The Iranian elections and public diplomacy 2.0: a tale of untapped potential

An international discussion was created on Facebook, the social networking site with over 20 million Arab users, by the White House specifically for the event, and responses to the speech submitted via text messages were compiled and later posted on America.gov.

All of these efforts clearly have a vision and a strategy behind them that could bear fruit in the 21st-century media environment. Unfortunately, new media is, in its own way, as vulnerable as traditional media to government interference in highly controlled societies like Iran or China. Consequently, other new technologies like cell phones and old technologies like short wave radio will continue to play an important role.

Recommendations

The US government should:

• get off the fence and propose that if President Ahmadinejad really believes he has won, he should allow recounts overseen by international election observers;
• tell the Iranian government to respect the free media and stop interfering in television transmission and Internet access;
• deploy all the Web 2.0 tools used in the promotion of the President's Cairo speech to reach the Iranian public; and
• restore funding to Voice of America, thereby allowing it to resume its broadcasts in Farsi.

As demonstrated by the activities coinciding with Obama's speech, the US government has seized on the possibilities of cutting-edge communication. Yet if the political will is not there to project a positive message in defence of political freedom and values that the United States has promoted for decades, it will matter little how effectively this new media is used.