The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2014 23 Twitter followers and 13,000 Facebook friends or subscrib- ers. Foreign Policy included McFaul among the top-10 diplomats and politicians in its “Twitterati 100” list, put- ting him in the company of the pope and Hillary and Bill Clinton, and describing his message as “live and occasionally uncensored.” A Russian rating agency ranked the American ambassador among the country’s most-quoted bloggers. However, that high profile doesn’t necessarily translate into popularity. Amb. McFaul moved into Spaso House at about the same time that Vladimir Putin reoccupied the office of president—and U.S.-Russian relations got noticeably cooler. Even though McFaul had championed the Obama administra- tion’s “reset” policy with Russia at the NSC, he was the subject of what the Washington Post described as “protracted harass- ment” when he first arrived in Moscow. State-supported anti-Americanism has been on the rise in the Russian media, as part of what one U.S. analyst describes as a “massive propaganda cam- paign” that has seen the 2012 expulsion of the U.S. Agency for International Develop- ment and major civil-society nongovernmental organiza- tions; the Duma’s rush to pass a law banning U.S. adoptions of Russian orphans; and claims that the State Department had helped organize protests against the alleged falsification of legislative election results in 2011. That campaign has caused Russian attitudes toward the United States to deteriorate. A survey this past September found that the proportion of Russians who view the United States favorably was just 41 percent, compared with 61 percent a year before. Faced with that trend and the Kremlin’s tighten- ing controls on the Russian media, Embassy Moscow has been seeking new ways to get out its message. Surveys have indicated that more than two-thirds of Rus- sians get most of their news from television reports, and the Kremlin keeps the national TV networks under strict supervi- Stefan Mizha Members of Embassy Moscow’s social media team discuss the embassy’s Twitter page. They are: Assistant Information Officer Betsy Meyer (seated) and social media assistants Lada Krasilnikova (pointing) and Anna Romanenko (at right). Social media are a supplement to, not a substitute for, face-to- face meetings and other aspects of traditional public diplomacy.