There are countless ways to screw up a fragile democracy. Two aspects of the democratic process seem to be especially vulnerable - elections, and term limits. Recent events in Iran have reminded us that elections are surprisingly easy to rig if you’ve got adequate control of electoral commissions. (Ideally, you should never need to rig an election. With state control over media, it should be easy enough to marginalize opponents and consolidate the image of a strong executive. The mistake in the Iran elections may have been the televised debates, which established Moussavi as a credible threat to Ahmedinejad…)

And there are a lot of rigged elections. In Africa, we’ve seen recently seen a thoroughly corrupt Zimbabwean election leading to an uncomfortable power-sharing arrangement, a rigged Kenyan election leading to violence and a bloated power-sharing government, a massively flawed election in Nigeria being accepted largely because it didn’t erupt into violence. Even in Ghana, where the 2008 elections were rightly celebrated for providing a peaceful transfer of power (the rare and celebrated “double alternation“), some of my friends affiliated with the ousted NPP claim that the election was flawed, but their party stood down rather than risk Kenya-style chaos. (I have no way of validating these claims, but I’m fascinated that an election celebrated for its smooth running is being questioned by some participants.)

Recent events suggest that we may need to pay close attention to the moment when leaders realize they’re constitutionally obligated to step down. It’s a legitimate concern in fragile democracies that a leader may be fairly elected, and may then manipulate the levers of power to remain in office indefinitely. (The running African joke about democratically-elected strongmen has the punchline: “One man, one vote, once.”) So many constitutions include strict term limits for executives. And popular leaders often try to ammend constitutions to allow them to rule indefinitely - Hugo Chavez proposed such ammendments to Venezuela’s constitution and was narrowly defeated in a referendum in late 2007.

Honduran president Manuel Zelaya is facing the end of his term in office and can’t currently stand for another term due to term limits. He sought a referendum allowing a constitutional change which would allow him to stand again. An hour before polls were scheduled to open, he was seized - in his pajamas - by military officers acting on a Supreme Court order and spirited off to Costa Rica.

That sounds a lot like a coup to me - the military has seized power and ousted an elected leader before the end of his term. On the other hand, the military was acting under court order, which leads to an argument that the presidential ouster was legally mandated. There’s been lively online debate on the topic of coup/no coup - readers on Reddit yesterday morning were greeted with an angry comment, “I am from Honduras. It was NOT a COUP” and a long comment thread debating events. The back and forth on the English-language wikipedia has been fierce enough that the Honduras page is currently protected from future edits (thought the Spanish-language page is not protected at present.)

While the Honduras situation is gaining some media attention - notably because both Hugo Chavez and Barack Obama have protested the events that have transpired - a very similar situation in Niger hasn’t moved beyond the back pages of the newspaper. In Niger, President Mamadou Tandja has been seeking an additional term in office, which has required constitutional changes via a referendum. The constitutional court ruled against his proposed referendum, and earlier this week, he declared he would rule by decree, dissolved the court that ruled against him and appointed 8 ministers who agree with his referendum plans. It’s not technically a military coup, as the military has stayed neutral… but an Nigerois opposition figure has called the situation a coup and been arrested for his troubles.

Mark Leon Goldberg, writing in UN Dispatch, asks “If a coup falls in Niger, does it make a sound?” While Tandja is earning brickbats from ECOWAS and from the EU, the story isn’t getting much play in international media. I can’t find evidence that Obama’s specifically condemned Tandja’s actions (BTW, I do not recommend searching for “obama niger” - it’s depressing, and won’t enlighten you on this story), and there certainly aren’t media pundits demanding an Obama stand on events.

It’s interesting to think about what democratic stresses attract international attention and which fly under radar. Protests in Iran were going to be front-page news, even before demonstrators displayed uncommon persistance and courage. Iran’s a founding member of the “axis of evil” - the Beatles of international media attention - a country that’s always red hot on attention maps. That Iran has a thriving blogosphere and a tech savvy population, many of whom knew how to evade the government firewalls that have been in place most of this decade, helped turn exciting, inspiring political developments into an international media phenomenon.

Other countries can have profoundly strange goings-on and healthy citizen media coverage, and won’t get a fraction of the coverage. See Madagascar, which has been in the throes of a deposed government, where bloggers have emerged as a key alternative to mainstream media. Or Fiji, where the military has been in control since late 2006, the fourth coup in recent years, and where recent restrictions on freedom of the press has been called “coup 4.5″ and turned bloggers into outlaw media outlets. We’ve covered both crises closely at Globa Voices, but we’ve not had the mainstream media interest we’ve received around Iran.

So why does Honduras get the Iran treatment, while Niger is ignored like Madagascar? Proximity? Strategic importance? (though Niger’s got massive uranium reserves - you remember yellowcake, right?) It’s not population - Niger’s roughly twice the size of Honduras. Expectation? Perhaps we’re sufficiently accustomed to African coups (Madagascar, Mauritania and Guinea in the past year) that Niger’s not a surprise.

Or perhaps all the pundits are still trying to figure out which one’s Nigeria and which one’s Niger…

It’s nice to be listened to. I guess. Maybe. Though I now find myself wondering whether I wouldn’t be better off shutting up.

I saw the first reports of Michael Jackson’s death on Twitter around 6pm. I ran a little script I threw together some weeks ago called “twitcent” to see just how many tweets would share the news. Twitcent takes advantage of the fact that Twitter gives a unique, sequential ID to each tweet to estimate the intensity of posting around certain terms. It retrieves a page of 100 search results for a particular search term - say “Michael Jackson” - and looks at the ID numbers of the first and last tweets listed. Take the difference of those numbers, and you get how many tweets were posted between search result #1 and #100. Divide, and you’ve got a percentage of tweets on the system in a discrete, small interval mentioning the term.

Is it accurate? I dunno. If my assumptions are right, it should be - if Twitter’s not always numbering sequentially, or if some large percent of tweets on the system are unsearchable, less so. Anyway, I ran several search terms through the engine and saw something I’d never seen before - search terms registering in double digit percentages, and the term “Michael Jackson” appearing in 13 - 20% of the tweets.

So I tweeted the following: “My twitter search script sees roughly 15% of all posts on Twitter mentioning Michael Jackson. Never saw Iran or swine flu reach over 5%” And then I went to make dinner.

