The Foreign Service Journal, May 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2017 21 Worse, he adds, once officers finally get the tools they need at post, they inevitably move on to another post— where they again find they have to start over from scratch. “We are falling light years behind our private-sector peers.” Don’t Delete the Tweet! A third factor that hamstrings PD prac- titioners in the field is trust. According to PDwatchers like Nicolas Cull, many U.S. diplomats already know what they need to do. They just aren’t empowered to do it, thanks to a hierarchy that is power-centric and risk-averse. The emergence of digital media poses a significant challenge to a bureaucracy whose internal communications struc- ture favors centralized power and vertical hierarchies. Sometimes social media “decorum” and diplomatic niceties are out of step. If things go too far, someone in management abruptly pulls the plug, possibly with consequences for an officer’s career and corridor reputation. “It’s like there is this perpetual fear of another Cairo tweet,” says Cull, referring to the controversial Twitter feed from Embassy Cairo that, according to some pundits, “went rogue” during the Arab Spring and strayed from the official U.S. government stance toward Egyptian Presi- dent MohammedMorsi. The embassy took the account down briefly in April 2013 to remove the offend- ing tweet. That prompted widespread speculation that State Department leaders did not understand the negative implica- tions of deleting tweets, and reinforced a widespread impression that the U.S. government was censoring itself. (For non-Twitter folks: deleting a tweet is really, really bad. Try not to do it.) This kind of knee-jerk response was in full view again last year following the State Department’s instantly viral “Not a 10” tweet on its @TravelGov Twitter account. The tweet was part of a campaign to alert U.S. travelers to scams overseas, but caused significant backlash on Twitter for being judgmental and sexist. After attracting media coverage on global news networks, the tweet was yanked from the feed—which generated another news cycle about whether State was sanitizing its image. On the upside, that tweet instantly drew in thousands of new followers to @TravelGov and, in this writer’s view, should be looked at as at least a partial success story in grabbing world attention and increasing State’s Twitter following. Social media is all about rapid-fire interaction with the public, informally and in real time—something not easily permit- ted in State’s current corporate culture. One mid-level PD colleague puts it this way: “I would kill for just two hours a week to talk to people online about issues that matter. Like democracy, or trade. But I don’t do it.” It’s not because the time isn’t there, she says: “It’s because it’s not clear to me what I can and cannot do. There’s no mandate. There are no clear rules of engagement.” And therein lies the rub. There is fear that the spontaneous, informal (some- times even risqué) engagement that makes social media pop could have long- lasting professional repercussions. Ideally, what is needed is a “train and trust” model for PD, where the depart- ment clearly articulates the parameters for online engagement, trains its people and trusts them to do the right thing. TWITTER.COM/TRAVELGOV