SOCIAL MEDIA SHOULD BE ALLOWED DURING CRISES

Quick share: The first research results are being published on the use of social media during the #UK riots. One study, published august 16th, i came accross this morning is worth sharing here, since it suggest that the absence of censorship helps control the amount of unrest  in the ‘real’ world. It also suggest that the more censorship you impose, the more chance there is for violence. Now thats something different than what prime minister Cameron suggested and what other leaders around the world, even in our country suggest: that more strict rules and control should be imposed to keep things nice and peacefull; or at least that more cooperation with the companies providing those platforms should be undertaken (what this ‘cooperation exactly ammounts to is not really clear, so thats can be a bit of an issue.)

To me, this study is another great argument for allowing the use of social media, ESPECIALLY in times of unrest, or in special situations.  Social media is not the same as traditional media, the rules and practices are different, so stop using the old media’s controlmechanisms, studies like these show that those have their downsides as well.

In short: More studies like this please!

THANKS TO BITS OF FREEDOM FOR THE LINK.

Some Syrian soldiers record trophy video

It looks like their is another source of information popping up from Syria; the soldiers doing the dirty work are filming their actions. These video’s are becoming a new kind of bounty. In Lybia they stole someones smartphone? as a trophy, here they show off their deeds online. I wonder if these folks understand what the potential spread of these video’s is. What do they want to share with us, the viewer?  Is it really a trophy, like the people  in Lybia taking dead fighters phones? Is it a ‘ look mom, i can shoot my gun and beat prisoners’ kind of video, is it something to share amongst friends, is it ment for the family archive? These intentions are important if we want to understand the story the soldiers are sharing. Maybe they dont know themselves and they just do it because they can.

I like big buts though: in Syria’s almost lighttight censorshiprule you have to be carefull in jumping to conclusions about leaking videos that where not ment to be online. Maybe they áre ment to be online and that mr.Assad is taking the online battle for the framing of the Syrian showdown to the next level, not only beating the protesters on facebook (bit of an old link, still actual), but also increasingly countering their shaky video’s on youtube.

Syria knows its social media, so be carefull when ananlysing these vid’s.

Weibo worries Chinese Government’s secu

 Just read that Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter, is causing sleepless nights for the  Government. Social media in an autoritharian regime is not all that great to keep your population at bay. So, some cyberutopians start mesmerizing about a twitter uprising already. 
Uhuh, nope, Dream on! Cyberutopian alert! Lets not forget that people using Weibo are not all trying to overthrow the government and you can trust the good ‘ol Chinese Party to keep a keen eye on anything suspicious happening on those platforms. I dont believe that it will cause big trouble in Little China.   

It does show that social media challenges the existing ways to control the flows of information. But a challenge is not by far the forerunner of a revolution.

But Maarten, for Gods sake, why so careful? Its a great new development, the first rays of light peeking through the slowly opening doors to democracy and freedom for all Chinese, i can hear some of my friends say.

I would say to that: Dont get me wrong, i am a strong believer in social media and the powers it harnasses to mobilise (not organise!) large groups of people. 
But heres my point: just because Twitter has proven some kind of mobilising ability elsewhere in the world will not make its bastardchild Weibo work in some Chinese province we never heard of.
Benghazi is not Shanghai, The Tahir square not Tienaminsquare. If Weibo or Twitter gain in momentum it wil be because of the people using it, not because of the medium itself. People will have to be willing to organise protests. Weibo can help mobilising people for these protests. But without some people organising in real life, nothing will happen. I am convinced of that.
The organising party will not be succesful or unsuccesfull BECAUSE OF social media. Its just a tool. A great tool, but just a tool.

To keep the debate going, here’s a link to a piece by Aaron Brady: very interesting, it helped me focussing your view on the China – social media debate as well. so, just to have an excuse to link to his piece, here it is.

Digital divide during UK riots?

Wanted to share a thought that occured to me while reading a report by Pew on the demographics of social media users in the US.

The #UKriots i also made some comments on may fit one conclusion of the report. In the conlusion the report states (and i quote):
We did find that people who are already likely to have large overall social networks – those with more years of education – gravitate to specific SNS platforms, such as LinkedIn and Twitter.
When looking at the use of social media and Blackberries in the #UKriots i already noticed that the rioters used blackberries to organise, while the cleanup was organised mostly through Twitter. Maybe this is because of the social status the different groups have; the rioters underclass, lower middleclass, the cleanup preppry academics with good education (or singing in some majorselling stadiumfilling band)

 

So, if this is true, there is not only a digital divide in age, which is closing looking at the pewreport. There is also another divide amongst social media users themselves. Maybe the UK riots where a glimpse into this divide. Interesting times.