When I got back online this evening, the tweet had been quoted in Wired News, the New York Times Bits blog, Washington Post’s mocoNews, and in the San Jose Mercury News.

Geez, think these guys read each other much? I’m flattered, I think. But worried that I’m now going to be quoted for the next several days as an “expert” on Michael Jackson twittering, especially as the NYTimes piece identifies me as a Berkman Center researcher.

Of course, by the time I’d gotten back online, the initial fervor had died down - here’s what my script turns up now:

2.152 % Michael Jackson
2.634 % jackson
2.242 % michael
0.312 % micheal
1.596 % MJ
0.119 % #MichaelJackson

That’s a lot of tweets, but now in the neighborhood of a busy swineflu day or the heart of Twitter’s interest in the Iran protests. What was interesting to me was the way the information flashed across Twitter, briefly bringing on the failwhale for some users - with one in seven or so tweets mentioning the death, it’s interesting to wonder whether people saw themselves as spreading the news, or as simply expressing shock, surprise, or their personal reaction. (And yes, I tweeted an update that the term was now down to roughly 3%. That one hasn’t gotten retweeted…)

What’s really interesting to me is the extent to which news reporters seem to have chosen Twitter as the go-to source for reactions to news events. It makes sense - there’s a premium in the news business on speed, on having a story faster than anyone else does, so the need for the quick quote makes Google hours to slow to help you. And the 140 character limit guarantees that whoever you quote will be pithy and limited to a single soundbite.

This, in turn, also increases the chance that you’ll be wrong. A proper quote from me would probably have been something like: “The search string ‘Michael Jackson’ is getting intense interest on Twitter at the moment, showing up in between 13-20% of tweets. It’s unlikely this level of intensity will continue through the night, but at the moment, it exceeds the intensity I’ve seen on Twitter during slower-breaking stories like #swineflu, #pman and #IranElection.” That, unfortunately, is 337 characters - far too long for anyone to read anymore. And a clarification in the form of a blogpost? That’s so 2006.

Omar Bongo is dead. He died while undergoing cancer treatments in a Barcelona hospital. Can’t say I’ll be sorry to see him go. The late leader of Gabon could be proud of the fact that his oil-rich nation was significantly more stable than others in West Africa. But his 41-year rule was a naked kleptocracy, and he ruled in classic “big man” fashion, subverting and paying off all opposition. He was a nepotistic crook… and that’s not my opinion, but the headline in the New Zealand Herald about his death.

The Onion’s brilliant “Our Dumb World” - their farcical atlas - describes Gabon as “President Bongo’s Private Residence”. That’s a bit off - while he certainly ran the country for his personal benefit, his most impressive residences were in France, where Bongo and his family owns 33 properties valued at over $190 million. His taste for French property gave the French arm of Transparency International a brilliant opportunity to seek legal action against him for corruption - alas, the other leaders TI is suing probably won’t ever be brought to justice either.

You’d think that the passing of a man who systematically looted his country for four decades would be the cause for celebration. Unfortunately, there’s no reason to believe it’s going to get better any time soon. Several African big men have passed on in the past decade, and the situation hasn’t improved much for their beleaguered subjects. When Togo’s Eyadema Gnassingbe died in 2005, the military installed his son, Faure… who was “elected” soon after. Lansana Conté died in December 2008, and within six hours of the announcement of his death, a military government voided the constitution and took over in a coup d’etat. No one’s predicting a coup in Gabon - the minister of Defense is Ali Ben Bongo, Bongo’s son and almost certain successor. (Reuters has a good set of reactions from Africa experts on Bongo’s death - it’s interesting to see how many reference Guinea and Togo in talking about the transition.)

Even if there were elections in Gabon, it’s hard to believe they’d be competitive. Bongo systematically paid off opposition politicians so succesfully that the running joke was that the best way to become a millionaire in Gabon was to start a political party. The country isn’t even a one-party state - it’s a one-man affair. When Bongo died, officials were so afraid of announcing his death that we saw the Prime Minister insisting Bongo was alive and well hours before AFP and other French media made clear that this was no longer the case. It’s going to take years to develop an independent political culture in Gabon… and that will likely only happen if the younger Bongo doesn’t create a similar government structure to his father’s.

Elia Varela Serra has a good roundup of Francophone bloggers reactions to Bongo’s death, including a quote from commenter Akin on AfricanLoft: “The greatest indictment of his lamentable regime of 42 years is that Gabon does not have hospitals that could treat either himself or his wife. What kind of leadership is one that cannot bring any appreciable benefits to its people whilst the leaders jet off to foreign lands for the slightest sign of discomfort?” While most are excited to see another “crocodile” go, few predict Gabon will be a democracy any time soon. The estimable Elizabeth Dickinson of Foreign Policy Passport notes that stores have been closed in Libreville in anticipation of insecurity and AFP is reporting that the country’s land, sea and air borders have been closed.

A closing note - as Gabon works through the transition away from the rule of Africa’s longest serving dictator, watch France. ELF has an enormous presence in the country, and Bongo worked hard to maintain his relationship with the former colonial power. Whether or not France meddles in Gabonese politics, they will be accused of meddling… and I’d be very surprised to see a leader emerge who wanted to remove France’s continuing military and commercial presence.

Sandra Ball-Rokeach, professor at USC Annenberg, is interested in the ways in which communities use media to tell stories to themselves and to others. In introducing her, Dean Wilson notes that she refuses to look at one media at a time - instead, she looks at complex communications infrastructures and their interaction with “geo-ethnic communities”, groups of people with a common ethnicity in a particular community.

Storytelling networks matter because they lead to a sense of belonging, towards collective efficacy and towards actual civic participation. Networks include community organizations and NGOs, the geo-ethnic media and the residents and families of these communities. A community NGO holds an event on diabetes. It’s reported on in ethnic media, and leads to conversations about the issue. This is a conversational model of media - it succeeds when it promotes conversations.

Ball-Rokeach challenges us to think about how public service media fits into this equation. Social media can serve as a space for conversation, much in the same way as a safe neighborhood park can provide a space for people to meet and greet, and eventually share conversations about what’s going on in a neighborhood. An unsafe neighborhood, where people can’t sit on their front porches, inhibits storytelling and undermines civic engagment. How can public service media open itself as an approachable space?

