For Ambassador Michael McFaul, the unfiltered communication offered by social media means he can tweet U.S. policy, blog it and post it on Facebook, an alternative to the mostly hostile traditional media here.
While Russian Internet use is widespread, the majority of people still get their news from television, so McFaul is unlikely to win the nation’s hearts and minds tweet by tweet. But his use of social media gets him buzz — and a direct line to a new audience.
McFaul tweets, he said in an interview, because Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former U.S. secretary of state who sent him to Moscow two years ago, told him to.
“Her message was that our diplomacy goes beyond meeting with our counterparts in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” he said.
McFaul’s reception when he arrived here in January 2012 helped reinforce his boss’s orders. Officially directed anti-Americanismwas on the rise, and television crews, taking cues from the Kremlin, hounded McFaul. They pounced on him when he met with human rights activists. He was accused of giving the activists orders and stirring up revolution.
Time to power up the computer.
Many public officials tweet, but McFaul has been noticed for his willingness to answer questions and get into some give-and-take on Twitter. A few days ago, a tweeter asked if there would ever be war between Russia and the United States. “Never,” he wrote in Russian. That touched off a longer exchange about whether the two countries threatened each other. McFaul argued they faced common threats. Pressed, he tweeted, “al-Qaeda.”
Months after his arrival, a paper prepared for the Center for New Media and Society at the New Economic School in Moscow declared that McFaul had taken digital diplomacy much further than other diplomats. Sam Greene, then a senior research fellow at the center, also wrote that McFaul was already among Russia’s 10 most influential bloggers, as evaluated by numbers of mentions by other bloggers and readership.
The December issue of State, the magazine published by the U.S. State Department, and the January-February issue of the Foreign Service Journal ran admiring this-is-how-you-do-it articles about his use of social media.
He tries to vary the discourse, following up a tweet about Secretary of State John F. Kerry discussing Iran or a link to a strong U.S. statement on human rights in Russia with something personal about himself or his family.
When he and his wife celebrated the new year by watching a Bolshoi Ballet performance of “The Nutcracker,” he tweeted photos and posted them on Facebook, commenting on the wealth of Russian culture. A year and a half ago, a photo of him in Red Square with family members visiting from Montana got a thousand likes.
In a series of 15 or more tart tweets, the Foreign Ministry called itself shocked by remarks McFaul had made to students at the Higher School of Economics, describing him as distorting the U.S.-Russian relationship and spreading falsehoods.
McFaul defended himself; his standard PowerPoint presentation had emphasized positive results, he said. Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister who was watching in cyberspace, called it the first Twitter war.
“I see that Russia MFA has launched a twitter-war against US Ambassador @McFaul,” tweeted Bildt, who has 251,600 followers. “That’s the new world — followers instead of nukes. Better.”
