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In early January, a spokesman for the Czech presidency described the Israeli offensive in Gaza as more defensive than offensive, taking a position that was anathema to most big European nations, including France, which had strongly condemned Israel’s action. That prompted the Czechs to revoke their comments, which they said had been misunderstood.

Likewise, the Czechs apologized to several countries for a public artwork they commissioned in Brussels to celebrate their presidency. The art installation consisted of an avowedly satirical map of Europe that depicted Bulgaria as a Turkish toilet and Germany as a highway resembling a swastika, among other offenses.

Ahead of Mr. Obama’s first presidential trip to Europe, Mr. Topolanek called the American fiscal stimulus package “a road to hell” in a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.

With Mr. Topolanek a lame duck, the signature event of the Czech presidency — a May meeting to engage with the European Union’s eastern neighbors, including Georgia, Moldova and Belarus — was snubbed by leaders of the main European players, including France, Britain and Italy.

The episode demonstrates the extent to which the administration views social networking as a new arrow in its diplomatic quiver. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton talks regularly about the power of e-diplomacy, particularly in places where the mass media are repressed.

There were also suspicions that some pro-government forces might be using new-media outlets to send out misinformation. One popular opposition site, Persiankiwi, warned its followers on Tuesday to ignore instructions from people with no record of reliable posts.

Mr. Cohen, a Stanford University graduate who is the youngest member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, has been working with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other services to harness their reach for diplomatic initiatives in Iraq and elsewhere.

Tehran has been buzzing with tweets, the posts of Twitter subscribers, sharing news on rallies, police crackdowns on protesters, and analysis of how the White House is responding to the drama.With the authorities blocking text-messaging on cellphones, Twitter has become a handy alternative for information-hungry Iranians. While Iran has also tried to block Twitter posts, Iranians are skilled at using proxy sites or other methods to circumvent the official barriers.

Last month, he organized a visit to Baghdad by Mr. Dorsey and other executives from Silicon Valley and New York’s equivalent, Silicon Alley. They met with Iraq’s deputy prime minister to discuss how to rebuild the country’s information network and to sell the virtues of Twitter.

In addition to Twitter, YouTube has been a critical tool to spread videos from Iran when traditional media outlets have had difficulty filming the protests or the ensuing crackdown. One YouTube account, bearing the user name “wwwiranbefreecom,” showed disturbing images of police officers beating people in the streets. On Monday, Lara Setrakian, an ABC News journalist, put out a call for video on Twitter, writing, “Please send footage we can’t reach!”

Journalists were told on Tuesday that they could not cover protests without permission. The restrictions “effectively confine journalists to their offices,” a spokesman for the BBC said.

He says that a state prosecutor to whom he took his findings refused to pursue the cases for fear of being killed himself. Gordan Malic is another journalist who now relies on police protection. "Organised crime has become part of the establishment," he says.

The deputy head of Croatia's privatisation fund is currently on trial after he was secretly filmed by prosecutors apparently stuffing a brown envelope filled with money into his pocket. The pictures were all over the newspapers, the film is on YouTube (in Croatian). The Index of Economic Freedom recently ranked Croatia below several African states in one of its corruption measurements.

"You can see corruption with government officials and practically ministerial-level people with wealth that cannot be explained," says Natasha Srdoc from the anti-corruption think tank the Adriatic Institute for Public Policy.

"Croatia needs to put an independent judiciary, the rule of law, and protection of property rights in place before it gets into the EU, because if it is allowed to get in before then it will not reform - it won't do anything."

Croatian police recently arrested a number of suspects in a mafia crackdown.

The crackdown has been prompted by Croatia's desire to join the European Union (on 1 April Croatia became a member of Nato). But some here, like politics professor Zarko Puhovski of Zagreb University, complain of double standards.

"If you have Bulgaria and Romania in the European Union, if you have a divided Cyprus, if you have Greece with all the corruption and problems with its judiciary, if you have Baltic states with catastrophic minority politics and so on, then you can't see why Croatia has to commit itself to all these reforms before being accepted."

Others suggest that some EU member states opposed to further expansion have exaggerated Croatia's problems with organised crime and corruption in order to damage its accession prospects.