 

 

Lybia rebel takover unveils social media monitoring

The fall of the Ghadaffi regime (for now, he has not been caught yet) gives a unique insight into the world of online monitoring by autoritharian regimes. As i wrote in earlier posts and what mr. Evgeny Morozov has explained in great detail in his book ‘The Net Delusion’ (BUY IT!) the internet gives ample opportunities to regimes to spy on their own people. For regimes such as  Ghadaffi’s a very interesting tool to maintain in power.

Some findings include that the regime knew about a lot, and by a lot, i mean A LOT. Another finding is chilling, yet not suprising. There was help from abroad: French, South African, Chinese systems where used and manuals where found. So you have ‘democratic’ regimes building systems for such dictators to oppress its own people. It is one thing building a one off unique electric fiat 500, like the one shown below, but helping the Lybian Stasi to collect date which can lead to arrests (and a treatment that does not exactly involve polite interrogation)? Someone start an ethical discussion, please.

I shows again that the internet was percieved as safe, but turned out to be just as dangerous to gather as the local coffeebar crammed with listeningdevices and secretagents with cheap cigarettes observing your every move through holes in a newspaper..

In this there is a awkward paradox: The the last resort for the opposition was the internet, where they used westernbuild social media networking sites to organise themselves, while at the same time this last dark alleyway in the digital realm of Lybia was flooded with the cybersearchlights of monitoringsoftware made partly in the West as well.
How paradoxal, how cynical.

 

 source fiat pic: http://gigapica.geenstijl.nl/2011/08/bye_bye_ghadaffi.html

UK internet shutdown talks ‘constructive’.

The talks between British Government and Twitter/Facebook and Blackberry representatives are called ‘constructive’.

Lets hope that both parties find a way that balances the freedom of speech and the freedom of internet with the need for some sort of control by a third party, such as the UK government. It is not clear yet what is ment with ‘criminal behaviour’ , or ‘working together to keep people safe’ and ‘reacting firmly’  What does it all mean? In China the government is very ‘firm’, mr. Assad is very firm… Ofcourse a bit of a cynical comparison, but i think that the people drafting the policies must think out their plans carefully and make clear definitions of all those terminology. The line between a government arresting people for saying stuff they dont like or dont find appropriate  and arresting people for  really saying nasty hatebreeding stuff is a thin one in some cases.

Small tip from modest me: Set clear rules as a government, this will help social media users. If the rules are clear, people will be free to use internet within those boundaries. If the rules are unclear, people will stay away from the borders, you never know when you will cross the line. People not expressing themselves because they are rather safe than sorry should not be the outcome.

Second tip: dont make the rules to strict, this will help the government, but thats besides the point. Intern regulation should be about the people using internet in a way thats free, but with some clear guidelines. Just as people using the road, or the bus.

Very curious how this is going to work out in the near future.

 

US Army releases new social media handbook 2011

Great! The US army has released its new and updated social media handbook.

Their reason: Social media evolves, so does the handbook.

Simple, handy, thorough. And whats really neat is that is open and easily accesible to everybody interested. Even better: they tip you that its updated. It shows that the US military is way ahead in the harnassing of social media as a tool for themselves. And that they understand that the power of social media lies in openess and communication.

Props!

Waterpistols and Facebook = National Threat?

About two weeks ago a round 500 Iranian youngsters organised a waterpistol fight through facebook in Teheran, causing acute hartfailure amongst some religious leadership, who critisised  the behaviour very un-islamic and ágainst social norms’, as one official put it

So, few days later interviews on tv emerged with youth claiming stuff like:

“We had been invited on internet to come and play with water,” one girl said. A boy added: “It was very intimate; it was much more intimate than it should have been.”

Whats up? Two things intersect here: its people having fun and people organising through social media.

In my opinion, the whole irritation over social media is greatly enhanced by Irans suspicion about the role the West plays in pushing for reforms in Iran through social media. The role Twitter played in the demonstrations in Iran in 2009 and the influencing of Twitter by the White House caused the regime:

1-To crack down on social media

2-To link the use of social media with American imperalistic tendencies, maybe because they really believed this, maybe  using it as a great excuse to flog ‘different’behaviour as being influenced by evil westerners trying to corrupt the minds of innocent young people.

