Challenging mainstream narratives with social media

14 May 13 | Uncategorized

A lot has been said about the impact of social media on the dissemination of news and the future of journalism. Opinions seem to span from believing Twitter and Facebook hold the power to bring down dictatorships, to despairing at the space it gives to armchair analysis and knee jerk reactions. One thing can be agreed upon: readers, listeners and viewers now have access to a platform to express themselves and challenge the mainstream narrative of events, Milana Knezevic writes.

Take Newsweek’s #MuslimRage debacle from last September. The magazine’s main article about protests over the controversial film Innocence of Muslims, featured a front page with angry men in traditional clothing, under the headline “MUSLIM RAGE.” Newsweek posted a link on their official twitter feed, encouraging their followers to voice their opinions under the hashtag #MuslimRage. And voice them they did:

On the surface, this shows how a carefully planned “social media strategy” can go wrong in an instant. More importantly, it shows that traditional media outlets no longer have as much control over the conversations around their coverage.

Social media and other online platforms give readers the ability to speak out and take part in setting the agenda. The age of user generated content has also ushered in a kind of crowdsourced fact-checking on a massive scale. If a story is being misreported, readers, listeners and viewers can and will let the authors know. Other examples include the huge social media backlash CNN faced over their article on hormonal female voters ahead of the US elections. On a lighter note, viewers lambasted NBC’s shambolic  Olympics coverage through hashtags like #NBCfail and #ShutUpMattLauer.

From the Magazine: Don’t feed the trolls
An anti-Muslim video demonstrated how the politics of fear dominate the online environment. It’s time we took action, argue Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman.

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Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of this development is the platform it has provided for people outside of the western world to speak back against the often simplistic and incorrect way in which their nations and cultures are reported on in international media.

For instance, some journalists are still likely to present African countries as one, exclusively impoverished and backward entity, which is constantly balancing on the brink of war. Alternatively, there is the increasingly popular, but almost equally tedious and one-dimensional “Africa rising” narrative.

In the past, people had few possibilities to respond to such coverage — if it even reached them.  But this has changed with the dawn of the internet. As foreign reporters parachuted in to cover the Kenyan elections in March, an easy go-to story following the crisis of the 2007-2008 vote was that of ethnic tensions and the potential for violence. However, this narrative was undermined the fact that most Kenyans went to the polls peacefully.  Foreign media promptly experienced the full wrath of a well-informed and snarky Kenyan social media population.

The below are only a few examples of the hashtag #PicturesForStuart, aimed at France 24 anchor Stuart Norval, who trailed their Kenya report with a tweet promising “dramatic pictures”:

Then there was #SomeoneTellCNN, aimed at a particularly sensationalist CNN report titled “Armed as Kenyan vote nears”, featuring an unknown militia, seemingly consisting of a group of men rolling around in the grass with homemade weapons.  The piece was widely mocked.

There was also the more general #TweetLikeAForeignJournalist:

The hashtags trended worldwide. This was picked up by Al Jazeera and the Washington Post among others, and prompted CNN to release a statement defending their coverage. Kenyans had successfully turned the lazy journalism into the dominant story. As Africa is the fastest growing smartphone market in the world, over the coming years millions more will get the opportunity to challenge one-dimensional international reporting.

It’s important not to overstate the power of social media. Traditional media still commands the biggest platforms and audiences, and many sensationalist, ignorant or incorrect reports do remain unchallenged. Twitter in itself is not a solution, it is simply a tool. Used correctly, it provides a legitimate possibility for people to collectively raise their voice and be heard. It provides the platform for those on the ground, those in the know and everyone in between to help bring balance and nuance to big news stories. And that is certainly a positive development for freedom of expression.

 

Digital freedom, internet governance on agenda at two key meetings

13 May 13 | Digital Freedom

It’s a big week for digital freedom and internet governance, with two key summits taking place in Geneva ahead of World Telecommunication and Information Society Day on Friday, May 17, Brian Pellot reports.

The week-long World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum bills itself as the “largest annual gathering of the ‘information and communication technologies for development’ community”. This multi-stakeholder UN forum brings together government, business and civil society to discuss internet policy and governance issues.

