Social and Political Innovation through Social Media

Last week I attended a great panel on Social and Political Innovation through Social Media as part of Social Media Week NYC. It was hosted by Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) at the New York Times building and organized by Toby Daniels (@tobyd). The panelists included Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook and director of online organizing for President Obama's campaign; Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference and website covering the intersection of politics and technology; and Jamie Daves, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur with more than ten years of experience in the public sector who has helped found a number of successful nonprofit and political organizations. Here are the highlights from my notes:

Jamie Daves emphasized the disruptive effect new media technologies have always had when they shift the social balance of power to new agents. He also mused whether the two components of democratic capitalism can continue to function in their current forms worldwide given the current trends and uncertainty. Daves said that the rise of social media is creating the largest accrual of social capital we've ever seen. This trend forces corporations to no longer be faceless, and it forces the people who work in business to engage as individuals, leading to an increase in personal responsibility and accountability.

Rasiej said Obama scored points by being the first national candidate to use the pronoun "we." He also noted that an organized minority will always triumph over a disorganized majority, and that social media technologies have lowered the cost of organization.

Chris Hughes noted that the strategy behind my.BarackObama.com was to provide an organizing toolset for supporters to do their own outreach, fund raising, and event hosting.

Rasiej noted that Whitehouse.gov is lackluster so far concerning social media. "Technically every citizen should have their own login," he said. But government doesn't have a Chief Technology Officer to guide things yet, and discussion moderation tools are still imperfect.

Hughes said these things require time, technology, and money. The Bush White House had only one person manning the Web. And the goals are more complex once you're in office, whereas a presidential campaign has one focus: winning.

Daves noted that it was naive of government to be scared of contact when it could actually benefit from the crowd-sourcing of answers. The trick is to connect common strands and the people who weave them. To illustrate his point, Daves cited one of the recent crane crashes here in NYC. There had been numerous citizen complaints about the shakiness of the construction site, but the local government didn't put their comments together into a bigger picture, and the people had no means of finding each other online to amplify their message.

Rasiej said 95 percent of human behavior is about maintaining position, so it's no wonder governments are slow to adapt to new technologies. For example, he came to be known as "wifi guy" when he ran in 2005 for Public Advocate in New York City because he wanted to modernize the city's telecom infrastructure. Nowadays a pejorative and reductive moniker like that might not stick, or might be a positive, because the upside is that social norms change relative to power and technology.

Daves emphasized that the universal service model for broadband connectivity is essential. He cited Pew statistics showing that 75 percent of people 18–24 are active in social networking.

Rasiej replied that older demographics are fast catching up and show some of the strongest growth rates. Globally he said many people will receive a mobile phone before they get access to clean water. Old institutions may fade in the face of these new technologies. One example where mobile phones could prove particularly useful is election monitoring. They may also unleash a new type of grassroots populism. For example, reform of marijuana laws consistently rises to the top of online forums where users are allowed to vote on commonsense priorities for their government.

Daves commented on the roles and responsibilities of old versus new media. We shouldn't look to the New York Times for social solutions, he said. They do a great job articulating the problems, but the mobilization will come from elsewhere.

A question was raised about the economic meltdown and whether this signified a broader meltdown of trust in our society. Hughes responded that transparency is actually natural to Internet technology. Rasiej agreed, stating that in a world of social media it's easier to build than destroy, and there's more vetting than ever before. Everything is recorded, meaning that to fear Big Brother is to fear ourselves.

Another question was raised about the momentum built by the Obama campaign and where it will go now. Hughes, speaking now as a private observer, said they had compiled 13 million emails and that 2 million accounts had been created on my.BarackObama.com, so the infrastructure of a movement does exist and could be channeled into activism, service, and other goals.

A question was raised as to whether social media will chip into the two-party system. Rasiej believes we have drifted into a somewhat post-partisan era where people may be more likely to self-identify as empowered citizens rather than Democrats.

Rasiej also discussed the potential of social media to save politicians from being "sound bited" to death in traditional press conferences. Interactivity can spur a virtuous circle between representatives and their constituents, as was somewhat the case when a cadre of my.BarackObama.com supporters staged the FISA Rebellion, forming a popular group within Obama's own site and threatening to suspend their fund-raising if they didn't get some straight answers from him on warrantless wiretapping. Obama responded directly to prove that he was willing to listen.

Rasiej seemed adamant, however, that social media will not morph government into rule by popular referendum, à la thumbs down in the Coliseum. But I wonder if he isn't being a little preemptive in his reasoning here. If the evolution of technology makes it possible to give more power back to the people, A LOT MORE POWER, why shouldn't it? One can conceive of a People's Digital Parliament rising in parallel to the traditional structures of government and wielding significant influence over legislators. Perhaps it would eventually be annexed to the government as a new branch with specific and limited authority. There may come a day when the dusty documents of a predominantly agrarian society, ingenious though they were, will have to be discarded and rewritten to fit the new ethics, politics, and technologies.

