US state department sends a delegation of tech luminaries, including world’s most popular tweeter Ashton Kutcher, to Moscow in an attempt to use technology to improve relations.

Call it geek diplomacy. This week, in lieu of the congressmen and capitalists who typically make up delegations to Russia, Washington sent a detachment of Silicon Valley dreamboats: the 33-year-old creator of Twitter; the “chief lizard wrangler” of Mozilla ; the chief executive of eBay; and — for good measure — the actor Ashton Kutcher, who has edged out Britney Spears to become the world’s most popular Tweeter.

The approach is an unorthodox one, punctuated by such strange moments as Kutcher’s tweeted discovery of a Siberian man whose arm bore a large tattoo of his face. But it indicates how seriously Washington takes online networking as a social force. Among the delegation’s goals was to persuade Russia’s thriving online social networks to take up social causes like fighting corruption or human trafficking, said Jared Cohen, who serves on secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s policy planning staff.

“These platforms are more than just ways to make money — they’re affecting the lives of people for better or for worse,” Cohen said. “As that realisation takes hold, it’s just a natural human thing. People want to steer it toward the good rather than the negative.”

Russia has already developed the world’s most active social networking audience, with the average adult spending 6.6 hours a month on networking sites, according to the market research company comScore, which is based in Virginia. The government makes little effort to censor the web, which has become a key platform for dissenters like Major Alexei Dymovsky, who last November posted videos saying that the police were under pressure to fabricate charges.

The projects proposed by the delegation were neutral by comparison: a cellphonebased program to assist new mothers; a “safe jobs index” to protect women from human trafficking; and jobs tailored to deter young programmers from becoming hackers. The delegation also encouraged high-tech entrepreneurs to join with social activists, though in Russia, the two groups inhabit different worlds, said Esther Dyson of EDventure Holdings, a member of the delegation.

To many in business, social activists “have lost touch with what is going on,” said Dyson, who has been investing in Russian companies for 20 years. “Their attitude is kind of like: ‘We don’t think that stuff was effective. We’re entrepreneurs. It’s not relevant to us.’ They don’t identify with these heroes of the past.”

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed article last week, Evgeny Morozov chided the State Department for indulging in “techno-utopianism,” the notion that social networking has a natural democratising effect. On the contrary, he argued, crowds mobilised online tend to be chaotic and riven by internal debates , while repressive governments use the same platforms, often anonymously, to distribute propaganda.

He also warned delegations like the one in Moscow tie the platforms too closely to Washington. “The kind of message that it sends to the rest of the world — ie that Google, Facebook and Twitter are now just extensions of the US state department — may endanger the lives of those who use such services in authoritarian countries,” wrote Morozov, a Belarussian and the author of an coming book about the internet and democracy. “It’s hardly surprising that the Iranian government has begun to view all Twitter users with the utmost suspicion.”