Over 200 years ago, President George Washington warned Americans about foreign powers undermining American democracy by tampering “with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils.” In the present, we are finding that old threats are new again as the United States is challenged by Russia’s strategic communication efforts targeting both our domestic politics and international interests.

Several times, the concepts analyzed in theory and the ‘how should it be’ don’t really happen in reality, for social scientists like me it’s a constant struggle to analyze reality and society and try to come up with proposals to improve the situation and the life quality of people, and sometimes they don’t happen to be quite as real as we would want.

Oxfam, one of the UK’s biggest charities, plans to harness the power of the smartphone to bring donors closer to its work. The global poverty reduction charity is launching an app, My Oxfam, that it says will make donating easy and rewarding. The app will also bring supporters closer to the charity’s projects, offer a new level of transparency around its work, and aims to help regain donors’ trust.

Technology makes government operations more transparent and delivery of services more efficient and less costly. It’s often called “e-government,” and officials beyond Estonia and South Korea are embracing it to various extents.

President-elect Trump is about to inherit a newly empowered Voice of America that some officials fear could serve as an unfettered propaganda arm for the former reality TV star who has flirted for years with launching his own network. Buried on page 1,404 of the National Defense Authorization Act that passed last week is a provision that would disband the bipartisan board of the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

The Embassy of Pakistan in Washington DC has launched a major public diplomacy initiative named “Pakistan Embassy Forum” [...] The session was attended by participants from think tanks, academia, U.S. Government departments, World Bank, IMF, private sector energy companies and notables of Pakistani-American diaspora.

Beginning eight years ago, the Obama administration embraced a fresh approach to leveraging technology platforms and improved the experience of interacting with government. While leading the White House’s digital technology team, I witnessed the impact of private-sector principles and ideas becoming embedded in government. It was a push to close the digital experience gap between the private and public sectors. 

While cyber and Internet issues were once seen as technical issues solely reserved for computer geeks, today they are increasingly being seen around the world as inextricably linked to national security, economic growth, social development, and human rights. Therefore, these issues are increasingly a core aspect of our foreign policy.