I’m teaching my first class at MIT this spring, a “special topics” class at the Media Lab. (This is evidently how new classes get launched at MIT -they’re “special” the first year before they become official. All that means, I think, is that you need my permission to take it.) If you’re a student at MIT, or another Boston/Cambridge institution, hope you’ll consider joining us.

The class is my attempt to bring a “journalism” class to the Media Lab while avoiding the journalist/citizen media distinction. (This certainly isn’t a first for the lab – Andy Lippman and Walter Bender have done great teaching around newsgathering and journalism in the past.) With advice from Clay Shirky and other friends I consulted, I’m asking students to think very little about how paper and broadcast newsrooms currently operate and instead treat newsgathering and reporting as an engineering challege. How do we know what happens in the world? How do we verify information about what happened? How do we understand what events are important and which we can ignore? How do we make the important relevant and interesting?

To make these practical questions, we’re doing eight weekly exercises, each of which involves reporting a different type of story using different media. The final project involves designing a tool, technique or technology to make reporting one or more of these stories easier to accomplish… and part of the project involves persuading another student to use the new tech to report. The goal is to create some interesting stories, all of which will live on the web, and design some tools that might take on new life in newsrooms, in the hands of bloggers or other civic actors.

I’m excited to get back into the classroom and to see how the legendary inventiveness of Media Lab students – and the creativity of other students at MIT and within the Boston academic community – applies itself to some of the newsgathering questions I’m most intrigued by. First class is 2pm, Wednesday, February 8th, in E15-363 – that’s a classroom in the “old building” of the MIT Media Lab. Maybe I’ll see some of you there…

Some notes from day 2 of the Microsoft Research Social Media Symposium:

My attempts to transcribe Wael Abbas’s talk about media and protest in Egypt prior to the Arab Spring.

Becky Hurwitz has been active in the Occupy movement in New York City, and offered reflections on how Occupy is developing and testing technology for protest. She invites us to use the people’s mic, a technology created to ensure that participants in Occupy General Assemblies can hear speakers, despite police bans on amplification. We dutifully echo her in a mic check and in repeating a few words of her talk, one three word phrase at a time.

The people’s mic is effective and accessible – anybody can use it, regardless of whether you have technical expertise or money. It’s a rhetorical leveler – when you need to speak in three word phrases, you can’t dazzle people with complex arguments. It’s an empathic technology, she argues: you are asked to repeat things even when you disagree with them. And it allows processes to be collectively enforced – people who speak out of turn will cause the mic to fizzle out, as people refuse to amplify their statements.

Attempts to use different forms of amplification to share General Assemblies were often less successful than this simple, low-tech solution. A system allowed GAs to be simulcast in Spanish, and Becky tells us that it was useful, but was rented, expensive and ended up being discontinued once funding ran out. Attempts to broadcast proceedings on low-power FM were technically successful, but required a three person team to manage mics and transmitters. Attempts to stream via smartphone failed when it became many people didn’t have smart phones, didn’t want to listen to streamed audio for hours, and disliked the latency of streaming systems.

Other technologies have experienced stumbling blocks as well. The Tech Ops group at Wall Street has tracked media streams coming out of a thousand other Occupy movements. There are at least seven aggregators of these feeds, but they’re not very popular. It’s hard to follow the conversations taking place in other movements, and other than the effect of showing how widespread a movement is, it’s unclear that an aggregator is the best way to share this data.

She closes by examining technology developed to help people when they get arrested. Several smartphone applications have been designed to provide a “panic button” which sends a pre-programmed SMS when someone triggers the alert. The idea is that a person is supposed to press the button just before they are arrested, so allies can provide legal services. These systems have been obsoleted, Becky argues, by lawyers and sharpies. Lawyers shared the phone number of the National Legal Guild, and people wrote the numbers on their hands so they could call the service when they were put under arrest. And it turns out that yelling your name and birthdate to a lawyer standing by as you are arrested is really helpful, as those lawyers can act as witnesses to your arrest and testify in hopes of getting you released.

Development of technologies in a need-based space instead of a commercial space can follow an interesting trajectory – an idea that fails to get traction dies rapidly. In a commercial setting, you’d likely iterate and try to improve on a failed project. In non-commercial space, you rarely do. Becky wonders, “how do you commit to ideas without commercial reasons to explore and refine them?” Occupy raises other interesting questions as well: “How do you create end products that users can control, like the people’s mic, where people can turn off their amplifier when people defy process? How does occupy become a loud voice on existing platforms like Facebook, Twitter and people’s email inboxes?”

Zeynep Tufekci believes we’re seeing electronic communications usher in a moment where old power and new power are coming together. This syncretic power is complex and hard to understand, but we can think of it in terms of understanding who controls the power of attention.