Through the Metamorphasis project, Ball-Rokeach is trying to buck the trend of public media to produce a product and invite people to come. Instead, they are trying to design a citizen media model where the model is driven by the residents and local institutions. This involves doing lots of focus groups, intervies and onsite observations and letting the design be driven by the residents.

Lots of cities around Los Angeles have complex, multiethnic communities. Glendale has three main populations - Armenians, Anglos and Latinos. Each has a separate communication ecology. Anglos rely heavily on newspapers, especially the Pasadena Star News. Local television is important to all communities, but geoethnic television reaches only Armenians and Latinos. The internet only really reaches Anglos. You’d need to study and understand these dynamics if you wanted to reach the whole community with media. Metamorph needs to find ways to understand and work within these dynamics to produce media that builds bridges.

She identifies ethnic media as a form of public service media - while these papers are often for profit, the main priority is serving the community. This media allows readers to have complex identities, both living in Los Angeles and in their homeland. As her research yields a book, “Understanding Ethnic Media”, a major focus of her thought will be the way ethnic media enables and empowers this dual identity, allowing you to be both here and there.

A UN report on extrajudicial executions in Kenya has recommended that Kenya’s police chief and attorney general both resign. At issue in the report are more than 500 killings of civilians by police, in the wake of the 2007 elections, in a campaign against a regional land rights movement and a campaign against a criminal gang. Human rights advocates are celebrating the report, pointing out that Kenya’s judiciary is far from independent, and that the executive is able to use police forces as a tool of political violence. The president of the Oscar Foundation, an NGO which accused the police of political killings, was assasinated in Nairobi earlier this year.

Unsurprisingly, the report is splitting Kenya’s coalition government. Mwai Kibaki, who was unwilling to step down from power in the 2007 elections, condemns the report and rejects it as “paternalistic”. Raila Odinga and his supporters, the head of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement - which joined the Kibaki government in coalition after months of violent standoff - are more receptive to the findings.

The Kenya report is a useful reminder that transforming a political culture goes well beyond holding democratic elections (though free and fair elections certainly help, and Kenya’s elections were far from exemplary.) Other unelected institutions have enormous power, and their institutional culture helps shape the politics and the everyday life of a nation. Kubatana, a coalition of Zimbabwean civil society organizations, is sharing a disturbing video of police training. Police inductees are being forced to assume a push-up position, then are beaten by senior officers, eventually kicked out of the way to allow another trainee to take their place.

While one might dismiss this as am ugly form of hazing, it’s worth remembering that the Zimbabwean police have eebn powerful political actors, savagely beating opposition figures and their supporters. This “training” looks like an organized program to train security authorities to behave as political thugs - it’s a video disturbing both for its content and for its implications, the idea that a new generation of Zimbabwean law enforcement are being prepared to abuse citizens.

It’s depressing to write a post about police violence in two countries I care deeply about and whose people I so admire. If there’s an upside in news like this, it’s that this violence is now being documented, and that pressure around these reports could lead towards this institutionalized violence being eliminated. I think it’s particularly significant that the video from Zimbabwe was shot with a mobile phone - as cameraphones become more pervasive, it’s more likely that unacceptable practices like this will be documented and addressed, rather than hidden.

This has not been an easy year for Madagascar. A power struggle between the president, Marc Ravalomanana and Antananarivo mayor Andry Rajeolina led to the army ousting the president, who resigned on March 17th. Rajeolina has been leading the High Transitional Authority, which has become increasingly autocratic and hostile towards free speech.

It’s hard to characterize the opinion of my Malagasy friends towards the civil strife. I think some were frustrated with Ravaolmanana’s government, which faced accusations of corruption and mismanagement, and hopeful that matters might improve under Rajeolina. But everyone I’ve spoken to has been deeply saddened by the violence that’s accompanied the protests, and increasingly upset about the detention of journalists, the closure of radio and television stations and the harrassment of bloggers. And I think everyone is hoping that the country can find a way to come back together and return to normalcy.

That may help explain why Razily has emerged as a hero for many Malagasy bloggers. On March 28, Razily carried the Malagasy flag into a street that had been closed by the Malagasy army. While the streets were filled with protesters, they remained behind the military cordon - Razily crossed into the space controlled by soldiers carrying the flag and marched solemly down the street. He was promptly seized by soliders in a pickup truck, and carried away from scene along with a companion, who had approached the truck to make sure Razily was unharmed.

Razily has not been released from military custody, and news recently emerged that he would be tried by the military for the crime of “flag theft”. Friends in the Malagasy diaspora are organizing a campaign to petition the transitional government not for his release, but for transparency regarding the charges against him and the trial he faces. The petition also expresses concern at the restrictions on speech and the use of tear gas and live rounds against protesters. The petition invites people to sign by adding a comment, and recognizes that many supporters in Madagascar may be unable to sign with their real names due to very real concerns about their safety.

My friend Lova Rakotomalala explains why Razily is so important to many Malagasy people:

Razily embodied the hope of the silent majority that is neither pro-Rajoelina, nor pro-Ravalomanana, that believe that there is still room for understanding and compromise if we reach out to each other and think of the nation first ( hence the flag). The fact that he marched on undeterred by the bullets around him made a strong impression on many of us. Bloggers have the protection of being behind the computer screen, Razily did not.

One of the reasons the crisis in Madagascar persists is that it’s receiving very little attention from the media, even on the African continent. In the absence of sustained pressure and scrutiny, there’s not much pressure on Rajeolina and Ravalomanana to find a solution that allows Madagascar to go forward. I’m often skeptical of the value of online petitions, but I think that demonstrating that people around the world are paying attention to the situation in Madagascar, and to the rights of a peaceful demonstrator, could have an important impact in this case. I hope you’ll join me in signing the petition and in spreading the word about Razily.

Global Voices has been covering the situation in Madagascar closely.

Wikipedia’s article on the 2009 protests is a good introduction to the situation as well.

Two Facebook groups exist to support Razily:
Save Razily and Libérez Razily et les autres.

