Over the last few years, it’s become common practice for ambassadors and other diplomats to use social media as part of a broader strategy for winning hearts and minds in the countries they serve. It was in that spirit that U.S. ambassador to Libya, Deborah Jones, expressed her disappointment in a Libyan air strike appeared to have killed innocent refugees from the city of Tawergha:

As it turns out, the ambassador’s comments may have been based on incomplete information, as the Libyan army soon condemned her remarks and insisted that it did not attack the refugees.

In fact, it appears that Jones may have actually conflated the story of an airstrike with another report that a family of a military officer had been killed by members of the Islamist Libyan Dawn, also known as Fajr Libya, which is fighting against the Libyan army. Around the same time, the army appears to have attacked a Libyan Dawn camp — thus leading to the confusion.

Reuters, which initially reported the ambassador’s remarks, later updated its story to reflect the Libyan army’s rejection of her claim:

The eastern chief of army staff said in a statement its planes had hit a Libya Dawn barracks, not a Tawergha camp, demanding an apology from Jones. Jones and Louai El-Ghawi, an eastern lawmaker, said there were reports that several family members of a colonel opposed to Libya Dawn had been killed in Tarhouna in an apparent revenge attack, but details were unclear. The eastern chief of staff said Dawn supporters had killed eight members of the family.

While the facts on the ground may be murky, the response online was not. The ambassador’s tweet received more than 120 replies, most of them critical of her initial claim.

About 35 minutes after her original tweet, Ambassador Jones tried backpedal her claim, changing the conversation to those who were insulting her online and the general state of violence in Libya.

After a few hours’ absence from Twitter, she reappeared to announce that she was quitting Twitter altogether, citing it as a “distraction” to her mission in Libya.

The response to her decision has been mixed. While some critics were glad to see her give up, others expressed disappointment that she had been bullied off of Twitter.

Some Twitter users, including former rebel commander Rami el Obeidi, invoked the late ambassador Chris Stevens when criticizing Ambassador Jones.

And as the U.S. embassy in Tripoli retreated from at least one social media front, American expat James Wheeler raised the question that probably should’ve been addressed at the start of this Twitter storm: