First Amendment Coalition » social media

Twitter becoming powerful, pervasive news platform

donal brown — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 20:22:16 +0000

Twitter is not only allowing journalists to broadcast news instantaneously to thousands of people but it also puts the means of publishing in anyone’s hands. -db

GigaOM
Commentary
September 8, 2010
By Mathew Ingram

There’s been plenty of debate lately about whether Twitter has become “mainstream” or not, but examples continue to pile up of how the social network/microblogging platform has worked its way into our lives, to the point where it has become a form of media unto itself. Whether it will ever become mainstream in the sense that it gets used by your aunt or grandmother is almost irrelevant — the reality is that, for all its flaws, Twitter is a publishing tool, and an increasingly powerful one. And it can be used by anyone, journalist and non-journalist alike.

One of the most recent examples came several days ago, when a Japanese journalist who was kidnapped in Afghanistan managed to trick his captors into letting him post a message about his location to Twitter. It’s not clear from the news reports whether his tweets helped get him released or not, but it is yet another example of how easy Twitter makes it to broadcast that kind of news — and not just to one or two people, the way email or text messaging does, but to potentially hundreds or even thousands (in 2008, Twitter helped American photojournalist James Buck spread the news that he had been arrested by Egyptian police while covering an anti-government protest).

Two other examples of Twitter as a news platform are the recent hostage-taking and shootout at Discovery Channel headquarters in Maryland, and the earthquake that hit near New Zealand last week. In the first case, reports about a gunman in the Discovery building started coming in before the news was on a mainstream news outlet. And in the case of the earthquake — as in similar cases involving earthquakes in China and forest fires in California — reports flooded the Twitter network while most mainstream media outlets were still unaware that it had even occurred. One resident said she relied on news she got from Twitter more than the radio, because it was a lot faster (although it should be noted that she is a Twitter fan and web consultant).

Obviously, Twitter reports aren’t going to contain a complete accounting of an event like an earthquake or a shooting, but it has become just as obvious that they can be a powerful tool for “man on the street” or eyewitness accounts, whether it’s the fires in California or a plane landing in the middle of the Hudson River. In the case of the Discovery Channel situation, reporters described how useful this was because it acted as “an early alert system” on what was happening. In fact, earlier this year researchers looked at the flow of content on the network and found that Twitter is far more of a news medium than it is a traditional social network.

Since the protests in Iran last year, there has been a lot of debate about how important Twitter was during those demonstrations, and whether it was actually used by dissidents or merely by sympathizers in the West. But there’s no question that it helped spread the news of events such as the shooting death of protester Neda Soltan — which many saw as a key moment in the protests — and that it was important enough that the Obama government contacted the company to ask that it delay scheduled maintenance on the network while the protests were going on. The network has been used in a similar way in protests in Burma and elsewhere.

The thread that ties all of these events together is simple: Twitter, like blogging did before it, puts the tools of publishing in anyone’s hands. And yes, that means the information flowing through the network is not always accurate — hoaxes are a routine part of the stream — but it also means that there are thousands more eyeballs and brains studying those reports than there would be at any mainstream media outlet. The bottom line is one that journalism professor Jay Rosen reiterated during a recent address to journalism students in Paris: the “people formerly known as the audience” have the tools to become part of the media now, and that is changing our society in ways that we are only beginning to appreciate.

Instruction in social media essential in journalism education

donal brown — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:36:45 +0000

According to an online news pioneer, modern journalism students do not naturally see the social media as an important aspect of their professional repertoire. -db

MediaShift
August 30, 2010
By Alfred Hermida

Social media is such a new phenomenon that it is easy for someone to claim to be an expert in the subject. A search on Twitter throws up all sorts of people claiming to be social media gurus. But at journalism schools, professors are working out how to teach social media to ensure that graduating students are proficient, if not expert, in this new addition to the curriculum.

Students use social media in their daily lives, with Facebook an almost permanent fixture on the computer screen. Yet they tend not to think about social media as part of their professional toolkit as journalists.

If anything, anecdotal evidence suggests that students are resistant to adopting social media, seeing it as a personal activity, rather than as part of their work as a journalist. The pressure is on educators to demonstrate the professional value of social media.

The first step is working out what we mean by social media. After all, there has also been a social aspect to media, whether it was people discussing last night’s TV in the office or clipping a newspaper article to send to a friend. But there is something new about services such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter that let people connect, create, share and mash-up media.

European researchers Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.”
In other words, digital technologies that empower users to interact with each other, and participate and collaborate in the making of media, rather than just consuming media.

Clearly there is more to social media in the classroom than technology. Central to teaching social media is providing an understanding of how these digital tools affect the way students actually do journalism. The issue for many journalism schools is incorporating social media into an established and packed curriculum, within an academic environment where the pace of change is slow.

LESSONS IN BEST PRACTICES

The question of how to teach social media in a way that enhances journalism reverberated at a meeting of hundreds of journalism educators from across North America. The annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in Denver provided a platform to discuss ideas on social media in the classroom. In a sign of the growing recognition of social media, the AEJMC even organized a competition for educators to share some of their best practices for incorporating social media into the classroom. (Read MediaShift’s previous coverage of the AEJMC conference here.)

One idea mentioned by several speakers at the AEJMC conference was the value of incorporating social media into beat reporting. There are various ways that this can be done. Students can use Twitter to monitor the community chatter on issues in their beats through hashtags. They can also identify and follow key people connected to their beat.

But students also need to understand how to assess the stream of information on social media. Real-time services such as Twitter have established themselves as primary sources for breaking news, so it is important to teach students to critically measure and check the validity of information.

