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A judge from the Brazilian state of São Paulo has barred a protester from an allegedly illegal construction site or even posting about it on Facebook. It’s the latest in a string of rulings targeting social media in the country. Rafael Spuldar reports
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:
BURN ALL WESTERN LITERATURE….onto a zip drive so I can listen to it while driving. #MuslimRage
— Qasim Rashid (@MuslimIQ) September 17, 2012
Lost your kid Jihad at the airport. Can’t yell for him. #MuslimRage
— Leila ليلى(@LSal92) September 17, 2012
Not knowing how many cheek kisses are due #muslimrage
— Abrar(@errnooo) September 17, 2012
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”:
Armed w/ MACHETE & spoons, Kenyan man destroys a plate of rice! Cc @stuartf24 #PicturesForStuart twitter.com/rimbui/status/…
— rimbui (@rimbui) March 4, 2013
Dramatic picture of clear streets in the Nairobi CBD on election day. flic.kr/p/dZuYK8 #PicturesForStuart #KenyaDecides – @stuartf24.
— ≡ (@wiselar) March 4, 2013
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.
This is what @cnni is calling an ‘Armed Kenyan’. Like reallyyyy??? #SomeoneTellCNN twitter.com/EricLatiff/sta…
— Eric Latiff (@EricLatiff) March 1, 2013
#SomeoneTellCNN that we had 2 presidential debates and countless peace rallies that they didn’t cover so they can take their crap elsewhere!
— tinakagia (@tinakaggia) March 1, 2013
There was also the more general #TweetLikeAForeignJournalist:
Kenyans go bananas awaiting election results, and dig in with Passion. Outcome fruitless. #TweetLikeAForeignJournalist twitter.com/MafiaCuckoo/st…
— Faiba Kartel (@MafiaCuckoo) March 5, 2013
#TweetLikeAForeignJournalist Fears as millions fall asleep before final results get released in Kenya. @stuartf24 #SomeOneTellCNN @nimacnn
— Wahura Kanyoro (@wahurakL) March 4, 2013
#TweetlikeAForeignJournalist International observers starry eyed at the goings on of the Kenyan election twitter.com/Frankiewgichur…
— Frankiewgichuru (@Frankiewgichuru) March 4, 2013
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.
In our increasingly digital times, freedom of expression may look like one of the positive beneficiaries of our ever more interconnected world. Countries like China or Iran build firewalls and employ small armies of censors and snoopers in determined attempts to keep their bit of the internet controlled and uncritical of their ruling elites. But with social media, blogs, citizen journalism, and ever greater amounts of news on a diverse and expanding range of sites, information is shared across borders and goes around censors with greater ease than ever before.
Yet online and off, free speech still needs defending from those in power who would like to control information, limit criticism or snoop widely across people and populations. And it would be a mistake to think the free speech attackers are only the obvious bad guys like China, Iran or North Korea.
While Putin’s Russia jails members of Pussy Riot, passes new laws to block websites and journalists continue to face risks of violent attack, it is Turkey, in 2013, that has more journalists in jail than even Iran or China. In 2004, the European Union assessed Turkey as democratic enough to be a candidate for EU membership. Today, Turkey’s government puts pressure on media companies and editors to rein in critical journalists and self-censorship is rife.
Meanwhile, in the UK, a fully paid-up member of the democracy club, the government and opposition argue over whether Parliament should regulate the print media (“statutory underpinning”, to use the jargon introduced by the Leveson Report into the phone-hacking scandal). On 18 March, the UK’s three main political parties agreed on a new press regulation system whereby an independent regulator would be set up by royal charter. And in this debate over media standards and regulation, the most basic principle, that politicians should not in any way control the press (given their interests in positive, uncritical press coverage), has been too easily abandoned by many. Yet the press faces big questions: what has happened to its standards, how can individuals fairly complain? Similar debates are under way in India, with corruption and the phenomenon of ‘“paid news” among concerns there. Falling standards provide easy targets for those who would control press freedom for other reasons.
Plenty of governments of all shades are showing themselves only too ready to compromise on civil liberties in the face of the large amounts of easily accessible data our digital world produces. Shining a light on requests for information — as Google and Twitter do in their respective transparency reports — is one vital part of the campaigns and democraticdebate needed if the internet is not to become a partially censored, and highly monitored, world.
Google’s recent update of its figures for requests for user data by law enforcement agencies shows the US way ahead of other countries — accounting for over a third of requests with 8,438 demands, with India coming in at 2,431 and the UK, Germany and France not so far behind India.
Both India and the UK have also used too widely drawn laws that criminalise “grossly offensive” comments, leading to the arrest and prosecution of individuals for innocuous social media comments. Public outcry and ensuing debate in both countries is one sign that people will stand up for free speech. But such laws must change.
A new digital revolution is coming, as millions more people move online via their mobiles. As smart phone prices fall, and take-up expands, the opportunities for free expression and accessto information across borders are set to grow. But unless we are all vigilant, whether we face democratic or authoritarian regimes, in demanding our right to that free expression, our digital world risks being a partially censored, monitored and fragmented one. This is the global free speech challenge of our times.
Microsoft released its first ever Law Enforcement Requests Report today, revealing that the company and its subsidiary Skype received over 75,000 requests for user data from law enforcement agencies around the world in 2012. This is an important step towards greater transparency, one privacy and freedom of expression advocates have actively encouraged in recent months.
In a statement announcing the report, Microsoft’s General Counsel Brad Smith acknowledged “the broadening public interest in how often law enforcement agencies request customer data from technology companies and how our industry responds to these requests” and commended Google and Twitter for leading the way with their annual transparency reports. In addition to user data requests, Google’s reports reveal takedown requests and, for the first time two weeks ago, the number of secretive national security letters it receives from the US government each year. Index encourages Microsoft to reveal this data in subsequent reports. As the number of companies issuing transparency reports grows, we encourage government agencies to do the same in the name of greater transparency and accountability.
Click here to read Microsoft’s report . Standout statistics include: