Obama courts worldwide following through social media, but are they playing catch-up?

By Social Editors • on August 4, 2009

Kansas City Star — Watch President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talk about China. Read about it in Chinese. Catch a Web chat with a filmmaker on democracy. Bone up on Mideast peace negotiations and U.S.-Indonesian forest conservation efforts.

Then debate these topics with thousands of strangers around the world while the U.S. government tracks it all.

This was the fare one recent day on the Facebook page of eJournal USA, which is run by the State Department and overseen by a former chief executive of a global media company. About 42,000 people worldwide had signed up as “fans” by late July.

While non-U.S. citizens can’t vote for Obama or his political rivals, they can serve as a world-spanning sounding board when the president wants to take the global pulse, exert leverage overseas or simply burnish America’s image.

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