A note on the video embedded above: There are at least two videos circulating of Razily’s march with the flag. The one above, from YouTube, has no sound. The one on DailyMotion has the sounds of the people recording the video. I interpret their laughter as a sign of their amazement at the audacity of Razily in walking towards the military with the flag. The fact that they cheer as he resumes his march after pausing suggests to me that they’re supportive of what he’s doing, not laughing at him, as does the fact that they posted the video. But I suspect the laughter could be confusing, and could seem very inappopriate given Razily’s arrest and subsequent disappearance. That’s why I’ve embedded the silent version, but am linking to the version with sound.

I’m once again locked onto the #Madagascar tag on Twitter, trying to get a sense for what’s going on in the wake of the March transfer of power/revolution/coup. Unfortunately, that tag has been very busy today, as protests erupt into violence and Malagasy citizens find themselves reporting on gunfire in the streets of the capital, Antananarivo.

For those not up to date… for most of this year, Malagasy President Marc Ravalomanana has been under intense pressure from an opposition group led by Antananarivo mayor Andry Rajoelina - that pressure stems in part from accusations of corruption and mismanagement by Ravalomanana. In February, Rajoelina declared himself the new President, but wasn’t able to take power. By mid-March, Ravalomanana had lost support of the army (in part because the army didn’t want to shoot protesters, as they did on the tragic Red Saturday) and was forced to step down, and into exile. Rajoelina can’t actually serve as President due to his youth, but has appointed Monja Roindefo and promised elections within two years. Because the government was installed by the army, most nations aren’t recognizing the change in power, and are terming it a coup. (Wikipedia’s article on the crisis is quite good. An earlier summary from this blog might be helpful as well, particularly for understanding underlying factors.)

Today’s violence is connected to demonstrations in support of the ousted president. The military, now in control of Rajoelina and his allies, has been asked to dispel protesters, who have been building barricades and looting shops and buildings. There are no reports yet listing casualty figures, but multiple reports of gunfire suggest that conflicts have been violent at times.

It’s been disappointing to watch Rajoelina, who criticized Ravalomanana’s control of media, ban public demonstrations and crack down on the media. Reporters Sans Frontiers issued a strongly worded statement today (fr) condemning pressure from the new government on media agencies, designed to keep them from reporting on the protests. The nature of that pressure is uncertain, RSF admits - some journalists say they haven’t been prevented from doing their jobs, while others claim they’ve been intimidated and warned off of certain stories. But other actions, like the shutdown of Mada TV - closely associated with Ravalomanana’s supporters - are less ambiguous. The Malagasy media environment is far from open, which makes it hard to track events on the ground, whether you’re inside or outside Madagascar.

I celebrated the use of Twitter by Malagasy friends to report events on the ground in a blogpost a few weeks back, and got gentle but firm pushback from Paul Currion at humanitarian.info, who noted that most of these posts were Twitter users reposting reporting they’d heard on radio or television. Twitter wasn’t responsible for the reporting, he argued, but was being used as a new channel to disseminate journalism. I suggested that, given the confusion around which faction controlled which radio and television stations during the crisis, reporting on which radio station was saying what might well have constituted a form of journalism. It’s an interesting conversation, and not one that’s easy to settle.

But the situation on the ground is different now than it was two months back. Malagasy bloggers, photographers and twitterers are reporting on gunfire in their neighborhoods, and taking photos of armed military personnel confronting demonstrators. These reports by themselves are pretty disjointed and confusing, but the synthesis being offered by Malagasy bloggers and on the Global Voices site are an important journalistic complement to the reporting being offered by wire services like AP and AFP.

The argument about whether citizen media is or isn’t journalism in this context is much less important than the larger question of how bloggers and journalists could help focus more attention on the conflict in Madagascar. As CARE International points out, Madagascar is simultaneously facing a drought, cyclones and political instability. The country is one of the poorest in the world, and is in need of food aid, a need that’s likely to become more acute as the political situation continues to be unstable.

There’s lots of reasons why media attention is important to a country - trade, investment and international support at moments of crisis. Disasters that get a great deal of attention, like the Boxing Day Tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, make it possible for organizations like the Red Cross to raise sufficient money to support those affected. Quiet disasters don’t. And Madagascar’s ongoing instability continues to be too quiet, at least in terms of attracting international attention and aid.

Three stories on Global Voices will help you catch up on some interesting stories around the world if you, like me, have been distracted by #amazonfail, Susan Boyle and teabagging tea parties. Collectively, they’re an interesting reminder for me of just how much is taking place at the intersection of new media and political change, a field I try to follow closely, and frequently miss important developments in.

Supporters of exiled former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, called “the red shirts” managed to shut down the ASEAN summit, embarrasing the army-supported Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. But the red shirt movement has appeared confused and disorganized after that succesful protest, and now faces accusations that the movement is being paid to protest by Thaksin.

The evidence for those charges? Thaksin has been communicating with supporters via videophone, and a recent speech transmitted by videophone included the phrase, “And you don’t need to go to queue up for 500 baht” (roughly $14). Based on the translation offered by Jonathan of Jot ASEAN, it seems like it could have been a reference to pensioners lining up for government assistance. But critics of Thaksin are jumping on the statement as an admission of guilt by Thaksin that he’s been paying protesters. The Thai version of the video has nearly half a million YouTube views, and an English-subtitled version is circulating as well.

Mong Palatino’s got lots of context for the controversial video, including bloggers who’ve sought advice from their personal astrologers in understanding the situation in Thailand. As for me - the sight of an exiled prime minister giving marching orders via videophone and being ridiculed on YouTube is sufficient proof that we’re living in the future.

Jen Brea is watching the reactions of Congolese bloggers to an interview DRCongo president Joseph Kabila gave with Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times. It’s a weird interview - Kabila seems to forget that the interview is going to be read widely, at home as well as in the US. And bloggers rip him apart, critiquing his statements about DRC’s strife with Rwanda, his tendency to blame problems on Mobutu, and his provocative statement that there aren’t enough people in his government who can help him transform the country:

You don’t need a thousand people to transform a country. No, you need 3,4, 10, 15 people with the necessary convictions, determined and resolute. Do I have those 15 people? Probably 5, 6, 7, not yet 15.

Bloggers like Congoliberte wonder why, if in a government with dozens of ministers and thousands of officials, has only seven worthwhile people in it, why doesn’t Kabila clean house? Brea’s post is an excellent overview of insightful and pointed media criticism coming from Congolese bloggers, who aim their barbs not just at the president’s strange statements, but the New York Times’s apparent ignorance of the controversy behind these statements and a willingness to let them go unchallenged.