The forum’s agenda this year will address infrastructure, education, gender, disability, literacy and development — all important digital access issues for freedom of expression. Most country-specific sessions are organised by their host states, which include Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. These countries’ troubling track records on digital freedom of expression call into question how useful these sessions will be in addressing the most sensitive local issues.

The first WSIS took place in 2005. Annual fora and the ongoing WSIS+10 review process will culminate in 2015 when the initial action plan’s success will be evaluated on a range of issues including connectivity and access.

Also in Geneva, the three-day World Telecommunication Policy Forum (WTPF) on internet policy issues starts tomorrow. WTPF is less inclusive than WSIS, bringing together the International Telecommunication Union’s member states and sector members but leaving civil society on the sidelines. Unlike December’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, decisions made at WTPF will not be binding but are expected to guide the future direction of internet governance discussions over the next two years.

The push for a top-down government-led approach, which Index on Censorship has opposed, may be a key issue at WPTF. Index set out its positions on digital freedom in this note. Similar points are made by the Center for Democracy and Technology and Access Now in a joint statement. The open and inclusive multistakeholder model of internet governance will be called into question again. Net neutrality, affordable access, development, privacy and other fundamental rights will also be up for discussion. To combat the lack transparency and civil society’s exclusion at WTPF, WCITLeaks.org is once again hosting leaked preparatory documents ahead of the summit.

Check back for more posts on WSIS and WTPF throughout the week.

Internet outage in Syria

08 May 13 | Digital Freedom, Syria

Syria appears to be cut off from internet access, according to reports from web monitoring groups. Google’s transparency report shows that access to its services has been cut off in the country since 22:00 local time on Tuesday. Similarly, web security group Umbrella Security Labs said in a blog post that “it seems Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet.” Internet connection monitor Renesys also confirmed the outage last night:

Syrian residents have confirmed that the internet is down to the BBC, but both landlines and mobile phones are still working.

Internet and mobile connectivity was shut down in November 2012.

 

The Queen's speech and free speech

08 May 13 | Politics and Society

queen

Today’s impressively short Queen’s Speech contained two nuggets of interest for Index readers. Firstly, there was the mention of intellectual propety:

A further Bill will make it easier for businesses to protect their intellectual property

The debate over copyright and free speech has been fraught, with widespread criticism of governmental attempts to create laws on copyright on the web. (Read Brian Pellot on World Intellectual Property Day here here and Joe McNamee’s “Getting Copyright Right” here.)

This is something the government will have to treat very carefully, and the consultation should be fascinating.

Further in, the speech addressed crime in cyberspace:

In relation to the problem of matching internet protocol addresses, my government will bring forward proposals to enable the protection of the public and the investigation of crime in cyberspace.

Here’s more detail from the background briefing:

The Government is committed to ensuring that law enforcement and intelligence agencies have the powers they need to protect the public and ensure national security. These agencies use communications data – the who, when, where and how of a communication, but not its content – to investigate and prosecute serious crimes. Communications data helps to keep the public safe: it is used by the police to investigate crimes, bring offenders to justice and to save lives. This is not about indiscriminately accessing internet data of innocent members of the public.

As the way in which we communicate changes, the data needed by the police is no longer always available. While they can, where necessary and proportionate to do so as part of a specific criminal investigation, identify who has made a telephone call (or
sent an SMS text message), and when and where, they cannot always do the same for communications sent over the internet, such as email, internet telephony or instant messaging. This is because communications service providers do not retain
all the relevant data.

When communicating over the Internet, people are allocated an Internet Protocol (IP) address. However, these addresses are generally shared between a number of people. In order to know who has actually sent an email or made a Skype call, the
police need to know who used a certain IP address at a given point in time. Without this, if a suspect used the internet to communicate instead of making a phone call, it may not be possible for the police to identify them.

The Government is looking at ways of addressing this issue with CSPs. It may involve legislation.

Eagle-eyed observers will note that this echoes what Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg told LBC listeners on 25 April, after announcing that the dreaded Communications Data Bill (aka the “Snooper’s Charter”) was to be dropped. Clegg suggested then that IP addresses could be assigned to each individual device.

As I wrote at the time, “New proposals for monitoring and surveillance will no doubt emerge, and will be subject to the same scrutiny and criticism as the previous attempts to establish a Snooper’s Charter.”

Well, here we are.

Padraig Reidy is senior writer for Index on Censorship. @mePadraigReidy