Social media is one way of introducing students to the notion of journalism as a conversation. The key lesson here is that these tools are not just another channel to distribute the finished story. Social media can help journalists reach out to audiences, seeking ideas for stories and fresh perspectives on stories they are working on.

One of the challenges here is teaching the different norms and practices on different social media services. For example, just posting a message seeking information is frowned upon. Instead, students are encouraged to be active on social media, showing they are contributing to the conversation rather than just taking.

REPUTATION MANAGEMENT

Social media blurs the line between the personal and the professional, so another important lesson is how to build and manage your online identity. Serena Carpenter at the Cronkite School at Arizona State University has students use Google themselves to research their online identity. She has found students are encouraged to adopt social media when they see themselves appear high up on Google.

In a variation of this, I have students Google each other to find out something they didn’t know about their peer. The aim of the exercise is to make students aware of how future employers might see them.

The next stage is teaching students how to manage their reputation and establish their credibility. Prof. Carpenter has students complete their bio on numerous sites such as LinkedIn and Google Profile using the same photo, credentials and web links.

Social media has also been used for student-centered learning, for example, to educate students about the strengths and weaknesses of online collaboration. Bob Britten of West Virginia University used Google Maps for students to work together to map retirement homes in the area.

Rather than lecture students on the credibility of Wikipedia, Gary Ritzenthaler, a PhD student at the University of Florida, created a wiki for students to collaborate on study notes for an upcoming test. By participating, the students learned about collaborative writing but also became aware of questions about the credibility of content produced by others.

THINKING ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA

Practicing social media is not enough in an academic environment. There has to be a place for student reflection on what they have learned, explaining their understanding of social media. Students should have set out their goals for the use of social media and demonstrate they can assess the most appropriate platforms and services.

Teaching social media is more than showing students the mechanics of Twitter. Rather, they should learn how to build a network of relevant followers and how to interact with them to be a better journalist.

In the classroom, we need to stress that social media technologies do not just offer journalists new ways of doing old things. They offer the potential to explore new ways of telling stories, of collaborating and connecting with audiences, of rethinking how we do journalism.

Editor’s Note: This is the first in our special series at MediaShift, “Beyond J-School,” where we will take an in-depth look at the state of journalism education and training in the digital age. Look out for more articles all this week and next.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer, currently an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia.

Experts have reservations but say social media helps journalists

donal brown — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 19:40:48 +0000

Experts agree that among other things social media can help journalists to develop stronger relationships with their readers, find sources quickly, reach a wider audience and do on-the-spot reporting more effectively. -db

MediaShift
August 16, 2010
By Sandra Ordonez

OurBlook.com has been conducting an ongoing interview series on the current and future role of journalism and social media. In previous posts for PBS MediaShift, I shared some of the insights we’ve gathered about the future of journalism, and the skills that will be required of future journalists.

In this installment, experts weigh on the impact social media has had on the media industry, and the way that journalists relate to their audiences. Overall, experts agreed that social media helps journalists:

•Have more frequent two-way communication with news consumers, and thus develop stronger relationships with their readership.

•Promote themselves by creating their own personal brand.

•Find an array of news sources and information in real-time, and stay updated on new developments.

•Easily promote content across multiple platforms, while at the same time reaching a wider audience.

•Do on-the-spot reporting by making video and photography more accessible and inexpensive.

EXPERTS WEIGH IN

“I can’t understand why so many sectors are going kicking and screaming from the industrial age. News organizations have been reporting the change for decades, so what’s the surprise? There is no shock that newspapers and magazines are failing; the model of printed news is being transformed into a new relationship model of information. Consumer markets, political conversations and everyday decision-making are being driven more and more by content in social media. Did news not get the memo that everyone wants to be a reporter?” — Val Marmillion, president of Marmillion + Company Strategic Communications

“Social media are value neutral; their main virtue is the promise of democratic communication. This brings along with it all of the difficulties of democratic society…incivility, bullying, bias, prejudice, privatization, power struggles. These problems aren’t a reason to dismiss or fear social media platforms; they’re a challenge to each of us to fight for parity, transparency, access and openness.” — Jessica Clark, director for the Future of Public Media Project for the Center for Social Media at American University, and MediaShift contributor

“Twitter’s brevity, its inherent capacity to reflect and create chaos, and to do so instantly and without verification, does not suggest that it has the power to create the kind of narrative that sustains real revolutionary action.” — Trevor Butterworth, editor of STATS.org

Matt Hinckley

“Too much information bouncing around at the speed of thought leads to too much information erroneously being ‘reported’ or accepted as ‘fact.’ This has only accelerated the pressure to be ‘first,’ often at the expense of being ‘right.’ But perhaps even more dangerous is that the increasing proliferation of choices means that news consumers can choose to focus exclusively on ‘infotainment,’ and thus disengage from serious coverage of critical issues.” — Matt Hinckley, assistant dean for journalism and student media at Richland College

“At a joint National Press Club/Atlanta Press Club event a while back, I asked this question of the panel: In the future, how will people know what is a journalistic story and what is a paid, biased or fictitious post? I said I was concerned that young people may not know the difference. The panelists’ answer was to encourage journalistic literacy programs, which is a good idea. But the most telling moment came when a journalism student approached me afterward and said young people can tell the difference; he’s more worried about people in the older generation like his mother, who can’t tell a scam email from the real thing.” — Terri Thornton, owner of Thornton Communications

“I strongly disagree that social media represent a dumbing down of America. It’s the opposite…it’s a way for us to become more informed, more connected and overall less ignorant. It’s a way for us to experience different lives, different worlds and different points of view in a way that’s never been possible, quite literally, in the history of the world. To call this tremendous capacity and facility to share information a ‘dumbing down’ is to miss the forest for the trees.” — Sasha Pasulka, blogger and founder of EvilBeetGossip.com

Rob Salkowitz

“People who approach political discourse from the perspective of reading blogs and engaging in online debates via social networks — Twitter and so on — tend to value authenticity in those interactions, and are less patient with the niceties of the one-to-many broadcast model of communication…Members of the millennial generation in particular find the pomposity and stuffiness of traditional media less engaging than the give-and-take of social channels” — Rob Salkowitz, author of “Young World Rising: How Youth, Technology and Entrepreneurship are Changing Global Business.”

