mediums such as satellite TV. Twitter is a tool for rapid, networked communication. It’s a medium for spreading your message amongst a very narrow segment of the population. It is not a substitute for on-the-ground or regional media engagement.

Interviewed by NPR, John Brown has it right when he says, “…what’s more important about public diplomacy in my view is not Facebook to Facebook, but face to face.” Writing something on the internet is easy. But getting on the ground and putting it into action is hard. In all fairness, the Embassy Staff in Damascus faced an extremely difficult and dangerous situation, and were rightly evacuated in fear for their safety.

The U.S. Embassy in Damascus has also posted satellite photos on its Facebook page documenting the destruction in areas like Homs. It provides a link that requires unnecessarily tedious registration in order to download a “print quality” image, which in fact is a low quality image that fails to show anything intelligible to the average viewer.  Despite labeling “armored vehicles” which look more like a collection of semi-trailers than anything else, and “impact craters” that you can’t actually make out, the image isn’t notable. The registration process alone impedes the rapid, unfettered communication that the internet normally provides.

Ultimately, what’s the point of showing the Syrian people pictures taken from space which they see up close and personal — shooting at them — every day? It’s not the Syrian people that need to be confronted with this.

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