E-diplomacy goes global

More than just politicians and diplomats using Twitter and Facebook, digital diplomacy allows countries to project their power beyond their borders. However the fledgling field is already experiencing a crisis of credibility in the wake of the NSA scandal, writes Antony Funnell.

Just after midday on 19 November 2013 Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono found himself confronting a diplomatic crisis.

International news services were reporting the latest instalment in the NSA-spying and surveillance scandal, and on this occasion Jakarta was in the thick of it.

Faced with reports that his own wife had been the subject of Australian intelligence gathering 'SBY' took to social media—tweeting first in Bahasa Indonesia and then in English.

'Since news broke reports of US & Australia tapping on many countries, including Indonesia, we have expressed our strong protest,' the president wrote. 'These US & Australian actions have certainly damaged the strategic partnerships with Indonesia, as fellow democracies.'

His message was intended for an audience far beyond his official four and a half million Twitter followers, and it quickly found its mark in both Canberra and Washington. But it also spoke to SBY's own constituency, who were unhappy with the nation's treatment by its western allies.

What was particularly noteworthy about President Yudhoyono's displeasure wasn't just his public frankness, but also his chosen method of delivery. In earlier times, his thoughts and protests would have been relayed by official representation or mediated through traditional media Instead, SBY chose to engage directly with the public.

President Yudhoyono isn't, of course, the first world leader or senior diplomat to use social media or the internet in such a way. It's now becoming commonplace for politicians and their staffers to use platforms like Twitter or Facebook to serve their own political purposes as well as those of their nation. In fact, the practice even has a name. The Americans call it 21st Century Statecraft, although in Australia and the UK it's known variously as e-diplomacy or digital diplomacy.

Increasingly, world leaders and their representatives are employing e-diplomacy as a tool of communication. And some, like SBY, have proven incredibly adept at its usage.

Social media usage, however, is not becoming a replacement for traditional diplomatic action, according to Sarah Logan, a digital politics research fellow in the School of International and Political Studies at the Australian National University.

'When I think about e-diplomacy, my immediate urge is to kind of dampen some of the excitement around this issue,' she says. 'If it's just ambassadors on Twitter, it's just an intensification of processes that already exist. When it is interesting is when you have states and diplomats engaging in the new information environment, using those tools to do new things, to respond to new challenges.'

For Alex Oliver, from the Lowy Institute for International Affairs, the real benefits of e-diplomacy come from its ability to widen the diplomatic conversation, to engage different stakeholders in an issue or dispute.

'It's one way of reaching these foreign publics, these individuals, these non-state actors, these civil society organisations,' she says. 'It's a way to communicate with them. E-diplomacy is a tool of public diplomacy which in itself is a tool of a nation's soft power.'

Both Oliver and Logan believe an effective e-diplomacy model involves genuine public engagement, not simply broadcasting political messages or propaganda. But determining exactly what constitutes digital diplomacy is no easy task. Depending on who you talk to, it encompasses everything from online polling of overseas populations to the provision of digital tools for dissidents fighting against oppressive regimes, to online education support for minorities and disadvantaged communities.

The United States were the first to realise the potential of a concerted e-diplomacy approach during the early years of the Obama administration, according to Fergus Hanson, a visiting fellow with the Brookings Institution in Washington, and they quickly established a significant digital presence.

Hanson, who in 2012 released a comprehensive study of the size and scope of digital-diplomacy and its global practice, argues a defining feature of the American e-diplomacy program is its closeness to the US commercial technology sector.

'It's a little bit like walking into the Googleplex,' he says in describing the US State Department's giant Office of E-Diplomacy. 'It's a really different environment to a traditional Foreign Ministry. People are bouncing ideas off each other, it's a very fluid environment.'

'You have people coming from Silicon Valley start-ups and spending a year as a fellow within the Office of E-Diplomacy, and there's a great exchange between different start-up companies and the State Department and also the wider parts of the US bureaucracy.'

One of those chosen to help develop the American program was campaigner and activist Ben Scott, who now works as a senior adviser to the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation.

According to Scott, the US Government's original aims were two-fold: to better engage in the new online environment; and, just as importantly, to shake things up within the diplomatic establishment.

'Twenty-first century statecraft was an idea that came from Hillary Clinton, and essentially she felt that she needed to make sure that American diplomacy got out ahead of the internet and the changes that digital disruption would bring. So she came to the State Department determined that one of the oldest and most ossified bureaucracies in the US government should become more nimble and become part of the internet generation,' he says.