“One particular advantage of social media is that they help a reporter see the intellectual and social network of a source. For example, in Twitter I can see whom you are following and who is following you. I can see what you have re-tweeted and what links you have selected. Therefore, I can understand more fully your social context.” — Jerry Zurek, professor of English and communication department chair at Cabrini College

“This is a new way, an emerging way, and now a pervasive way. So when you jump in this pool, you have to jump in all the way. And that means, you have to listen, you have to participate, you need to contribute value as part of those relationships. And the reason you have to do that is because if you are not, your competitor probably is.” — David Kissel, partner of the Zocalo Group

“Social media is a good tool for publishers to expand content reach, but it won’t save the fundamental business model of journalism at its core.” — Mitch Joel, president of Twist Image, author, and social media expert.

“Social media isn’t a fad; it’s changed the way people share and consume content. The web has allowed people to create their own online neighborhoods and elect leaders to speak for them. That’s something journalists are going to have to really take into consideration. It’s a new audience.” — Lisa Barone, chief branding officer of Outspoken Media, Inc.

“To be sure, social media are a frightening phenomenon to incumbents in the press, in politics and in the media. To the incumbents, social media are profoundly disruptive because of how they obviate their ownership of the ‘choke point’ in the communication channel. Their power is based on control of scarcity: Scarce resources, capital, intellectual property, and modes of production and distribution.” — Larry Elin, associate professor, S.I. Newhouse School, Syracuse University

Patrick Schwerdtfeger

“An active democracy is a successful democracy. As social media platforms engage voters in the political system, our democracy thrives. The risk, however, is that special interest groups have a significant opportunity to skew the conversation in their favor. While regular users have the ability to contribute to the conversation, few are motivated enough to do so. That allows motivated subgroups to manipulate the conversation and portray an inaccurate picture of the most important issues.” — Patrick Schwerdtfeger, author of “Webify your Business: Internet Secrets for the Self-Employed.”

This article was co-written by Kurt Schilligo, a University Partnership Program intern.

Sandra Ordonez helps run OurBlook.com, a collaborative online forum that gathers interviews from today’s top leaders in the hopes of finding tomorrow’s solutions.

Redondo Beach city attorney warns of pitfalls to social networking in local government

donal brown — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:52:10 +0000

Redondo Beach has launched social networking pilots to create greater transparency and public participation, but the city attorney warns of complications concerning California’s open meeting law, the First Amendment and the expense of maintaining the sites. -db

Redondo Beach News
August 18, 2010
By Sascha Bush

The City Attorney’s office spoke to the Redondo Beach City Council at its Aug. 17 meeting about the practical uses and potential perils of today’s most popular social networking media vis-a-vis local government.

As Facebook and its kin increasingly become the primary source of information and communication for many people, many cities have become fans of the trend – creating Facebook pages, Tweeting local news and updates, posting video on YouTube.

Although Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Nixle (Redondo has pilots of each) are free to use and can reach potentially millions of users, doing so is not without risk, City Attorney Mike Webb warned.

Twitter, with its 140-character posting limit, and Nixle, which is used for public safety news and alerts, pose less of a liability as both are used more for quick updates of information.

A Facebook “friend” page, however, would be open to comments from residents, employees, visitors – and none of it could be regulated (or even turned off) without risk of violating First Amendment rights. Council members could not post freely without risk of Brown Act violations. Information posted on the page would have to be archived to comply with public records laws, but Facebook does not offer that option and doing so can be expensive – so much so that San Francisco has already found archiving its Facebook page too exorbitant a cost to handle

“There’s going to be case law on this,” said Webb. “I’d prefer it not be case law with the city of Redondo Beach in the title.”

Staff recommended disabling the city’s current Facebook “fan” pilot page for the interim; Mayor Mike Gin disagreed with that recommendation.

“Traditional government is very conservative,” said Gin. “Now we’re emerging into this social media… we need to embrace it.”

Gin pointed that that online communities built within social network sites tend to be self-policing (regarding inappropriate comments) and that as there have been no problems on the Redondo page and its 3,000-plus “fans” yet, the page should be kept active but “closely monitored.”

Councilman Pat Aust preferred to err on the side of caution.

“The liability far exceeds the benefit at this point,” he said. “There are too many unforeseen consequences.”

Cyberbullying: Proposed California law aims to criminalize online impersonations

donal brown — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:18:34 +0000

Center for Internet and Society fellow Larry Downes says that while a new law criminalizing online impersonations seems reasonable, it is prone to unintended consequences. -db

Center for Internet and Society

Analysis
June 12, 2010
By Larry Downes

I was interviewed yesterday for the local Fox affiliate on Cal. SB1411, which criminalizes online impersonations (or “e-personation”) under certain circumstances.

