Demi Moore visited Capitol Hill this week to talk about the problem of sex trafficking. Moore and her husband Ashton Kutcher have long used their celebrity soapbox to draw attention to various causes, with Kutcher (@AplusK) having the distinction of the most followers on Twitter (4.8 million). (Moore — @MrsKutcher isn’t too shabby with over 2.6 million followers.)

Moore said she would like to see laws increase the penalties for sex traffickers and also secure greater funding to help rehabilitate victims. She has been working with the Department of Homeland Security on the issue and that she and Kutcher are currently working on a public service announcement about sex trafficking too, according to this Politico story.
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Hat tip to MediaPost, which has noted that the Saudi Arabian Embassy to the United States is now tweeting as @SaudiEmbassyUSA:

Yowza! Okay, it’s not quite Ashton or MTV, but that’s kind of the point: if risk-averse diplomats (whose whole job is basically message and brand control) see value in Twitter, it would seem to suggest even the most conservative, publicity-shy brands can find a home on the burgeoning social communication site.
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The New York Times has a story on the State Department’s trip to Moscow, with various social media honchos in tow, along with Twitter King Ashton Kutcher. They’re calling 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.
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TechCrunch has a post on the latest State Department/private sector trip to practice “21st Century Statecraft.”

Prolific tweeter Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) is going, along with Jack Dorsey (@jack), founder of Twitter and the Square, plus a variety of State Department officials — including policy planning staffer Jared Cohen (@JaredCohen) and White House CTO Aneesh Chopra.  Cohen lead a similar trip to Mexico last year.
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Ashton Kutcher became famous for playing pranks on celebrities on the MTV show Punk’d, as a dimwitted slacker in That 70’s Show and for uttering the line, “Dude, where’s my car?” in the cult hit of the same name.

Those aren’t the kinds of roles that would lead you to expect that Kutcher, the person, would be a social activist of sorts, regularly raising awareness about topics like human trafficking and teen homelessness to millions of people on a weekly and sometimes daily basis.

But that’s exactly what he does on Twitter, the social media site where he has 3,807,892 followers and counting. That’s about 280,000 more than the second place Ellen DeGeneres Show, and a few hundred thousand more than Britney Spears.

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