So, maybe, the arrest of young people organising a waterpistol fight was partly caused by the idea of Irans religious leadership that this public display of , lets say ‘different’ , behaviour was somehow influenced by Western evil-doers trying to underminde the Islamic revolution, or something like that.

If thats the case, than the American role in pushing the internet-freedom agenda, which i wrote about in earlier posts, is backfiring here, causing a regime to pay extra attention to anything pushing religous and social norms on otherwise less political communicationtools like Twitter of Facebook.  The uprisings in other countries such as Egypt, Lybia, Syria and Tunesia and the attention social media gets here as a big influence in those uprisings probably help as well in rising the anxietylevel of religous and government officials to Defcon 1.

However
First of all, I know little about Iran, never been there, read little about it other than newspapers and the occasional book. But their might be  less political and foreign policyésque reason for the advent of social media and the behaviour of young people in Iran; a demographic one.  The use of social media by these young people can mainly be caused by them being part of the N-Gen, born from somewhere around 1980 and upwards. The median age in Iran( 77 million inhabitans) is around 26, both for men and women, making the median date of birth 1985.  So a large part of iran’s population is part of this generation, and used to the internet and social media as a form of communication. Next to that, the majority of the Iranians live in cities: around 71% and most of them are literate as well.  This group is pushing religious boundaries. Whatever the fight is the Islamic leadership is fighting against social media, they will lose in the end. Not just because the use twitter and facebook, but just because their mindset is different than what the regime has been used to. Like the old guy says in No Country for Old men: ‘You cant stop whats coming’.

Iran: No country for old men indeed.

A little more apprehension a little less action please.

A couple of minutes ago i read this post on social media in Bahrain from Voice of America. Seems that the regime is very handy in turning the use of social media in a great tool for keeping control over the dissident part of their population.

When Sec. of State Clinton shouted last year that internet brings freedom around the world to oppresed peoples, not only we in the West were listening; the regimes of those people where listening too. 

Their response is an example of  using to much superlatives for a medium which impact on the world is not yet totally understood: If America is so extatic about social media, and people opposing our regime are using social media; then social media must be some covert CIA funded experiment trying to overthrow us. In 2009 Jared Cohen, some ITguy at the White House asked Twitter to postpone maintenance, protesters in Iran where using twitter as a communicationtool. This was the first documented account of social media being used as a tool of foreign policy. But… By using this as a tool of foreign policy it becomes a political tool, which attracts a LOT of attention from regimes like Iran, Syria, China and so on.  Social media is not only a great way of overthrowing a regime, its fantastic tool for keeping things under control and tracking down any opposing voice quickly.

So when it comes to the use of social media as a tool for regimechange  it is not really helpfull, to put it mildly, if people like Hilary Clinton keep mesmerizing about endless fields with moist grass, filled with people breathing in the fresh  air of democracy because they use Twitter. The West is behaving like the little kid that is on the lookout while his friends are doing something naughty and answers OH NOTHING, REALLY, NOTHING!! when someone askes ‘what are you doing’ . Its like placing a big neonsign over Twitter telling: OPPOSITION MEMBERS DOING SECRET STUFF IN HERE’, DONT LOOK!’.

Its like: stupid. We herald the advent of social media as a tool for democratisation in oppresed regimes, but we hamper democratisation through social media by overemphasizing the importance of the medium and by politicizing it as a percieved tool of aggressive American foreign policy.  A little more apprehension a little less action please.

Think before you share

 

The British autorities may be considering banning social media for rioters and other nonproductive elements of society, the Defence department knows that it has to deal with the new reality that social media will not dissapear if you say GO AWAY really loud.

So in an attempt to show soldiers and their relatives what is smart to do online while on a mission, they made some online video’s about the risks of online presence -notice the cup o ‘tea mum is drinking in one of the clips, how british indeed 🙂

The clips are already a bit outdated, considering the speed that social media is going at, but I just wanted to share one of  those here. Bit of the classic ‘loose lips sink ships meets 21th century’ media going on here. Well done MoD! Maybe the Dutch defense department should consider making the same video’s instead of prohibiting social media as dutch defence secretary Hillen announced (dutch link) last wednesday.  I bet it works a lot better than using the panicbutton. Why? because in reality: there is no panicbutton anymore.