On paper, of course, this sounds like a fine idea. As Palo Alto State Senator Joe Simitian, the bill’s sponsor, put it, “The Internet makes many things easier. One of those, unfortunately, is pretending to be someone else. When that happens with the intent of causing harm, folks need a law they can turn to.”

Or do they?

The Problem with New Laws for New Technology

SB1411 would make a great exam question of short paper assignment for an information law course. It’s short, is loaded with good intentions, and on first blush looks perfectly reasonable—just extending existing harassment, intimidation and fraud laws to the modern context of online activity. Unfortunately, a careful read reveals all sorts of potential problems and unintended consequences.

A number of states have passed new laws in the wake of highly-publicized cyberstalking and bullying incidents, including the tragic case involving a young girl’s suicide after being dumped by her online MySpace boyfriend, who turned out to be a made-up character created for the purpose of hurting her feelings. (I’ve written about the case before, see “Lori Drew Verdict Finally Overturned.” )

Missouri passed a cyberbullying law when it turned out there was no federal law that covered the behavior in the MySpace case. Texas and New York recently enacted laws similar to SB 1411, though the Texas law applies only to impersonation on social media sites.

The problem with all these laws generally is that the authors aren’t clear what behaviors exactly they are trying to criminalize. And, mindful of the fact that the evolution of digital life is happening much faster than any legislative body can hope to keep up with, these laws are often written to be both too specific (the technology changes) and too broad (the behavior is undefined). As a result, they often don’t wind up covering the behavior they intend to deter, and, left on the books, can often come back to life when prosecutors need something to hang a case on that otherwise doesn’t look illegal.

Given the proximity to free speech issues, the vagueness of many of these laws makes them good candidates for First Amendment challenges, and many have fallen on that sword.

California’s SB 1411 as a Case in Point

SB1411, which last week passed in the State Senate, suffers from all of these defects. It punishes the impersonation of an “actual person through or on an Internet Web site or by other electronic means for purposes of harming, intimidating, threatening or defrauding another person.” It requires the impersonator to knowingly commit the crime and do so without the consent of the person they are imitating. It also requires that the impersonation be credible. Punishment for violation can include a year in jail and a suit brought by the victim for punitive damages.

First let’s consider a few hypotheticals, starting with the one that inspired the law, the MySpace case noted above. Since the boy whose profile lured the victim into an online romance that was then cruelly terminated was a made-up person (the perpetrators found some photo of a suitably shirtless teen and built a personality around it), SB 1411 would not apply had it been the law in Missouri. The boy was not an “actual person,” and, except perhaps to a thirteen year old with existing mental health problems, may not have been credible either. (The determination of “credibility” under SB 1411 would presumably be based on the “reasonable person” standard.) Likewise, law enforcement agents creating fake Craigslist ads to smoke out drug buyers, child molesters, or customers of sex workers would also not be violating the law.

Also excluded from SB 1411 would probably be those who use Craigslist to get back at exes or other people they are angry at by placing ads promising sex to anyone who stops by, and then gives the address of the person they are trying to get even with. In most cases, these ads are not credible impersonations of the victim; they are meant to offend them but not to convince a reasonable third person that they really speak for the victim. A fake Facebook page for a teacher who proceeds to make cruel or otherwise harmful statements about her students, likewise, would not be a credible impersonation.

The Twitter profiles being created to issue fake press releases purportedly on behalf of BP would also not be illegal under SB 1411. First, BP is not an “actual person.” Second, Twitter profiles such as BPGlobalPR are clearly parodies—they are issuing statements they believe to be what BP would say if it were telling the truth about its actions in relation to the gulf spill. (“We’re on a seafood diet- When we see food, we eat it! Unless that food is seafood from the Gulf. Yuck to that.”) Again, not a credible impersonation.

You also do not commit the crime by confusing people inadvertently. There are several people I am aware of online named Larry Downes, including a New Jersey state natural resources regulator, a radio station executive and conservative commentator, a cage fighter and a veterinarian who lives in a nearby community. (The latter is a distant cousin.) Facebook alone has 11 profiles with my name. Only one of them is actually me, but the others are not knowingly impersonating me just because they use the same name, even if some third person might be confused to my detriment.

Likewise, the statute doesn’t reach out to those who help the perpetrator, intentionally or otherwise. The “Internet Web sites” or providers of other electronic means aren’t themselves subject to prosecution or civil cases brought by the victims of the impersonation. So Craigslist, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter aren’t liable here, nor are the ISPs of the perpetrators, even if made aware of the activity of their users and/or customers.

For one thing, a federal law, Section 230, immunizes providers against that kind of liability under most circumstances. Last week, Craigslist lost its bid to preclude a California lawsuit using Section 230 as its defense when sued by the victim of fake posts soliciting sex and offering to give away his possessions. The victim informed Craigslist of the problem, and the company promised to take action to stop future posts but did not succeed. But it lost its immunity only by promising to help which, of course, the site won’t do in the future! (See Eric Goldman’s analysis of the case.)

So there are important limitations (some added through recent amendments) to SB 1411 that reduce the possibility of its being applied to speech that is otherwise protected or immunized by federal law. (In the BP example, the company might have a trademark case to bring.) Most of these limits, however, seem to take any teeth out of the statute, and seem to exclude most of the behavior Sen. Simitian says he is concerned about.

Unintended Consequences

What’s left? Imagine a case where, angry at you, I create a fake Facebook profile that purports to represent you. I post material there that is not so outrageous that the impersonation is no longer credible, but which still has the intent of harming, intimidating, threatening or defrauding you. Perhaps I report, pretending to be you, about all of my extravagant purchases (but not so extravagant that I am not credible), leading your friends to believe you are spending beyond your means. You find out, and find my actions intimidating or threatening.