Finally, in news I wish I’d been following more closely - John Liebhart looks at the situation in Fiji, where a military coup leader basically ignored a supreme court decision which ordered him to step down. The mechanics are pretty complicated - told to step down by the court, the Prime Minister (the head of the army) had the president fire the judiciary, abrogate the constitution and swear him in again as Prime Minister. Elections aren’t likely to be held before 2014, and Fiji is coming under increasing pressure from the community of nations, who threaten to isolate it if it continues down the path of military rule.

The climate of military government is extremely hostile to free expression, Liebhart reports. The government has instructed media outlets to report “pro-Fiji” news and instructed that news shouldn’t contain “negativity”. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s man in Fiji has been deported, and a Fijian journalist was arrested for reporting on his deportation. However, the military government has reassured the global community that foreign journalists are always welcome - they just need to apply to the ministry of information, who will review their past coverage and ensure they’re sufficiently pro-Fiji before issuing a permit.

In this sort of media environment, it’s not surprising that some blogs are going dark. What’s impressive, Liebhart argues, is how many blogs continue to report news, and how essential this reporting is:

Getting reliable news from inside Fiji – even for those living in the country – has been difficult. By most accounts, all foreign journalists have left the country. With the local media mostly quiet regarding political issues, Fiji’s political bloggers have been publishing nearly non-stop.

He goes on to offer a selection of coverage from local bloggers. People hungry for news are looking to the online newspaper Fiji Times (whose photographer was recently detained and questioned) and blogs like Coup Four and a Half and Raw Fiji News. Soli Vakasama is hosting lively political discussions, and Loyal Fijian has published a passionate post about the importance of an open and free media.

It’s worth watching Fiji very, very closely to see how these independent voices will fare in the wake of a government which appears to be consolidating control, and appears insensitive to international pressure. New Zealand-based journalists are already offering to publish news from Fiji based on email reports from Fijians… a situation very familiar to those of us who follow Zimbabwe closely via reports from South Africa.

All of which is my way of saying, I should read Global Voices more often and more closely. It’s a good reminder that the hot stories about the internet and politics aren’t always the only ones out there.

Moldova’s parliamentary elections on April 5th appeared to return the governing Communist party to power. Reuters reports that exit polls showed the Communists with 46% of the vote; figures from the board of elections released the following day gave the party a 50% share.

In Moldova, the parliament elects the president. While Vladimir Voronin has served two terms and is ineligible for a third term, there’s a storm brewing over the future presidency - three parties that favor closer ties with the EU say that they won’t form a coalition government with the Communists. After the announcement of preliminary results on April 6th, there were complaints about election fraud, claims that Voronin had packed the voting lists with the names of dead and nonexistent people to keep his party in power.

On Tuesday, April 7th, at least 10,000 protesters took control of the President’s office and of parliament in the capital, Chisinau. Over 100 people were hurt and one killed during demonstrations and the police response. By Wednesday, April 8th, the buildings had been retaken, and almost two hundred opposition protesters were arrested. In the hopes of calming the tense situation, a vote recount will be held Wednesday. But the situation looks difficult to defuse - Moldova is desperately poor, and up to a quarter of the country’s population is working abroad. The result, suggests Mansur Mirovalev in the AP, may be a generation gap between pensioners who traditionally side with Russia in political disputes, and students, who look to the EU and specifically to Romania. Protests continued on Sunday, bringing fewer people into the streets, but suggesting that a vote recount may not be sufficient to calm the situation in Chisinau.

There’s a parallel timeline to this one, focusing on the use of social media in organizing these protests. The Telegraph reported on April 7th that students had used Twitter to organize their protests. My friend and colleague Evgeny Morozov explored the idea in more detail on his blog, net.effect, helping to set off a storm of articles and posts about “the Twitter revolution” in Moldova. Commentators stepped up to debunk the role of Twitter in organizing the protests, leading to an interesting debate between Daniel Bennett - “The Myth of the Moldova Twitter Revolution” - and Morozov - “Moldova’s Twitter Revolution is NOT a Myth“.

While I weighed in on the argument a few days back, I realized that the argument over the role of Twitter in Moldovan activism reminded me of a lot of arguments about new media I’ve had in the past few years, both at Berkman and elsewhere. These arguments tend to be long on examples and storytelling, and very short on data and analysis. That frustration is what led friends and me to start building MediaCloud, a platform designed to study the spread of ideas between the blogosphere and mainstream media. The goal is to help turn media criticism from a largely qualitative to a partly quantitative pursuit.

MediaCloud doesn’t currently track Twitter - we’ve optimized the system to look at blogposts and newspaper articles and make generalizations about the subject matter of those pieces. It’s very hard to perform that sort of text analysis on the very short messages that come through Twitter.

At the same time, Twitter’s a very appealing platform for media research because it promises completeness. When tracking an idea that spreads between blogs (or blogs and mainstream news sources), there will always be sources not tracked by MediaCloud or fully indexed by Google. But Twitter is a self-contained universe - it’s virtually impossible to assemble a set of all webpages that mention the Moldova protests during the past week. Assembling a set of all tweets, on the other hand, is absolutely possible.

A brutally simple and stupid approach to the problem would involve retrieving every tweet for the past week and throwing away the ones that aren’t about Moldova. I decided to sharpen my large, heavy rock slightly and try something marginally less dumb. I decided to grab every tweet that included the #pman tag between Tuesday morning and yesterday afternoon (April 7th - April 12th).

(What follows is geekery about doing research on Twitter, and surprisingly few conclusions about whether Twitter did or didn’t help organize the revolution. If you’re interested in questions about what quantitative research might tell us on platforms like Twitter, it might be fun. If you’re looking for me to tell you whether Evgeny or Daniel is right, you’re out of luck, for the moment at least.)

