16 Aug 2013 | Events
As part of Social Media Week 2013, debate the benefits and pitfalls of social media for you and your future career.
Social media skills are now required in almost any job, but what do employers really think of their employees’ online activity? Should you censor your output for the sake of your future? Paris Brown, former Kent Youth Crime Commissioner, stood down after tweets she’d written years earlier…
Join a specialist panel of media, law and freedom of expression experts to examine how what we say online can affect our futures?
#smwspeaknow
WHEN: 23 Sept, 2013, 6pm
WHERE: Centre for Creative Collaboration (16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG)
TICKETS: Free, registration required. Please note this event is for 18-25 year olds.
NB Participants must be aged between 18-25 and be willing to debate and get involved with the issues discussed by our panel.
Student Journals is a website hosted and run for and by students, reporting on politics, lifestyle and culture across the UK.
Youth Media Agency is the strategic home of Youth Media in the UK; connecting and supporting over 300 Youth Media platforms including Radio, TV and Magazines, online and print.
The Centre for Creative Collaboration (C4CC) is an initiative of the University of London, supporting new types of collaboration using the principles of open innovation.
26 Jul 2013 | Comment, Digital Freedom, News and features, United Kingdom, United States
If we want the web to be a positive place for young people, we need to start talking about the positive things that happen there
Texan teenager Justin Carter was released on bail on 11 July, after his $500,000 bail was paid anonymously. His family had been unable to raise that amount previously.
The young man had been in a Texan prison since February, charged with making “terroristic threats” on Facebook.
What exactly did he say?
During an argument with fellow gamers, in which doubts had been cast on his sanity, Carter posted:
“I’m f—ed in the head alright. I think I’ma shoot up a kindergarten and watch the blood of the innocent rain down and eat the beating heart of one of them.”
Not pleasant, no. Not particularly funny. But is it an actual threat? I really don’t think so.
Carter’s lawyer insists that the teen posted “LOL” and “jk” (joke) immediately afterwards to clarify that he wasn’t serious. And yet he finds himself facing a terror-related charge, with a possible sentence of 10 years ahead of him.
Why?
Americans are often wrongly accused of not getting irony, but this is one of those awful cases where the letter of the law clashes with expression that is clearly not meant to be taken literally.
Britons will be all too aware that they cannot be too complacent about these cases. People such as Paul Chambers, Azhar Ahmed, Liam Stacey and Matthew Woods have all felt the full force of the law for inappropriate, ill-advised social media messages, under laws that have been clumsily applied and don’t really allow for context – the crucial component in all free speech cases (though the Crown Prosecution Service has at least attempted to offset this problem with its new recommendations).
It’s interesting that almost all these recent cases involve young men.
The only exception I can think of is 21 year-old British woman Deyka Ayan Hassan, who was recently sentenced to 250 hours community service for a tweet in the aftermath of the murder of Lee Rigby, in which she said anyone wearing a Help For Heroes t-shirt deserved to be beheaded.
A lot of social media at the moment is based on getting a reaction; our worth is based on how many likes or comments a post gets, or responses and retweets on Twitter. The most hardened editor will sit anxiously viewing how many times an article is tweeted.
This pushes content posted in certain directions: either mind-numbingly banal but well meaning to the point where people feel bad for not responding (RT IF YOU THINK CANCER IS BAD), or snarky and borderline – or just plain – offensive (CANCER IS LOLZ).
The latter type of comment is the one that’s getting young people in trouble.
A segment of the Olympic opening ceremony in London last summer made a great deal of the amazing power of communications technology in young people’s lives, with “founder of the web” Tim Berners Lee looking on benignly as a sweet love story played out between pretty teenagers wielding smartphones.
But the way we talk about the web now does not reflect that idealism. The current debate in the UK portrays the web overwhelmingly as the habitat of trolls, predators, bullies and pornmongers. And that, plus the police are watching too, ready to arrest you for saying the wrong thing.
I can’t help feeling that all this doom-mongering could be self fulfilling. If we keep thinking of the web as the badlands, that’s how it will be, like a child beset by endless criticism and low expectations. We need to talk more about the positive side of life online – the conversations, the friendhips, the opportunities – if we’re going to get the most out of it.
20 Jun 2013 | News and features, United Kingdom
Keir Starmer’s new guidelines aim to minimise controversial criminal cases against Twitter and Facebook users. But will they work, asks Padraig Reidy
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14 May 2013 | 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.
International in outlook, outspoken in comment, Index on Censorship‘s award-winning magazine is the only publication dedicated to free speech. The latest issue explores the impact the 2008 economic crisis has had on free expression. Subscribe.
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.
