Go Figure! Government Officials Start Blaming Social Media For Their Failed Foreign Policy

Social media is "partially responsible" for the widespread international criticism of Israel’s conduct during its military campaign in Gaza, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has suggested.

The top American diplomat made the comment during an exchange with Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) at the McCain Institute’s 2024 Sedona Forum in Sedona, Arizona on Friday.

Romney asked Blinken why “the PR [has] been so awful” for Israel amid the conflict in Gaza. “Why has [Palestinian armed group] Hamas disappeared in terms of public perception? An offer is on the table to have a ceasefire, and yet the world is screaming about Israel,” he said. “Typically, the Israelis are good at PR. What’s happened here?” Romney said.

The Secretary of State recalled that when he started working in Washington in the early 1990s “everyone did the same thing,” which was reading newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, and watching national news networks to get information about world events.

But now, in the 2020s, “we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond” and social media “has dominated the narrative,” he said.

"And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates. And we can’t – we can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative,” Blinken suggested.

However, he also stressed that another reason for Israel’s bad PR was the “the inescapable reality of people who have and continue to suffer grievously in Gaza. And that’s real and we have to… be focused on that and attentive to that.”

^ The later comment being absolutely true. Perhaps the solution is not more censorship, perhaps the US government should not be supplying Israel's corrupt genocidal government or other dangerous extremist hostile regimes around the world? Perhaps the blunder of our foreign policy is our own government's doing!? Sometimes doing nothing is far less dangerous than risking blowback from unnecessary foreign intervention! It carries an equivalent risk of trying to start a fight in a bar, you just don't know how it will end for you. Let us hope and pray the neo-cons will finally ponder the obvious!