Though he no longer works for the State Department, Scott bristles at the perception that e-diplomacy is simply about using social media as a form of political broadcast.

'For us, 21st century statecraft had three different components. One was public diplomacy, of which social media was a part, that's where the critics of propaganda come in. A second part was building expertise in technology policy and the way the internet would impact economics, global economics, social movements and political movements, as we saw for example in the Arab Spring. And thirdly, understanding how technology and the internet would affect development policy and how we could use resources more effectively to promote economic growth around the world. There's no way to reduce that down to Twitter and Facebook,' he says.

But while the American e-diplomacy program is well advanced, most Western countries, including Australia, still lag well behind the US in their digital skills and outreach.

'We are not at the forefront of it and we do not apologise for that. We do not have the resources to do it,' the then head of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Dennis Richardson, conceded to a Senate committee hearing in 2012, before adding: 'If I had additional resources now, that is not where I would allocate those additional resources. I would put people into western China before I established an office of e-diplomacy.'

Fergus Hanson describes that kind of approach as short-sighted, arguing that it ignores the basic day-to-day realities of the digital world. By Hanson's estimation, e-diplomacy is no longer something governments can afford to ignore.

'What we are starting to see is an ever-increasing proportion of the world's population moving online, the extremely low cost of mobile phones and the growing spread of 3G and 4G communications is allowing pretty much everyone in the world to connect to each other through cellular phones and increasingly through the internet. And that is bringing in a whole range of new actors that diplomacy has to contend with. And it is also transforming power dynamics within those different groups.'

It's a point not lost on Sarah Logan, who says Australia's reticence in investing in e-diplomacy initiatives is particularly frustrating given the huge impact of social media on the Asia/pacific region in recent times.

'Given that Southeast Asia is the fastest growing region of internet access in the world, it's an opportunity that could be taken up in the pursuit of broader diplomatic goals,' she says.

'There are people out there talking about us in a polarised environment, saying things that aren't necessarily true or that Australia could come up with a pretty good counterfactual for, and we are not doing it in a cohesive, badged way.'

Alex Oliver suggests that cost might not be the only reason for Australia's reticence to engage in e-diplomacy; it's also very difficult to quantify its effectiveness.

'Governments want to see instant rewards, and unfortunately the goal of public diplomacy and the impacts of public diplomacy are long-term and they are not concrete. They are quite abstract, and so they are quite difficult to define and quite difficult to measure,' says Oliver.

'So that has been a bit of a setback, but there are some methods being developed by foreign ministries to try and measure this better. I think one of the tasks for foreign ministries will be to be less specific about the goals and try and measure the more abstract changes of attitudes and not to be quite so prescriptive about the targets and the outcomes that they are trying to reach.'

Perhaps a more serious problem for democratic governments in pursuing an e-diplomacy approach relates to public trust.

It's hard not to imagine that the Edward Snowden/NSA revelations about mass government spying are anything but poison for honest diplomats trying to convince people of the need to engage with them in online discussion.

Logan cites US corporate dominance in the technology and social media sector as one possible cause of future tension and suspicion. 'I think it might become a problem, particularly given recent revelations about the relationship between certain tech companies and American government goals,' she says.

'The tools that we use to progress e-diplomacy, they are private tools. But when we think about e-diplomacy now we have to think about what that means; that those tools are designed by Americans, owned by American companies based in America, using an infrastructure—the internet—that is essentially reliant upon American control. I just think it's an interesting issue that doesn't come up often enough when we think about and talk about e-diplomacy.'

Oliver believes some collateral damage has already been done to the reputation of e-diplomacy because of the NSA surveillance scandal.

'I think the message is that governments are going to need to be very clear and very honest in their communications. I would hope that that is a short-term setback in the longer-term trend towards much more open and credible global communications between nations and between publics, whether they be their own domestic publics or international publics.'

For his part, Ben Scott also acknowledges the impact the NSA revelations have had on all forms of online activity initiated by government.

'The Snowden affair has on the one hand dramatically increased everybody's understanding of the power of information networks,' says Scott, 'that the same system that provides the biggest and most productive marketplace of ideas and commerce the world has ever known has also built a surveillance engine that is unprecedented in scale and invasiveness.'

'The Snowden documents undoubtedly have reduced American credibility in promoting the internet as a tool of social and economic welfare, which I find to be really tragic because it has reduced the trust in a tool and in a new media and information environment that I think benefits humanity.

'That said, I think we now have an opportunity to course-correct.'

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