In the Arab Spring, which she’s been studying closely, understanding the power of attention means looking at traditional media like Al Jazeera and the New York Times, at the algorithmic power of Twitter trending topics, at networked activists and their sympathizers, at new media curators and bridge figures, and at the network power of governments and political powers.

If we want to understand attention, we need to understand focusers, people capable of transferring lots of attention. We should look at the most linked users of Weibo, the thousands of followers of Wael Abbas’s Twitter account. These are some of the building blocks of a new filtering system. We’ve needed filters to cope with the massive amount of information created from well before the Internet. While Clay Shirky’s observation that we don’t have information overload, just filter failure, is legitimate, events like the Arab Spring give us a chance to better understand what’s powering these filters and how they work.

Zeynep tells us the story of Rami Jarrar, a Syrian dissident who tweeted under the pseudonym “AlexanderPageSY”. He’s a Syrian businessman who lived in Damascus and was educated in Britain. He writes about Syria in beautiful English, and under his pseudonym, became something of a spokesman for the anti-Assad movement in Syria. Zeynep identifies him as a bridge figure, but notes that he chose to tweet only in English, translating a great deal of Arabic content into English for non-Syrian audiences.

Somehow, his real identity was discovered. He got a phone call from someone sympathetic within the Assad government who warned him to flee immediately. He left within an hour with his wife and six-month old daughter, heading first to Lebanon and then to Cairo. He was likely one step ahead of arrest or death, Zeynep tells us, given the experience of other activists arrested by the regime.

The next chapter of Rami’s story came when he tried to travel to Doha, Qatar to attend a conference. On entering the country, the border guard decided that Rami’s passport was out of order and decided to deport him. Deportation doesn’t send you back to where you’d flown in from – Cairo – but to your home country. Rami tweeted about his predicament – he was about to be deported “home” to a country where he would likely be arrested, disappeared or killed due to an inflexible bureaucracy.

A 21st century network of concerned Twitter followers emerged to address the Kafkaesque 20th century problem of bureaucracy. But the solution was ultimately a 17th century one – A Syrian living in Lebanon, who tweets as @LeShaque, knew a sheik and was able to get him up in the middle of the night to intervene in the solution. “We needed a 17th century solution – a sheik – so we used a 21st century solution to get one.” This seems ironic. “We had mobilized Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera Arabic, media people around the world, but the only guy who could actually get him out was a sheik.” Fortunately, the network found someone with the connections and the guts to call a Qatari sheik in the middle of the night and got him to intervene.

“The 21st century network worked until the last mile, but then we needed to reach old powers.” Media activism, Zeynep speculates, is most powerful when it hacks the system and contacts the old powers. She offers the similar example of Mona El Tahawy, arrested in Egypt. She tweeted about her arrest and activated a network, but ultimately, she was released from custody (where she’d been beaten and injured) because the Twitter network reached Anne Marie Slaughter, who contacted friends in the US State Department who intervened on her behalf.

We’re seeing the emergence of micro-celebrity citizen journalist activists, like “Angry Arabiya”, know to her parents as Zainab Al-Khawaja. She’s been a brave and outspoken critic of the government in Bahrain, facing arrest and abuse. Recently, she helped stop the movement of riot police into a Manama neighborhood by appearing in an abaya (which Zeynep identifies as giving female activists an interesting new form of power, exercising the image of being conservative and observant) and blocking the procession of police vehicles. She resisted arrest, and the police weren’t initially able to arrest her, as they lacked enough female officers to detain her. Bahraini officials, Zeynep tells us, debated arresting her and concluded that they didn’t want the pictures of her being dragged off to appear in the New York Times.

Microcelebrities are learning how to exert their power, to stop the movement of troops and to help counter torture when they’re in custody. It’s far from the power to end police states, but it’s an interesting new capability and a sign of things to come.

Danny O’Brien of Committee to Protect Journalists titles his talk “Public Private Secret Alone”. He suggests that, contrary to many people’s view of lessening privacy, we may be entering a golden age of privacy. We’re starting to codify what should be public and what should be private, what’s shareable and what’s sacrosanct. This is at least as much a social process as a technical one, and Danny thinks that we’re all now learning to use the right “register” in speaking in online spaces.

Putting his tongue firmly in cheek, Danny declares that he’s likely the first person to have thought of the distinctions between personal and public speech, blogging on the topic in 2004. “As a blogger, I looked at the literature on Technorati, and it seemed to be an open space. I assume I was probably the first person to write about this.” As many have observed, we speak differently in public and private spaces, employing different registers. In a private register, you might say, “I think that guy’s a dick”. In public, “I respectfully disagree that guy” and people map it backwards to say “I guess Danny thinks that guy’s a dick.”