Perhaps I announce that you have defaulted on your mortgage and are being foreclosed, leading your creditors to seek security on your other debts. Perhaps I threaten to continue posting stories of your sexual exploits, forcing you to pay me blackmail to save you embarrassment.

Would these cases be covered under SB 1411? Perhaps, unless of course the claims that I am making as you turn out to be true. In the U.S., truth is a defense to defamation, so even if my intent is to “harm” you by revealing these facts, if they are facts then there is no action for defamation. That I say the facts pretending to be you, under SB 1411, would appear to turn a protected activity into a crime, perhaps not what the drafters intended and perhaps not something that would stand up in court. (The truth-as-defense in defamation cases rests on First Amendment principles—you can’t be prosecuted for saying the truth.)

Of course, much of the other behavior I described above is already a crime in California—in particular, various forms of intimidation, harassment and, by definition, fraud. The authors of SB 1411 believe the new law is needed to extend those crimes to cover the use of “Internet Web sites” and “other electronic means,” but there’s no reason to believe that the technology used is any bar to prosecutions under existing law. (Indeed, the use of electronic communications to commit the acts would extend the possible criminal laws that apply, since electronic communications are generally considered interstate commerce and thus subject to federal as well as state laws.)

For the most part, then, SB 1411 covers very little new behavior, and little of the behavior its drafters thought needed to be criminalized. For an impersonation to be damaging would, in most cases, mean that it was also not credible. Pretending to be me and telling the truth could be harmful, but probably a form of protected speech. Pretending to be me in order to defraud a third party is already a crime-that is the crime of identity theft.

Which is not to say, pun intended, that the proposed law is harmless. For in addition to categories of behavior already covered by existing law, SB 1411 makes it a crime to impersonate someone with the purpose of “harming” “another person.” There is, not surprisingly, no definition given for what it means to have the purpose of “harming,” nor is it clear if “another person” refers only to the person whose identity has been usurped, or includes some third party (perhaps a family member or friend of that person, perhaps their employer.)

Having a purpose of “harming” “another person” is incredibly vague, and can cover a wide range of behaviors that wouldn’t, in offline contexts, be subject to criminal prosecution. The only difference would be that the intended harm here would be operationalized through online channels, and would take the form of a credible impersonation of some actual person.

Why those differences ought to result in a year in jail doesn’t make much sense. Consequently, an attempt to use the law to prosecute “harmful” behavior would be met with a strong constitutional objection.

That’s my read of the bill, in any case. Since I posed this as an exam question, I’m offering extra credit for anyone who can come up with examples—there are none given by the California State Senate—of situations where the law would actually apply and that would not already be illegal and which would not be subject to plausible Constitutional challenges.

Coast Guard’s web-based news site on Gulf oil spill may provide model for covering future disasters

donal brown — Thu, 06 May 2010 17:40:08 +0000

The Coast Guard’s Deepwater Horizen Response site created in 24 hours to cover the Gulf oil spill has been so successful in providing photos and information about the spill that some say the site could become a model for how government disseminates information during disasters. -d

NextGov
May 5, 2010
By Bob Brewin

Crisis management in an Internet-driven news cycle demands a fast response. So after an explosion rocked a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, the Coast Guard created within 24 hours a website to manage inquiries from the media and the public, and now it is a model for how agencies can inform the public during a major disaster.

The Deepwater Horizon Response site, named after the BP-leased oil rig that began spewing oil into the Gulf on April 20, provides news and information about the effort to clean up what some environmentalists fear will become the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

The site shows photos of the cleanup effort and issues numerous news releases daily. On Monday the Coast Guard posted 11 items, including one about officials in the Florida Keys preparing for the oil slick, a shoreline cleanup manual, and a release about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s decision to close certain fishing areas. Information also is categorized by states along the Gulf and by region. Visitors can click on links to social networking sites Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for public discussions and notifications.

The rapid launch and popularity of Deepwater Horizon Response could make it model for how the government communicates to the public during disasters, said Lt. Cmdr. Christopher O’Neil, media relations chief for the Coast Guard. Traffic on the site has been unprecedented, an indication of the public’s interest in the disaster, said Gerald Baron, who developed the Web-based system for the disaster communications site that the Coast Guard has been using for nearly a decade. As of Tuesday, the site had recorded 1.3 million page views from 412,000 unique visitors and it averaged 7,123 inquiries from the media and public every four hours.

PIER could handle traffic surges — including the download of photos and maps, which are measured in gigabytes per day — because the company hosts Deepwater Horizon Response on server farms on the East and West coasts, said Baron, now executive vice president for communications for O’Brien’s Response Management Inc., which acquired PIER Systems Inc. in December 2009.

To keep the Coast Guard’s networks from becoming clogged with e-mail traffic about the spill, the service created accounts on Microsoft’s public e-mail service Hotmail to respond to queries, O’Neil said.

The site has become a source of information sharing for 61 federal managers working at numerous agencies, including the Defense Department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, NOAA and the Coast Guard’s joint information centers in Louisiana and Alabama, O’Neil said.

PIER allows agency public affairs officers to collaborate because all personnel in a Coast Guard joint information center use the same system rather than the officers’ proprietary networks, he said. Officials in the center can review any information before it is released.

When the officials report to a joint information center, the site’s webmaster furnishes them with login credentials and sets their permission levels on the system. Only certain personnel have the authority to release information to the public.

The system also tracks inquiries to ensure they are not dropped, and displays the status of each query and how long it takes to answer it.