Grabbing those 32,000 tweets involves talking Twitter’s search engine into doing something it really doesn’t like doing - giving you more than 1500 search results. The trick involves manipulating the “max_id” field in the twitter search URL. Try a search on twitter. Go to the second page of results. You should see a URL that looks something like this:

http://search.twitter.com/search?max_id=1511783811&page=2&q=%23pman&rpp=100

Picking apart the URL:
max_id=1511783811 - Only return results up to tweet #1511783811 in the database
page=2 - Hand over the second page of results
q=%23pman - The query is for the string #pman, encoded to escape the hash
rpp=100 - Give the user 100 results per page

While you can manipulate these variables to your heart’s content, you can’t get more than 100 results per page. And if you retrieve 100 results per page, your results will stop at around 15 pages - the engine, by default, wants to give you only 1500 results on any search. This makes sense from a user perspective - it’s pretty rare that you actually want to read the last 1500 posts that mention the fail whale - but it’s a pain in the ass for researchers.

What you need to do is figure out the approximate tweet ID number that was current when the phenomenon you’re studying was taking place. If you’re a regular twitterer, go to your personal timeline, find a tweet you posted on April 7th, and click on the date to get the ID of the tweet. In the early morning (GMT) of the 7th, the ID for a new tweet was roughly 1468000000 - the URL http://search.twitter.com/search?max_id=1468000000&q=%23pman&rpp=100 retrieves the first four tweets to use the tag #pman, including our Ur-tweet:

evisoft: neata, propun sa utilizam tag-ul #pman pentru mesajele din piata marii adunari nationale

My Romanian’s a little rusty, but Vitalie Eşanu appears to be suggesting we use the tag #pman - short for Piata Marii Adunari Nationale, the main square in Chisinau where the protests were slated to begin - in reference to posts about the protests. His post is timestamped 4:40am GMT, suggesting that there were at least some discussions about promoting the protests on Twitter before protesters took to the streets.

Now the key is to grab URLs from Twitter, increasing the max_id variable in steps so that we’re getting all results from the start tweet ID to the current tweet ID. My perl script to do this steps by 10,000 results at a time, scraping the results I get from Twitter (using the Atom feed, not the HTML) and dumping novel results into a database. This seems like a pretty fine-toothed comb to use… but if you want to be comprehensive, it’s important to figure out what maximum “tweet density” is before running your code.

Density of tweets charted against blocks of 100,000 tweets

At some point on Friday, we hit a peak tweet density - 410 of 100,000 tweets included the #pman tag. Had I been scraping results by iterating 100,000 tweets at a time, I would have had four pages of new results - my script is only looking at the first page, so I’d be dropping results. If I ran the script again, I’d try to figure out the maximum tweet density by looking for the moment where the meme was most hyped, try to do a back of the envelope calculation as to an optimum step size and then halve it - that would probably have me using 20,000 steps for this set.

Some things to think about if you’re interested in scraping Twitter:

- There’s a lot of data. On the days for which I have complete data, I saw roughly 7 million tweets a day on weekdays, 6 million on Saturday. (Wednesday: 7087156, Thursday: 6921776, Friday: 6929399, Saturday: 5977967). You’re going to have more luck choosing good tags or keywords and using the search to limit your set than by grabbing all the data. (Smart monkey sharpens rock first.)

- It’s easy to break Twitter. Twitter breaks Twitter all the time - how many other tools can you think of where their semi-official mascot is the symbol of their dysfunction and downtime? So be really nice. Your spider should identify itself as a spider and include your email address so the admins can tell you to back off if it’s hurting the site. My spider waited two seconds per page and took a minute off if it got a 500.

- Use as big a step size as you can without losing data. Bigger steps mean fewer retrieves.

- Please don’t re-spider the #pman tag. I’ll happily share the data with you - which I’ve already done some preprocessing on. It’s here as an .xls file. If you need it in something else like .csv, let me know and I may be able to accommodate you. I plan on updating the set in a couple more days and will post when I do.

So what can you do with 32,107 brief messages in a language you don’t speak? I was curious to see the time distribution of the messages - the tweet density histogram above is a little confusing, because the density of tweets can change from moment to moment on twitter. Here’s how the activity breaks up over time:

Tweets versus time, starting around 04:00 GMT on April 7th, and extending through 21:00 GMT on April 12th

There’s very little activity until midday Moldovan time on Tuesday, at which point the protests are in full swing. By 12:30pm (09:30 GMT), we’re seeing tweets like:

@Moscovici: Protesters are injured. The Presidency building is damaged and protesters get inside. Police prepares to fight back. Chisinau, Moldova #pman

@bunelul: Anticomunist Protesters are injured. The Presidency building is damaged and protesters get inside. Police prepares to fight back. #pman

What’s interesting (to me, at least) is how quickly the Twitter analytics community made it onto the scene. An hour after these first posts about the protests, we see:

@whatthetrend: Why is #pman trending? Help explain why at What The Trend? http://wttrend.com/2173

I’d been operating under the theory that there was some Twitter use during the protests, but that the sustaining interest - the peaks on subsequent weekdays - had as much to do with self-congratulatory Twitterers talking about the revolutionary potential of social media as it did with actual discussions concerning people in Moldova and the Moldovan diaspora. There’s some evidence to support that viewpoint - here’s an exchange from Wednesday night:

4/8/09 23:57:24 1480123179 PaulMaior (Paul Maior) RT @guykawasaki Twitter revolution: 10,000 protesters organize in Moldova via FB, Twitter and texts http://adjix.com/2w9d #pman

4/9/09 0:08:21 1480180156 chriskeating (chriskeating) The people of Moldova say with one voice: IT’S NOT ABOUT F*CKING TWITTER! #pman

But the whole point of quantitative analysis is that you might get a different understanding from the numbers than from reading individual tweets. I was surprised to see a “professionalization” of tweeting as time went on. In other words, on the first day of the use of #pman, we saw an average of 5.87 posts per person using the tag - the sort of volume one might expect from a protester with a mobile phone. By Sunday, we’ve got roughly the same volume of tweets, but a much smaller set of people speaking, and an average of 14.74 tweets per author.


tweets authors mean
Tuesday 3820 651 5.87
Wednesday 6684 1050 6.37
Thursday 7300 643 11.35
Friday 7003 529 13.24
Saturday 4012 275 14.59
Sunday 3288 223 14.74


These numbers are almost certainly the result of a lot of people posting single tweets, and a small group of people posting tons of tweets, a classic long-tail/Pareto distribution. (For the whole set, the mean/median/mode is 16.22/2/1.) On Friday, the most active Twitterer, Zalmox3s, offers 465 posts with the #pman tag. (His posting volume may explain why he’s got only 51 followers. It might be interesting to try to figure out who had the biggest influence on promoting the #pman conversation - perhaps a product of number of #pman tweets and number of followers.)