The privacy embarrassments we’ve all been seing come from having private online speech lifted out of context and brought to the public. When sources ask journalists to go off the record, they’re not saying “You can’t report any of this” – they’re saying “I’m going to speak in a private register, and you must translate into public register before repeating this.”

As television becomes more all-pervasive, Danny speculates, people are learning how to drop into public register very fluently. Turn on a camera, and they speak like spokespeople. Of course, what makes reality TV work is broadcasting the private register, which is still transgressive and exciting.

Eight years ago, Danny tells us he predicted that the private register would gain a new foothold. Of course, a few months later, thefacebook.com came into being.

Systems like Facebook have the potential to bring private conversations into public, but there are technical and social protections. Friends understand that there should be rules for sharing. Oddly, though, we trust these very personal conversations to a corporate entity we have no personal relationship with.

What’s common to many of these tools is that they’re terrible at search. It’s very difficult to cut through the waves of data on Twitter and Facebook and search for something specific. Ask the people who engineer technology for these companies and they’ll feign embarrassment about the quality of search, but it’s a conscious decision: they want to preserve the context of conversations and make it harder to yank statements out of context. (He offers a strange aside on David Bowie’s teeth. If you see David Bowie perform, and you’re used to slick nightclub singers, all you can focus on are his teeth and how awful they are… or were, as he finally jad them fixed. Search is David Bowie’s terrible teeth when you look at Twitter or Facebook…)

Danny declares Twitter as the most successful at letting people speak in private voice in public space. It’s become quite common for celebrities to swear on Twitter. It creates the idea of intimacy with celebrities in the conversation, and people appear not to be shocked by the tone of the speech.

The rise of commentariat, the people who comment on published documents, forces another clash of registers. The quality of newspaper comments is often discussed in terms of the values of real names versus anonymity versus pseudonymity – Danny suggests that it’s a clash of registers. When people talk about the nastiness of online comments, part of what they’re commenting on is on hearing private register in public spaces. Fortunately, some newspapers are learning where to draw firm lines – fortunately, the New York Times doesn’t allow commentaries on obituaries, for example.

Moving into the realm of the secret: Danny observes that high school teachers realize they’re sufficiently public figures that they take most conversations offline, rather than risk recontextualization and register clash. Yes, there’s the danger of the private becoming very public, as in hacker attacks where Lulzboat took Stratfor’s corporate communication public. But in some ways, what’s even more uncomfortable is the information we thought was purely ours alone, like our online purchasing behavior, becoming public, as in situations like Facebook Beacon.

He closes with his predictions for 2012:

- more swearing
- panicked actions to defend the secret and unrevealed
- growing fluency in negotiating the public register
- more suicides

On this last point, he notes that South Korea – which often precedes the US in online behavior – closed down internet freedom in the wake of pop stars committing suicide over online disclosures of speech. If Rebecca Black committed suicide over what people say about her online, he speculates, we’d see a chill on online speech in the US.

Wael Abbas himself to the crowd at Microsoft’s Social Media Symposium saying, “I’m just a blogger.” Yeah, and Clay Shirky, who introduces him, is just some bald dude. Here’s my attempt to transcribe Wael’s talk.

I want to talk about social media in Egypt from 2004 through the revolution and why we needed to use social media. In our country where we’re told we have freedom of speech, where they’ve convinced us we have independent media, we weren’t being told the whole truth. The media is not covering everything.

In 2004, we started seeing movements calling for change in Egypt like Kefaya calling for Mubarak to be impeached, for Gamal, his son, not to follow his father. They were getting coverage in foreign media – BBC, Al Jazeera – but not in the domestic media. That foreign coverage wasn’t reaching ordinary people.

I was blogging in Arabic slang because I wanted to reach Egyptian youth. I believeed that these guys were the ones who would make a change. So I used language they would understand… including lots of profanity. I avoided the language of journalists and scholars and I was reaching a good audience.

Before 2004, I was anonymous, posting to newsgroups. But with the rise of Kefaya, I picked up my camera and was photographing movements and talking about how big these demonstrations were, beyond the three lines a demonstration would get in domestic media.

Wael shows us pictures of a demonstration against the Gaza war in 2006 to show the size and impact of these movements. “The police were using techniques including plainclothes operators. Foreign media thinks that protesters are clashing with one another, but it’s actually protesters clashing with police.”

One of the biggest movements asking for change in Egypt were the judges, who were calling for judicial independence. Bloggers were great supporters of the judges, as were the Muslim Brotherhood. (We see a video where police use force to control a demonstration.)

(Video footage of the Kefaya movement in 2005 – “At that time, you did not see things like this on TV”.)

It wasn’t only about the activists or politicians – we covered workers’ strikes because we believe strikes and sit ins play a big role for change in Egypt. (Footage of a demonstration by garbage collectors.) In Egypt, no one would care about covering garbage collectors on strike.

