By
SB Anderson
Social media and diplomacy are growing enmeshed — shall we call it Twitterplomacy? Tweetoplomacy? — with the U.S. State Department in recent days launching Twitter feeds in Arabic and Farsi, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton today announcing more to follow in Chinese, Hindi and Russian.
“As you’ve seen, we are making more significant use of social media. It’s a key element of our plan to – and our strategy to engage people-to-people around the world,” State Dept. Spokesman Philip Crowley said in his daily media briefing on Monday. “As the Secretary has made clear, we do engage governments, but we also want to engage people directly. And as we use social media, we’re also employing – using languages in key parts of the world. So last week we began Tweeting in Arabic, and this week we begin Tweeting in Farsi.”
As of mid-day today, @USAdarFarsi had 3,340 followers and had been added to 81 lists; @USAbilAraby had 1,236 followers and was on 61 lists. Continue reading →
By
SB Anderson
The historic unrest in Egypt has exposed the raw nerve endings of several issues related to U.S. national security and civil liberties, among them, whether Internet access is a fundamental right, not a privilege, and whether shutting down access to it as Egypt did is an assault on free speech in the name of national security. The obvious question: Could that happen here?
From a reporter’s standpoint, what unfolded in Egypt “should prompt journalists around the world to take a closer look at their government’s attitude toward controlling the Internet,” Robert Niles wrote on ORJ.org today (2/4/11). He noted federal legislation “that would allow the government to shut down parts of the Internet in a ‘national emergency.’ ”
That proposed legislation from the last Congress (and reportedly set to be teed up in the new Congress) is shadowed by the spectre of so-called “Internet kill switch” that some believe would give the U.S. government the authority to do what the Mubarek government did: Cut the Internet off at the knees. Continue reading →