There’s also quite a bit of staying power within the group - I saw only 1979 unique Twitterers using this tag over the six-day set. On Wednesday, the second day of the tag’s life, 53% of the people who’ve ever used the tag (in this data set) use the tag. That suggests to me that this isn’t so much a viral phenomenon, which keeps adding members, as a community that formed quickly, got some out-of-group attention (including my four #pman tweets :-) and has retained a small, hard-core membership.

My bitter, cynical hope had been to demonstrate that the conversation switched from a small Romanian-language conversation about the actual protest events to a self-congratulation festival in the English-language twittersphere. Good thing we’ve got data to prove me wrong. Using Daniel Steinbock’s kickass tool TagCrowd, I was able to generate word frequencies for each day’s worth of data. This is a fun hack - unless you remove “stop words” from your data, you’ll get a frequency map telling you that people on Twitter were talking about “I” “me” and “here”. I fed Daniel’s tool a custom English-language stoplist… and his had a Romanian one built in!

On the first day of the tag’s use, the top twenty terms were moldova, rt, chisinau, protesters, live, ro, moscovici, twitter, tv, md, revolution, police, protests, piata, anti-communist, voronin, fost, protest, protv, romania. “rt” - which appears in 908 of the day’s 3820 tweets - is short for “retweet” - it’s a sign that a poster is quoting someone else. On Tuesday, a lot of the tweeting was amplifying reports from people in the square, and “rt” was a common term. By Wednesday, it dropped to fourth in the frequency tables, and to 29th by Thursday - something is clearly changing in the nature of the discourse. Across the board, we see “rt” appear in 1932 of over 32k tweets, or roughly 6% of all posts. On Tuesday, when people were desperate for on-the-ground news, it appeared in almost 24%.

TagCrowd for tweets containing #pman on 4/8/2009

I’d expected to see “twitter” emerge as one of the most popular terms by Wednesday or Thursday, and to see the conversation shift into English. Twitter ranks third in term incidence on Wednesday and there’s a bit more English in the word cloud. But by Thursday, Twitter’s out of the top 20 entirely and “comunistii” ranks behind Moldova and Chisinau. So yes, the conversation on Wednesday - the busiest day with over 1,000 authors - included lots of non-Moldovans. But the conversation quickly shifted back to the political standoff. (The word clouds are really interesting, but take up a lot of space - the downloadable data includes the 40 most frequent words for each day.)

Evgeny made the point that tracking the number of Twitter users in Moldova (reported to be under 200) doesn’t adequately show the impact of social media - how do we know if a tweet is reproduced on a blog or on Facebook? What’s the interaction between different types of social media? I don’t have a good answer - I think Evgeny’s right, but I also think it’s a bit of a cop-out. But I thought it would be interesting to see what URLs were referenced the most often in the #pman tweets. Here’s the top ten, plus their incidence:

92 http://revolutiemoldova.islandjewelers.us/ (Romanian-lanaguage blog)
74 http://redkokane.blogspot.com/ (Romanian-lanaguage blog)
59 http://tinyurl.com/dlwvtb (http://www.imarin.net/2009/04/moldova-revolution-2009.html, Romanian-lanaguage blog)
58 http://tinyurl.com/c (probably a broken version of the following URL)
57 http://tinyurl.com/c6zckl (http://pmfu.blogspot.com/2009/04/tinerii-arestati-in-chisinau.html)
51 http://www.pldm.md/ (Party site for the Liberal Democrats in Moldova)
50 http://www.antena3.ro/live.php (Streaming TV in Romanian)
49 http://www.azi.md/ro/story/2146 (Romanian-language news story)
47 http://tinyurl.com/c88rd5 (Romanian-language news story)
45 http://tinyurl.com/cda895 (English translation of a Romanian blog post)

Stories on CNN, the BBC, the New York Times and our battles over whether or not the events of the week are a twitter revolution, an old fashioned revolution or a riot do make it onto the list of URLs, but they don’t rank very highly - the #pman tag is mostly being used by Romanian speakers to share information, both through Romanian news sites and independent blogs. Again, my cynicism is shattered.

There’s a lot more I’d like to do with this data. I think it would be great to do some social graphs and try to track the spread of information. I’d love to work with a Romanian speaker to understand who was seeding and who was amplifying information in this space, and to look at the accuracy of reportorial information on the day of the protests. I plan on capturing data sets for some related tags and keywords - moldova, moldavia, chisinau, voronin, comunistii - and I’d be grateful for suggestions for keywords to study, especially Russian terms.

I’m most interested in comparing this tag to some other Twitter-reported stories. I’m hoping I can retrieve data on #Madagascar before Twitter expires it’s archives - while the Twitterverse was much less attuned to the tensions and coup in that country, it might provide an interesting contrasting case.

What I’m hoping to do - with my colleagues at Berkman and with anyone who wants to join the conversation - is try to figure out a set of techniques and tools we can apply to any breaking events on Twitter. As news breaks, we’ve got the opportunity to capture these conversations and study them at length - seems like an opportunity we should take advantage of and get better at.

Please feel free to download and play with the data yourself. It includes the full set of tweets, the tweets broken up per day, the top authors per day, the most popular terms per day, the top authors through the whole set, and the most popular URLs referenced in the set of tweets. Would love to hear what you come up with as well.

I’ve just ordered Dambisa Moyo’s new book, “Dead Aid“. For the past couple of weeks, Moyo has been on a full-scale media blitz, talking with Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, trading quips with Stephen Colbert, chatting with Forbes and lunching with the Financial Times.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to get more than the basics from these interviews - Moyo is accomplished, extremely smart, has extensive experience with African finance, and argues that aid has been a very bad thing for Africa thus far. It wasn’t until I got to hear an hour-long interview of Moyo by Tom Ashbrook on On Point that I got a more complete understanding of her views. I came away from that experience agreeing with her on many points, and violently disagreeing on others. An interview in Guernica, forwarded by my friend Nathan, helped me put the finger on what I think she misses, which I’ll explain here.