Maybe you heard about the Mahana general strike of 2008? (A video that shows the living conditions of a Mahana worker.) Video like this helps people realize why people are protesting and why they have those demands.

Bloggers were part of the movements, starting movements on their on or reporting on movements for change. Here’s a demonstration that was very unexpected – it was a flash mob. The organizers didn’t trust the media to cover it, but alerted the bloggers so they could cover the events.)

When the border opened with Gaza, I was able to get in with a camera and document the living conditions there, including people warming themselves with open fires. When the borders opened, we used social media to document the smuggling of essential goods.

Bloggers even covered the US presidential elections. (A video of a Mexican-American immigrant to Egypt who’s happy about Obama’s candidacy.) This taxi driver was happy because his children would be able to run for president in America.

Bloggers organized demonstrations as well, including one for Christian/Muslim unity in Egypt – no other political groups did this. I guess that’s when they realized bloggers were dangerous: when we started organizing protests instead of drinking Nescafe in our pajamas.

You may think the first Tahrir Square protests were January 25, 2011, but here are photos of the sit in in Tahrir we organized in 2006. They used firehoses to prevent us from sitting on the ground, and turned off the lights, but we slept for the night in the garden. This was a movement organized entirely by the bloggers.

We made fun of them, too. It’s a traditional song, it talks about how sitting on the floor is lovely and sitting on chairs is not healthy. I used it to make fun of President Mubarak, because it was forbidden to talk about Mubarak’s health – journalists were sent to prison for writing about Mubarak’s health. I made the song about Mubarak being unhealthy because he’d been sitting too long.

They used to scare us back then, saying talking about the President’s health was affecting the stock exchange and the economy, and we shouldn’t talk about it.

Using video meant that television stations could take our video and borrow it – here’s video shown on Al Hurra, the American-backed TV station, using video from bloggers. Bloggers became a source of information for international news agencies and television channels. Some borrowed our material and others just stole it. (Video of an Al Jazeera video, retitled “Al Jazeera stole my video.”)

Other people started bringing us video. Here’s footage of a train crash, shot by a bystander – he brought it to me so a wider audience could see it. This happened before CNN iReport, when the network started asking people to contribute their footage.

Some of the videos were of taboo nature, and could not be aired on traditional media. People shared the video because they saw a problem that needed to be solved. (Video of women being sexually harassed.) People shared this video with us because they wanted people to pay attention to this issue and look for solutions.

We had video on rigging of elections. No matter how powerful a blogger is, he can’t be all over the country to watch the polls. But people would send us footage. Here’s a video of someone taking ballots and throwing them out, unaware that someone was taking video of him.

In Egypt, we all talked about torture taking place in police stations. We made fun of it. But you can imagine the shock people felt when they saw video of it. (A video of police torture.) People were very uncomfortable when we started showing videos. It coincided with videos and photos leaked from Iraq of Abu Ghraib. But in these videos, it was Egyptians torturing Egyptians, so people started asking questions. These videos had been available for years, but they were of a taboo nation and no one wanted to get in fights with the authorities.

We started getting videos from other countries – here’s a video of torture from a police station in Kuwait. Here’s an Indian worker in Kuwait being humiliated in a police station. Thank god, we were able to break this taboo in Egypt and were able to put an officer on trial for the first time. Here’s an officer who sodomized a bus driver who’d been taking into a police station and video’d it.

He was only sentenced for three years, but it set a new precedent. Wael started receiving threats via the phone that he would be sodomized like the man in the police station. Egyptian politicians began publicly accusing Abbas of crimes, of converting to Christianity, of being homosexual. I was able to fight back on my blog.

I had a problem with YouTube – YouTube removed some of my torture videos. (CNN report on Wael being silenced by YouTube.) YouTube claimed I was not providing enough context for the videos I was posting, and that the content was not appropriate from the YouTube audience. I got a lot of support from US bloggers, from CNN and from Fox News. People asked, “Why did you post these on YouTube? Why not put them on your own hosting site?” I believe YouTube is a platform where everyone can post everything. According to Ethan’s Cute Cat theory, people go to YouTube to watch funny cats – let’s get their attention and get them to watch something else. On YouTube, these can get a greater audience than on a website specialized about torture. It helps get the attention of people who did not know about these issues.

Anil Dash asks about using titles for videos in English. Wael admits that he used Arabic for some titles, English for others depending on what audience he thought he wanted to reach.

At this point, Clay and Anil begin asking questions about how Wael curated videos – Wael tells us that the videos that received the largest audience were the ones about sexual harassment – Wael speculates that it’s because they were about sex.