PIER integrates social media with the crisis management websites, so when a press release is issued, a Tweet also is sent out. The system also has powerful analytical tools, including an electronic clipping service that collects articles published about the response.

O’Neil said he views PIER as a simple but powerful tool that he believes other agencies, such as the Homeland Security Department, should adopt for crisis management. The Health and Human Services Department began using PIER this year to manage its databases of media contacts who deal with HHS and to send out press releases, said William Hall, director of the news division at HHS.

HHS could begin to use the system on its website this month to respond to media inquiries. Hall said he likes the fact that it can be quickly adapted to push out public information on hot topics such as a disease outbreak.

University of Chicago censors student facebook post

donal brown — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 21:04:04 +0000

Continuing a practice of monitoring and censoring student posts on social media, the University of Chicago forced a student to delete comments about a professor from his private Facebook page. -db

FIRE

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

Commentary
March 24, 2010

CHICAGO — For the second time in two years, the University of Chicago has censored a student’s post on a private Facebook page. Undergraduate Joseph “Tex” Dozier posted a joke that he had had a dream about assassinating University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer “for a secret Israeli organization.”

Mearsheimer is co-author of the controversial book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. This post prompted an investigator from the university’s police department to question Dozier about his political views, suggest that he would investigate Dozier’s comments on his university radio show, and demand that Dozier remove the post or else have the post reported to Mearsheimer, one of his professors. Dozier came to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.

“Any reasonable person would recognize that Dozier’s post was unquestionably a joke,” said FIRE Vice President Robert Shibley. “If Dozier worked for a secret Israeli organization, would he have announced it via Facebook? And if the University of Chicago truly believed that Dozier presented a threat to a professor’s life, how would merely censoring the student have solved the problem? The U of C is making a joke of itself by policing and censoring student comments on Facebook.”

On December 6, 2009, Dozier wrote on his personal Facebook page, “Dreamt that I assassinated [University of Chicago professor] John Mearsheimer for a secret Israeli organization – there was a hidden closet w/ Nazi paraphanelia [sic]. Haha! ” Mearsheimer is popularly known for his 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy with co-author Stephen Walt. According to the authors, the book “focuses primarily on the lobby’s influence on U.S. foreign policy and its negative effect on American interests.”

University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) officer Abraham Martinez phoned Dozier on December 7. According to Dozier, Martinez called the post a “death threat” and asked if Dozier disagreed with Mearsheimer politically. Martinez also asked if he had made “controversial comments” about Mearsheimer in the past that the UCPD should be aware of.

Martinez even told Dozier that he had “researched” Dozier and his weekly radio show The Boiling Point, which is broadcast on university-hosted station WHPK. When Martinez said that he was required to contact Mearsheimer to inform him of Dozier’s comment, Dozier replied that Mearsheimer had been one of his professors and that he feared negative repercussions if his innocent comment was reported to Mearsheimer. Martinez responded that if Dozier deleted the comment within 30 minutes, Martinez would include the removal in his official report and not contact Mearsheimer. Dozier negotiated a two-hour window and then deleted his comment.

Neither the University of Chicago nor the UCPD has challenged FIRE’s or Dozier’s account of this conversation.

FIRE wrote University of Chicago President Robert J. Zimmer on March 2 about the violation of Dozier’s expression rights. While the University of Chicago is a private institution not bound by the First Amendment, it explicitly promises students freedom of speech in its Student Manual, which also states that “The ideas of different members of the University community will frequently conflict and we do not attempt to shield people from ideas that they may find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even offensive. Nor, as a general rule, does the University intervene to enforce social standards of civility.” The university has not responded.

This is the second time the University of Chicago has censored a student’s Facebook post in violation of the university’s promises to its students. In 2009, undergraduate Andrew Thompson posted a photograph album on his personal Facebook page under the title, “[Name of ex-girlfriend] cheated on me, and you’re next!” The photos were of various persons and were unremarkable, though some of Thompson’s Facebook “friends” posted negative statements about the ex-girlfriend.

The next day, after the ex-girlfriend complained, Susan Art, Dean of Students in the College, demanded that Thompson “remove her name and remove the pictures you have posted of her” because of an alleged Student Manual prohibition against “disrespectful” speech.

“Can you let me know when her name and her pictures are removed from your [F]acebook page?” Art wrote. “I expect this to happen right away.” Fearing university punishment, Thompson complied with Art’s censorship demands, but turned to FIRE for help.

FIRE wrote President Zimmer on February 23, 2009, but the university eventually replied that since FIRE was not threatening litigation, the University of Chicago did not want to engage in any further discussion regarding the issue.

“The University of Chicago had a chance to reverse course last year and start respecting students’ free speech rights, but it has continued to monitor students’ off-campus Internet speech and censor innocuous comments,” said Adam Kissel, Director of FIRE’s Individual Rights Defense Program. “The university has failed to fulfill its own promises once again.”

Student First Amendment rights get lost in school’s policing of off-campus postings on social media

donal brown — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:07:01 +0000

A blogger from the Citizen Media Law Project argues that school authorities are over reaching in many instances in punishing students for off-campus speech. In many instances the speech has no disruptive effect on the school or falls short of creating a hostile school environment. -db

Citizen Media Law Project

Commentary
March 17, 2010
By Justin Silverman

A freshman at Oak Grove High School in Missouri used Facebook last month to vent about another student: “Wow, [expletive] alert,” wrote Megan Wisemore. “You’re a skank and I hate you with a [expletive] passion.” Though Wisemore intended only for her friends to see the message, the classmate she wrote about eventually read the posting as well. When Wisemore returned to school, that classmate attacked her in retaliation.