Moyo isn’t the first person to critique aid as ineffective, insulting or corrupting. William Easterly offers a thorough and sometimes devastating critique in “The White Man’s Burden“, looking both at failed institutions and the good intentions that encourage their support. She’s not the first African to take a crack at the argument either. Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan journalist, has been railing against aid for years now, picking a fight on the TED Africa stage with Bono and dismissing international aid efforts in a memorable interview with Der Spiegel. But Moyo’s worth listening to, because her argument is a bit more careful than Mwenda’s, and comes from a deeply informed perspective.

She is careful to distinguish between emergency assistance and systematic development aid - Mwenda found himself gently smacked down at TED by former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who told a harrowing story about saving her sister’s life during the Biafran war. “When someone is saving a life, you don’t care that it’s aid - you want the person to be alive.” Bilateral and multilateral aid for long-term economic development is Moyo’s target, and it’s a better target than emergency food aid, disaster aid or medical aid designed to prevent the spread of infectious diseases.

Moyo argues that aid is a corrupting influence on governments because it’s easy money. Governments that have to provide social services by taxing their citizens are more likely to be accountable to them than those that rely on oil profits or aid, both forms of (comparatively) easy money. As an international financeer, Moyo would like to see governments go through the difficult process of floating international bonds to raise money for infrastructure projects - the process forces governments to be more open and transparent, and probably leads to better governance. (It’s rarely discussed that Moyo’s employer, Goldman Sachs, is in the business of floating such bonds, or that her role within GS is to sell these securities. I note this not because I think Moyo is doing anything unethical, more to point out that she walks her talk.)

I’m with her so far, though I agree with Paul Collier that her timing stinks - the capital markets are probably closed to African states for some time to come, which is a shame as the continent is projected to grow this year. And I agree with her on several other important points. Moyo talks about the psychologically corrosive nature of aid, and the danger that if the continent is seen as an aid recipient, it will slow investment. I agree entirely that trade is more important than aid to the continent, and I think she’s wise to advise people who care about Africa to consider supporting microfinance projects… though I’m not confident that microfinance is going to help build the infrastructure many African nations so desperately need.

But Moyo has a special hatred for aid that I don’t fully understand or accept. Not only is she skeptical about its benefits - she seems to draw a bright line between international aid and government corruption. I’m actually fine with that line being drawn - what I don’t get is why she can’t acknowledge that corruption can be a massive problem in African states interacting with the free market as well.

Jake Whitney in Guernica tries to pin Moyo down on this point, asking whether more kleptocratic rulers like Mugabe wouldn’t steal tax revenues as easily as aid revenues. Moyo counters that the population would rise up instead and overthrow dictators stealing tax dollars:

Guernica: So the only reason his government is still standing is because of aid, you’ve said. Let’s take that one step further. If aid were to be cut off, would you expect the people to just simultaneously rise up and throw him out of office or…

Dambisa Moyo: Yeah, they’d rise up. Look at Madagascar. Last Wednesday, there was a coup there. As a matter of fact, there’s been four coups in Africa in the past six months. Each situation is different, but in Madagascar, some aid money had been cut and the government was not investing in the domestic citizenry or even paying the army. So the army staged a coup.

Guernica: It happened quickly? Not a prolonged struggle with a lot of bloodshed?

Dambisa Moyo: Yes, [in Madagascar] it was quick. There was some bloodshed in some of these [coups]. But Mugabe has been smart by keeping the army on his side. If you feed the army, they won’t overthrow you.

As it happens, I’ve been following the situation in Madagascar pretty closely, and I haven’t seen a single account of events that resembles Moyo’s explanation of the situation. The account that I’ve found most convincing puts the blame not on aid, but on corruption and free market investment. The change of power wasn’t an army coup, as Moyo states, but a popular uprising led by the mayor of Antananarivo. The mayor and his supporters had a number of grievances with the president, but one major concern was a pending deal to lease huge amounts of agricultural land to Daewoo. Some Malagasy citizens saw the president’s purchase of an expensive executive jet as evidence that Daewoo had bribed the government to sign an otherwise unpalatable deal. That deal has now been scrapped, and the country is still struggling with questions of who’s in charge - so much for Moyo’s assertion that the months of political uncertainty have been “quick”.

I don’t really mind that Moyo’s not up to speed on all the details of the Madagascar strife - it’s not been well or widely reported. But I worry that her anti-aid, pro-market bias, as expressed in her misinterpretation, leads her to be “over-optimistic“, as Paul Collier (who taught Moyo both at Harvard and Oxford) characterizes her views. Collier believes that Moyo overfocuses on aid, which he describes as “a sideshow” in our debates about African development. And he wonders whether Moyo’s too optimistic about for-profit development, whether investment comes from China or international financial markets.

While I think increased trade is the way forward for Africa, it’s a terrible mistake to assume that private-sector investment will somehow be less subject to corruption, mismanagent, theft and fraud than international aid. Bribery is so rampant in the mining and energy sectors that a partnership of NGOs (those damned NGOs!) have teamed up on a project called “Publish What You Pay” to increase transparency in those sectors. The recent Siemens bribery scandal should remind us that some companies bribe so routinely that they’ve got entire departments dedicated to filling suitcases with cash. Now that’s easy money.

So is Moyo wrong to target aid? Maybe not. Africa needs trade and investment to build the infrastructure the continent lacks, generate jobs and move to a paradigm where government spending is based on taxation, not on external aid. A focus on African poverty and disease probably damages the climate for investment.

But pulling the plug on aid alone isn’t going to do it - kleptocratic governments are already figuring out how to tap Chinese investors, global oil companies and Bavarian engineers for bribes. Here’s my less inflamatory and significantly less viral suggestion: Africa needs good journalists, citizen and profesional, who work tirelessly for transparency. It’s impossible for citizens to hold their governments accountable unless someone is watching their interactions with donors, investors, lenders and international businesses closely. And if you’re looking for places on the continent to invest, the most important map may well be a map of world press freedom, not one of oil or mineral reserves.

(Needless to say, there’s a risk to writing a post like this before reading her book. If she’s got a chapter on press and transparency, or if she’s sufficiently critical of private sector corruption, I promise to eat my words here on the blog.)