The consequence for posting videos was that Wael began to be stopped and searched when he left the country. He was no longer allowed to travel with a laptop, CDs, DVDs or flash drives – he needed to upload presentations and show them online.

It’s clear that Wael could talk for much longer, but the session turns into a Q&A at this point.)

Question: How much did social media matter in the Egyptian revolution.
Wael: Social media is a tool. But revolution is the decision of many people. Once we decided to have a revolution, once people decided to stay in the square, social media was a helpful tool to call for support, ask lawyers for help. I will not give social media all the credit, nor will I take away all the credit from social media.

danah boyd: How will social media help in the elections?
A: We’re not beyond the revolution. We now have a military junta, and people are being shot by armed officers, defending their interests. The army is protecting American, Israeli, Saudi interests in the country. They are protecting their own interests: the military aid from the US. The army is building factories and roads, and they’re not paying taxes, electricity or water. The labor for these projects are soldiers acting as slave labor.
Q: Are there ways to use the technology to increase communications amongst citizens?
A: We’re trying, but now there’s a war in social media itself. Once they realized we were powerful, the authorites took to social media. They are attacking the revolution, asking for stability, security and for the revolution to end. We are also fighting traditional media, which is still central, and in the hands of the regime and pro-regime businessmen. They are all attacking the revolution and our image.

Q: How did you grow an audience for your blog? How did you grow your audience?
A: I never studied the topic – I simply did what I needed to do. I put links in forums, used chat lists on Yahoo, send links to new posts. I began posting on Facebook and Twitter once people started using them.

Gilad Lotan: How dangerous is it for people to support you in Egypt, to connect to your social media or to like your videos?
A: Some people clear their caches, but it’s not really that dangerous – they are after us, not after people watching our material. But they gave orders to cybercafes not to allow people to look at torture videos. But it’s only dangerous when you take to the streets.

After weeks of unseasonable temperatures, western MA finally got some snow yesterday morning, just enough to make me miss my train to New York City. So I was late for Microsoft’s Social Computing Symposium at ITP at NYU, missing my friend Dina Mehta’s talk. So I’ve been thwarted in my ambitions of blogging all the conversations taking place here, and I’ll instead offer some snippets of talks I caught.

Jenna Burrell studies cybercafes in west Africa, particularly in Ghana. So she was very interested when a wave of stories about “the dark side of the information age” reported on corrupt recyclers selling containers of used computers to unscrupulous dealers in Ghana and Nigeria, who dumped the machines into local waste facilities, causing serious environmental harm.

This didn’t read quite right to her, as she’s been studying “the career of the obsolete computer in Ghana”. The computers in most Ghanaian cybercafes are reused computers, Pentium 3 or 4 series. They frequently come with property tags – she shows us a CRT monitor with tags identifying it as the property of the US Environmental Protection Agency. While there’s probably a fascinating story about how that monitor made it from the EPA to an Accra cybercafe, she makes the point that it’s a working monitor – it’s been reused, not recycled. It’s not in a dump, it’s in active use.

There’s not a direct channel from the port to the dump site, she suggests. Second hand computers work their way through the economy. The best used computer dealers identify lots of machines with the same configuration and appearance so they can sell higher quality, tested goods to businesses and cybercafes. Other dealers work on the lower end, selling individual, unmatched computers. The machines that don’t work at all are sold to scrap metal dealers, mostly members of the Dagomba tribe, a northern tribe that tends to be economically disadvantaged in Accra.

Do computers end up in the dump? Yes. But it’s not as simple as the dumping of ewaste in Ghana, where waste is being inflicted on poor people. It’s people’s desire for computers, a legitimate desire, that creates a complex commercial ecosystem.

Samantha Doerr helps us understand what the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit does. The answer: they take down botnets, and they spend a lot of time fighting child sexual exploitation.

In the time before the internet, she tells us, child porn was not very common. You might be a creep, but it’s very hard to find other creeps to share pictures with. While she’s careful not to condemn the Internet, Doerr notes that child porn is getting much more common, as well as more extreme and violent. A man was recently arrested in Seattle for posession of more than a million sexual images of children. It’s becoming more common to find images of infants of toddlers… because they can’t tell anyone about the abuse they’re experiencing.

Doerr’s strategy is to make it more difficult to share child porn. Her chief weapon is Microsoft’s Photo DNA technology. Photo DNA creates a hash of an image that can match other images even when the format changes or the image is being resized. Her team has identified some of the worst child porn images, ones where the children exploited have been identified, are confirmed as being under 13 and are being abused. Microsoft now checks these hash signatures against photos uploaded to Skydrive, indexed on Bing or transmitted by Hotmail, and Facebook is announcing adoption of the same possibility/

Doerr wonders whether we can win against child pornography. Microsoft recognizes the complexity of the challenge, and has just issued an RFP for research on the topic. Her goal is to change the dynamics of the equation. Child trafficking is on the rise because it’s currently more economical than selling drugs – if we can make child exploitation more difficult and less profitable, that would be a win.