Both students received suspensions; the classmate for fighting, Wisemore for her Facebook post. “It was very colorful language I don’t approve of, but I didn’t like the fact the school stepped into my home,” said Christy Wisemore, Megan’s mother. “That’s her constitutional right to write what she feels.”

The First Amendment protection of student speech is grounded in the seminal case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969). In Tinker, three public high school students were suspended for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. They successfully challenged the school’s policy prohibiting the armbands, and in the process the Supreme Court created a new standard of review for student speech. Under this standard, school officials may prohibit or punish student speech only if the speech would “materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school.” 393 U.S. at 509.

The problem, however, is that social media provides students with a large platform from which off-campus speech can spill into the classroom. Though students have used services such as Facebook and MySpace for several years now, courts are still struggling to balance their First Amendment rights with the disruption their speech may cause on school grounds.

Consider two recent 3rd Circuit of Appeals cases. Both involved high school students who were suspended for creating fake MySpace profiles on which they insulted their principals. In Layshock v. Hermitage School District, the court found that school officials should not have suspended a student who described his principal as, among other things, a “big whore” who smoked a “big blunt.” In J.S. v. Blue Mountain, the court upheld the suspension of a student who called her principal a “tight ass” who liked “hitting on students and their parents.”

As the Legal Intelligencer explained: In Layshock, a unanimous three-judge panel declared that punishing students for off-campus speech violates their First Amendment rights. But the Blue Mountain panel split, voting 2-1 that students may be punished for lewd speech on the Internet about school officials that has the potential to create a substantial disturbance at school.

Forty-one years after Tinker, courts are waffling between interfering and potentially interfering. If there isn’t consistency in cases such as these, students like Wisemore could be without recourse. Further, all other students with a Facebook account will risk suspension any time they update their status. As Justice Fortas famously said in Tinker: Students do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech at the schoolhouse gate. Yet at least some courts now seem willing to ask students to shed them before they even leave home.

It doesn’t need to be that way. Courts should follow Tinker and expect schools to do so as well. Wisemore didn’t interfere with her school when she posted to Facebook. Wisemore’s classmate brought that speech into the classroom and caused a disturbance by starting a fight. That classmate should be the only student suspended. The comments made by the two 3rd Circuit plaintiffs didn’t interfere with the schooling of any students. They targeted principals, and as offensive as their comments may be, those students shouldn’t be punished unless that speech enters the classroom and causes a disturbance. For those who are the subject of online rants, there are legal remedies available when the speech is actionable, such as laws against libel and harassment.

What’s complicating matters is the panic over cyberbullying. High-profile suicides, like those of Megan Meier and Phoebe Prince, can make the words of Wisemore seem more threatening. Cyberbullying is a problem because targeted students assume everyone is reading about them simply because the comments are online. But just because anyone can read the comments, doesn’t mean everyone isactually reading those comments. The classmate that attacked Wisemore is claiming she was cyberbullied, despite the fact that Wisemore made her comment to a private group of friends. Still, school officials suspended Wisemore.

Many states are enacting cyberbullying laws to help combat hurtful and harassing online speech. Missouri enacted its own law two years ago in response to the suicide of Megan Meier, who lived in the state. Responding to the death of Prince, the Massachusetts Senate approved a bill last week that would prohibit the use of emails, text messages, Internet postings and other electronic means to create a hostile school environment. This focus on creating “a hostile school environment” seems to be the right approach because the focus is within the schoolhouse gates, not beyond them. Drafters of that bill made clear that “nothing in this section shall be construed to abridge the rights of students that are protected by the First Amendment.”

But that, unfortunately, is the problem. Those First Amendment rights have yet to be clearly defined.

Justin Silverman is a CMLP Legal Intern and a third-year evening student at Suffolk University Law School.

New access to social media may precipitate change in Iran

donal brown — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:00:45 +0000

After the U.S. Treasury Department decided to exclude social media services from sanctions against Iran, there is hope that these services will help Iranians effect political change. Iran is a special case in that nearly half of the population uses the internet. -db

Citizen Media Law Project
Commentary
March 11, 2010
By Arthur Bright

Anyone who followed the Green Movement protests in Iran is well aware of the importance of social media to the protesters. Without Twitter, photo sharing, and other key information-sharing technologies, it’s hard to believe that the protests would ever have materialized, let alone in such numbers that the Iranian government couldn’t discretely crush them. (By the way, if you’re interested in seeing the social media at work in the protests, I’d highly recommend checking out Andrew Sullivan’s blog The Daily Dish at The Atlantic. Whatever your opinion of Sullivan and his politics, he and his staff have done an excellent job of aggregating the protesters’ Tweets, posts, and what have you.)

With the Iran protests in mind, the Treasury Department’s decision this week to loosen export restrictions on social media services to Iran, Cuba, and Sudan is really no surprise. Indeed, The New York Times writes that the regulatory change has been in the works for a while:

“The decision, which had been expected, underscores the complexity of dealing with politically repressive governments in the digital age: even as the Obama administration is opening up trade in Internet services to Iran, it is shaping harsh new sanctions that would crack down on Iranian access to financing and technology that could help Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.

Critics have said these sanctions are leaky and ineffective, and some say it makes more sense to spread digital technology, which makes it harder for governments to restrict the flow of information within societies, and to prevent their people from contact with the outside world.

The Treasury Department’s action follows a recommendation by the State Department in mid-December that the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which is run by the Treasury, authorize the downloading of “free mass-market software” in Iran by Microsoft, Google and other companies.”

