In the midst of pro-democracy demonstrations across the Middle East, the State Department has been sending Twitter messages in Arabic and Farsi, ''connecting directly with people we could not reach before'', according to a statement issued to coincide with a speech on foreign policy and the internet delivered by Hillary Clinton this week.
The first messages were dispatched last week at the height of the Egyptian revolt. Within a couple of days, the department's Arabic messages had been forwarded to 570,000 people. Its Farsi language tweets reached 288,000 people ''within hours''.
''And it's not simply broadcasting our messages in the stodgy old way of governments,'' the briefing continued. ''We get to see responses from people everywhere - positive and negative - and then we are able to engage each other as equals.
''After all, no tweet can be more than 140 characters, whether you are the US Secretary of State, a protester in [Cairo's] Tahrir Square, or someone who wants to be heard in the streets of Tehran.''
The State Department will soon produce tweets in Chinese, Hindi and Russian, adding to its French and Spanish messages, while its plans for an office dedicated to cyber issues are well advanced.
Never has the superpower had a better conduit for its diplomacy - a kind of bunker-busting information bomb that works from within restricted societies.
''This is enabling us to have real-time, two-way conversations with people wherever there is a connection that governments do not block,'' Mrs Clinton told her audience at George Washington University.
Even so, she acknowledged that fighting curbs on cyberspace was tough and there was ''no silver bullet in the struggle against internet repression''. Governments that detained bloggers or restricted access to Facebook, Twitter and other social media would be ''taking the wrong path'', Mrs Clinton insisted. Sure, they might be able to ''hold back the full expression of their people's yearnings for a while, but not forever''.
The US is also putting its money where its mouth - or texting finger - is, recently allocating a further $US25 million to ''support digital activists''.
There are, naturally, tensions over whether State Department use of social media amounts to propaganda, as opposed to empowerment, with Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu biting back yesterday to warn Washington not to use internet access issues as a ''pretext'' for meddling in his country's affairs.
Mrs Clinton's ''innovation guru'' Alec Ross said: ''We support civil society organisations and technologies the world around.''