Del Harvey has built the safety team at Twitter, working since 2008 to eliminate spam and other forms of abuse from the service, while trying to respect user needs. Working on the front lines of the service, she has a unique perspective on “unintended usage and unexpected consequences”, or as she puts it, “users do the darndest things”.

Many of the behaviors we associate with twitter – retweeting, hashtags, @reply messages – were not created by Twitter’s programmers, but were emergent behaviors created by Twitter users. When users start doing something novel on Twitter, it’s her job to look closely at the new behavior and ask, “Should you be doing that? How are you doing that?”

Where this job gets truly tricky is when users engage in behavior likely to get them suspended by Twitter’s automated algorithms. If you message someone multiple times, are you engaging with the, or harassing them? It might be one thing if someone messages you a dozen times, and another if they message a celebrity a dozen times – a form of showing their devotion and fandom. Some people send themselves multiple @replies, using Twitter as a form of bookmarking.

The easiest way to eliminate spam is to identify spammy URLs and block people who retweet them. But this works very badly when people retweet spam and add snarky comments to it. “Nothing pisses off a user as much as complaining about spam and suspending them for spamming”

Why do some users take all the trending topics and put them into sentences? Del isn’t sure, but it’s become a pretty popular practice, and it makes it unwise to block people who simply use lots of TTs in a post. Sometimes her team is able to anticipate behaviors – it seemed likely that people would try to report users as spammers to silence them. (Twitter has systems in place that makes this unlikely to be effective.) But what do you do with users telling Twitter to report their accounts as spammers, a behavior that’s unexpected and inexplicable.

Del’s talk gets a lot of laughs of the “users do the darnedest things” variety, but there’s a serious message. Her job, as she thinks of it, is to “try to figure out when users are experiencing unintended negative consequences” and mediate the consequences.

In an Ignite talk, Alex Leavitt offers a great example of the ways in which media is moving from individual platforms to existing in ecosystems. He introduces us to Hatsume Miku, an open source fandom and culture based around a vocal synthesizer program. The character of Hatsume Miku is a teal-haired anime popstar, whose songs are written by an army of fans who record her music, build complex music videos for her, and throw concerts in the physical world featuring the best of those videos. It’s hard to understand the sheer scale of the phenomenon – Leavitt notes that Hatsume Miku just appeared in Japanese Playboy, both in drawn form and as the photographs of a leading live action Hatsume Miku cosplayer.

The video system, built around a program called Miku Miku Dance, is one of the most stunning aspects of the phenomenon – Leavitt tells us it’s the #1 3D software package in Japan. Point a camera at you and your friends and you’re converted into Anime characters which move their mouths and limbs in sync with your actions.

The ecosystem exists through an integrated commenting and attribution system that allows people to publish on appropriate platforms, like YouTube, while ensuring followers of the community know about the individual publications.

Always the provocateur, Clay Shirky is predicting the demise of another industry: street level retail. His argument begins by noting the similarity of streetscapes in New York City, a repeating loop of drug stores, mobile phone shops and banks. As higher end businesses move to selling primarily on the web, lower-margin businesses move into retail space, a process that can’t continue forever.

Shirky suggests that New York made two major errors in repurposing urban space. The first was in insisting that loft space, used to manufacture products like belt buckles, must continue to be zoned industrial, just in case the belt buckle industry returned to the city. It took thirty years, he notes, before New York loosened those restrictions and let first artists, then ordinary people live in loft space. The second transformation has been the disappearance of the working waterfront. For years, New York was a center of global shipping. But in the container age, that shipping has moved far south of the city, and New York took a long time to realize that infrastructure dedicated to shipping needs to be repurposed into waterfront open and green space.

If street level retail is dying (and here, I assume, Clay will write something at length making a compelling case for this, as his 5 minute version is pretty hasty), will we react quickly enough to fill the spaces? Clay remembers purchasing comics at his local comic shop. It wasn’t a great retail experience – the selection was small – but it was a great community experience, an opportunity to gather with other similarly oriented nerds. Can cities like New York figure out how to transform street level retail into street level community space?

Mimi Ito wants help solving the problems of education. She notes that there’s a 50% high school dropout rate for black and latino youth, and reminds us that this isn’t okay – it’s creating problems of social stratification and inequality that we’ll be facing for years.

The sort of folks in this meeting are the educational 1%. We are learning elites who know how to mobilize the internet and develop professional identities. To help students engage with education, we need to help them develop the same sort of skills we rely on.