Although not expressly banned, offering this sort of media technology to Iran, Cuba, and Sudan was of sufficiently ambiguous legality that companies simply abstained from doing so. Now they’ve gotten the green light, so hopefully they’ll start cranking out IM apps in Farsi and the like. (Oh, and in case you were wondering about that other “Axis of Evil” nation, North Korea, and why it’s not on the list—the sanctions against North Korea don’t actually ban Internet technology. Neither do the sanctions against Syria. Go figure.)

This certainly is a welcome change, as far as I’m concerned; it reminds me of nothing so much as when McDonald’s opened up restaurants in the Soviet Union. Hopefully the desire for Tweets will bring the same sort of glasnost to Iran that the desire for Big Macs helped bring to the USSR. (Obviously, this is a gross oversimplification; Big Macs didn’t bring about glasnost. But I’m cautiously optimistic that the same capitalistic forces that helped cracked open the Warsaw bloc will now be turned upon Iran’s theocratic shell with similar results.)

Now, it’s highly unlikely that this regulatory change will hurt Western efforts to open up Iran, Cuba, and Sudan. But will it actually help? Rik Myslewski, writing for online IT mag The Register, expresses some doubts:

“[T]he revised regulations don’t allow for a wide-open software surge to the three-country Axis of Disagreeableness. The OFAC’s 21-page ruling (pdf) specifically states that licenses will be issued only on a case-by-case basis and only for services and software “incident to the sharing of information over the Internet”.

And those exports won’t go to the minions of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, or Raul Castro. The new regulations prohibit the export of software or services to those overlords, their governments, or – in the case of the US’s Caribbean bête noire – to “a prohibited member of the Cuban Communist Party”.

In addition, the new regulations require that the software be used only for services that are ‘publicly available at no cost to the user’.”

Further, Mr. Myslewski notes that Iran may be a special case. In Iran, nearly half of the 66-million-odd population are Internet users. As such, social media technology is highly likely to fall into the hands of lots of pro-democracy/pro-détente Iranians who can make use of it to organize and challenge the government. In Cuba and Sudan however, the online population is decidedly smaller: only about ten percent each of Cuba’s 11 million people and Sudan’s 41 million are Internet users. That’s a much smaller pool of potential protesters, both numerically and proportionally. It’s far less likely that a Green Movement kind of protest, with sufficient numbers to challenge their government’s control, will foment in either nation.

Certainly, there’s less reason to believe that there’s the same opportunity for political upheaval in Cuba or Sudan that the Green Movement has taken advantage of in Iran. Still, it’s hard to see any downside to the Treasury’s move—it seems all upside to me. At worst, nothing changes. At best, the Green Movement opens up Iran, and Cuba and Sudan get nascent reform movements of their own, all funded at corporate expense. What’s not to like?

Arthur Bright is a third-year law student at the Boston University School of Law and a former CMLP Legal Intern.

International internet freedom gets boost in latest regulations proposed by Obama administration

donal brown — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:25:35 +0000

The U.S. Treasury Department announced changes in its sanctions against Cuba, Iran and the Sudan which allows internet service to these countries even when they are under U.S. sanctions. -db

Electronic Frontier Foundation
Commentary
March 10, 2010
By Danny O’Brien

The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced on Monday key amendments to the regulation of United States sanctions against Cuba, Iran and Sudan.

The new provisions give a blanket license for the export of “certain services and software incident to the exchange of personal communications over the Internet, such as instant messaging, chat and email, social networking, sharing of photos and movies, web browsing, and blogging, provided that such services are publicly available at no cost to the user.”

This clarification is just what EFF called for last June, and will go a long way to allay concerns that online service providers based in the U.S. cannot offer their services in those countries. Previously, despite the well-known freedom-enhancing capabilities of services like Twitter and Facebook in repressive regimes like Iran, it was unclear whether those companies could even offer their services there without falling foul of the United State’s broad prohibition on the export of goods and services to these regimes.

This was not a hypothetical concern: other services that were useful for dissidents to communicate and organize, like Microsoft, and Google’s instant messaging clients had previously been blocked from being used in these very countries — not by the repressive states, but by companies themselves, cautious of violating sanctions.

While the change in the letter of the law is clearly positive, perhaps just as important is the signal this sends about the administration’s new guiding policy on global Internet freedom.

Previously, cautious companies, afraid of running afoul of OFAC, have frequently forbidden or blocked all use in sanctioned countries, even when the letter of the law did not require such draconian steps. You can see this institutionally paranoid language, and its inevitable results, in Bluehost’s terms of service, which pre-emptively prohibits all citizens of sanctioned countries from even applying to use their hosting facilities (a policy which lead them to shamefully throwing innocent Zimbabwean activists off their service last year).

Now we are moving (slowly) to a new, and better default, where technologists and their lawyers might assume that free Internet services that facilitate free expression and association need not be blocked pre-emptively for anyone, anywhere.

The Obama administration has shown with these changes that it would prefer to move toward that end. Have we got there yet? Is it what export law now says?

While we wait for export regulation experts to sweat the details, the answer is still far too hazy for comfort. While the State and Treasury departments have fixed much that was wrong with Iranian, Cuban and Sudanese sanctions, there are still regulations on, for instance, Zimbabwe, Syria and North Korea for techies and their lawyers to worry about, and those sanctions still inhibit making software generally available. We also would like to see more clarity about collaborative software development locations, like Sourceforge.

We hope that this administration backs up these first steps with a continuing review of export rules, and pro-actively works to reassure Internet companies that they are free to build an open Internet for everyone, without expecting a knock on the door from their own government.