Meanwhile, said Daves, Members of Congress pay attention to four "M" words: Message, Membership, Media, and Money. And Rasiej concluded that there will be no expansion of participatory democracy in America without rebuilding education. Education funding and our view of it has been choked for decades, he said, citing the one hour per week that New York City school children spend on a computer.

Gaza and the Battle for Public Opinion

Seventeen days into Operation Cast Lead, Israel and Palestine are engaged in battle both on the ground and online. The Israeli Defense Force is the first national force to launch its own YouTube channel, complete with footage of attacks on Gaza, and the Consulate General of Israel in New York held a press conference in December via Twitter.

The Israeli military spokesman recently called new media a “new war zone” in which the battle over public opinion is a crucial component of military operations.

With that in mind, the Israeli military blocked foreign journalists’ access to Gaza in order to maintain some control over the flow of information out of the conflict zone. A few outlets who already maintained a presence in Gaza, however, have been closely following the conflict. Al Jazeera, the only international news outlet with a presence in Gaza, has been taking particular advantage of the Internet in order to get its news to English-speaking audiences. In addition to the station’s use of Twitter updates and YouTube, Al Jazeera has published an interactive map which tracks bombings, deaths, provision of aid, and other information using the Ushahidi platform. Ushahidi allows users to submit information related to international crises via cell phone or Internet, which is then fact-checked and published to the web.

Israel’s information blockade has also failed to stifle the voices of citizen journalists, and has potentially increased dependence on them. Images, video, and first-hand accounts from Gaza are spreading rapidly on the Internet.

Although web 2.0 and citizen journalism can help amplify aspects of a conflict that otherwise wouldn’t receive attention from the traditional press, the risk of biased or inaccurate information is also extremely high.

Already, video footage has been taken out of context. One video that has been widely circulated online and broadcast on France 2 claimed to depict dead and injured Palestinians in the aftermath of an Israeli bombing. According to the UK’s FirstPost, however, the footage was actually “the aftermath of an accidental explosion of Hamas’s own weaponry at a rally in a Gaza refugee camp in September 2005.”

In a similar vein, the BBC has debunked a video from the IDF’s YouTube channel:

Israel released video of an air attack on 28 December, which appeared to show rockets being loaded onto a lorry. The truck and those close to it were then destroyed by a missile.

This was clear evidence, the Israelis said, of how accurate their strikes were and how well justified…

It turned out, however, that a 55-year-old Gaza resident named Ahmed Sanur, or Samur, claimed that the truck was his and that he and members of his family and his workers were moving oxygen cylinders from his workshop.

But the misinformation, as well as emotion-filled if accurate accounts from bloggers, has effectively polarized the debate.

According to Dev Raj Dahel, head of Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Nepal:

In a situation of ongoing conflict, media's role lies in debating impartially about the health of the country and citizens, framing conflicts in a rational manner, offering concrete options rather than just criticism of actors and furnishing practical initiatives to the conflicting parties to resolve the conflict of various kinds—direct, structural, perceptual and latent. Capacity building of journalists on conflict reporting, communication and peace education thus helps to identify and release deep-seated knowledge located within the various sub-systems and systems of society, weigh a range of alternatives and adopt multi-track measures to seek peaceful resolution of conflicts.

A recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review critiques the use of social media in the Gaza conflict, questioning in particular whether or not the use of Twitter by the Israeli Consulate is in fact an improvement over a traditional press conference:

…this angle emphasizes the mere fact of democratization over the more salient question of what, exactly, is being democratized… As long as the people answering questions have public relations, rather than public information, as their primary goal, throwing the doors to a press conference open to the general public won’t make the press conference any better. It’ll just make it more crowded.

Followers of the “propaganda war” being waged online may be led to believe that violence is the only option available-both to Palestinians and Israelis-in the debate over Gaza. However, a 2006 report by the United States Institute of Peace found that “for the first time since the start of the peace process, a majority of Palestinians support a compromise settlement that is acceptable to a majority of Israelis.”

What’s been called the “over-democratization” of conflict journalism may be making it more difficult to amplify the moderate voices within the Israeli-Palestinian debate that are calling for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

The use of new media in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict encompasses a number of the ethical questions we often address on this blog: How can an audience verify the accuracy of citizen journalism? Is a certain amount of professional training necessary to produce quality reporting? Should YouTube censor extremely violent and gruesome footage of potential political significance?

It may also emphasize the responsibility of professional news outlets to maintain rigid standards despite an influx of information and amateur competitors. While new technology is making it easier and faster to get more news out to a wider audience, it's no less important for professionals to verify, edit, and contextualize citizen reports in a way that mediates, rather than sensationalizes, conflict.