Ito has been interviewing people who learn by exploring passions online. She tells us of a webcomics creator, who while he attended college, taught himself what he knew about creating comics from his online encounters. He discovered the medium online, developing a passion, and began learning to create by following tutorials and how-tos online. In the process, he connected with a community of the likeminded and passionate. Ito calls this “connected learning”, learning in which embracing your passions allows you to connect with others and learn with them.

The Internet has lowered barriers to acquiring knowledge and expertise, but kids often have not deciphered the puzzle. We need to build better platforms that connect people around interests. Ito suggests that while Facebook connects you with the people you went to school with and Twitter with the folks you wish you went to school with, we need infrastructure that connects you with the people you want to learn from or want to teach.

Andrés Monroy Hernandéz studies the use of social media in conflict situation. He’s especially focused on narcoviolence in his native Mexico, and notes that in the country, he’s seen increasing adoption of social media aligned with an increase in stressful situations. In cities like Monterrey, not only is drug violence an everday occurance that impacts bystanders, it’s a force so powerful, it’s driven traditional media away. Reporters will not cover drug violence for fear of being killed or kidnapped. As a result, people are using Twitter and Facebook to create immediate alerts of violence in specific cities and neighborhoods.

This means that when you leave your house for work in Monterrey, you check a twitter tag like #mtyfollow to ensure that there’s not an active “balacera” – shooting – on the path you plan to take. Hernandéz has collected 300,000 #mtyfollow tweets and shows us a quick overview – the language is a language of violence and warnings. It’s centered on a very few people who consistently tweet about breaking news and others who amplify the stories.

Those using social media to report narcoviolence in Monterrey face at least two enemies. The government is worried about control over information and recently jailed two Twitter users for allegedly spreading misinformation. The cartels themselves are killing people who are using social media to document their actions – he shows us a banner hung next to the head of a Twitter reporter, warning others not to use social media to track drug violence. Citizen responses are not totally impotent in the face of these attacks – a group called CIC is using Ushahidi to collect and track tweets, offering a graphical map of violence in the city and a portrait of life during wartime.

Vastly more good stuff that I was able to cover in one post. Looking forward to today’s talks (right after the one I give this morning…!)

Scholars of social media spend a lot of time studying Twitter. Twitter’s not the largest social network in the world – Facebook has at least twice as many users – but it’s massive and influential, particularly in the world of journalism, where smart practitioners have learned to report on stories using accounts from Twitter. And Twitter is something of a model organism for social media researchers. Most relationships and content on Twitter are public, while relationships and content on Facebook are often private. There’s an ecosystem of tools that use Twitter’s API to understand popular topics and networks of influence on Twitter, and countless research projects that use Twitter’s API to understand behavioral dynamics on social networks.

By contrast, there’s little scholarly research in English on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging network. (The top article on Google Scholar that comes up for a search on “twitter” has 637 cites. Top article for “sina weibo” has 9 cites.) The service is structurally similar to Twitter, with @usernames, hashtags, reposting, and URL shortening (using the t.cn site instead of t.co used by Twitter.) In one sense, the service is richer than Twitter, as posts can contain both 140 characters (which may contain significantly more information than 140 alphanumeric characters, as the 140 characters in Chinese are ideograms), and an embedded image or video. And Sina Weibo offers an API and supports an ecosystem of tools and applications that interact with Weibo data. Oh, and Sina Weibo has almost as many users as Twitter – 250 million in October 2011, as compared to roughly 300 million for Twitter at the end of 2011.

The obvious reason for the lack of English language research is that most English-speaking social media scholars don’t read Chinese very well. But this a lame excuse for ignoring a powerful media tool. John Kelly of Morningside Analytics doesn’t speak Persian, but he’s done groundbreaking research mapping links in the Iranian blogosphere. Colleagues at the Berkman Center are using Media Cloud (built by researchers who speak no Russian) to understand conversations taking place in Russian blogs versus those in state-influenced media. Language is a powerful, but not insurmountable, barrier to researching a media space. In both the cases I mention above, English-speaking researchers worked with translators to understand novel social media phenomena.

I sometimes wonder whether English-speaking scholars pay insufficient attention to Chinese social media due to an assumption that Chinese media has been censored to the point of sterility. I often speak about internet censorship, and American audiences in particular are quick to share their knowledge of the “great firewall”, the “fifty cent party” and other aspects of Chinese internet censorship. Because Chinese censorship has been widely reported in American media, I suspect many Americans know more about what’s not on the Chinese internet than what’s present. (David Talbot of Technology Review wrote an excellent article about “China’s Internet Paradox” which makes the case that the Chinese internet is freer and more complicated than most audiences think.)

One of the best ways to get a sense for the complexity of Sina Weibo is through WeiboScope, a tool created by Cedric Sam and colleagues at the University of Hong Kong. WeiboScope uses Sina Weibo’s API to collect posts from 200,000 Sina Weibo users. His sample is a subset of Sina Weibo’s most popular users, and contains only users who have at least 1000 followers. (His blog, the Rice Cooker, offers lots of details on building and deploying the system.) Taking advantage of the fact that many Sina Weibo posts include images, WeiboScope offers a visual version of Weibo “trending topics”, showing the images associated with the most retweeted posts.

A first glance at WeiboScope offers a sense for what’s hot in the Chinese internet. There’s lots of images of pop stars, and lots of pretty women showing off cleavage. Dig a bit further and there’s some hope for the xenophiles amongst us: internet memes that need to translation. Sam the Seagull – a bird who steals Doritos from an Aberdeen convenience store – has been kicking around the internet since at least 2007, and an animated GIF of the thieving bird is the second most popular post today. Other memes appear to be shared in realtime – this comparison of pollution in a Chinese city versus the skies above Australia featured on WeiboScope today, and also appeared on Reddit this morning.

Dig a bit deeper and there’s quite a bit of political content. Take this deeply disconcerting image:

The face of the mammarilly-enhanced cow is that of Niu Gensheng, CEO of Mengniu Dairy, one of the companies implicated in the 2008 Melamine scandal, where companies apparently added a toxic chemical to milk powder to increase protein content in their products. Mengniu recently revealed that some of their milk is testing positive for another toxin, apparently because cows were fed moldy feed. The company’s share price dropped 24% on this news today, knocking more than $1 billion of the company’s value. The text accompanying the Gensheng cartoon warns the executive of the dangers of angering 1.3 billion people. Another post, the most popular today, links to an article on Songshuhui.net that argues that Chinese people should stop drinking milk. While the article doesn’t explicitly mention Mengniu, it references scandals about milk, and it’s likely that the conversation about eschewing milk is directly related to the Mengniu news. Another popular post suggests a boycott of Mengniu, reminding readers that Saatchi & Saatchi, which had worked to rebrand the company, left after the tainted milk scandal of 2008.

I suspect some readers will note that the story I’m featuring about popular dissent is about consumer issues, not about direct opposition to the government. It’s worth remembering that popular protest often focuses more on economic and social issues than on overtly political issues – the Occupy movement in the US has been triggered by frustration with banks at least as much as it is with frustration with US politics. And there’s more directly political content on Weibo as well – this post talks about a family’s house that’s demolished by the government and a man’s protests in Beijing. This isn’t to say that Sina Weibo isn’t censored – it is. But the speed of Weibo means that stories can be widely discussed before censors declare a topic off limits, as we saw with extensive online coverage of the July high speed train collision. And the popularity of Weibo gives Chinese authorities a classic Cute Cats problem – censoring the service too heavily would alienate the 250 million people who use it, including the majority who are largely interested in scantily dressed celebrities.

I should note: I don’t speak or read Chinese. That means that my interpretation of the Mengniu cow could be deeply mistaken. But it also means that it’s possible to puzzle out a breaking story in Chinese media using WeiboScope, Google Translate and a few web searches.

Here’s hoping tools like WeiboScope will help make the Chinese internet seem like less of a foreign land and more like a near neighbor.

Oiwan Lam at Global Voices has posted about online activism around Mengniu, with some wonderful (and generally less disturbing!) images. And An Xiao offers a great reaction post to the ideas I’m putting forward here, including a clever inversion of the Cute Cat Theory: “with Chinese political memes, the cute cats are the activist message.” Very interesting, something I’m still digesting.

It’s a few days after Christmas, and if you overextended yourself in buying gifts for your family and friends, you may be thinking about options to tide you over until the next payday. For years, payday lenders have offered short term loans at extortionate interest rates to people desperate for cash. Some loans are tied to collateral: the title to an automobile or deed to a house. Others offer unsecured “cash advances”, usually requiring evidence that a borrower is employed and that paychecks are deposited into an individual’s bank account. Borrowers secure the loans with a check to the lender dated in the future, or by giving the lender permission to debit from their checking accounts.

Payday loans charge extremely high interest rates, as high as 400-800% annually. The theory behind these rates is that they’ll be paid back in a few weeks, so finance charges aren’t competitive with more conventional bank loans. But payday lenders allow borrowers to “roll over” loans, using a new loan to repay a previous loan – a paper on payday lending coauthored by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren explains that as much of 90% of the profits in the payday lending industry comes from loans rolled over 5 or more times. When these loans extend for months or longer, their interest rates mean that the cost of borrowing rapidly exceeds the initial sum borrowed.

In a few American states, these high interest rates violate usury laws, and payday lending is prohibited. The Pentagon, worried about the impact payday lenders were having on military families, asked Congress to prohibit this form of exploitative lending to military personel. The Talent Amendment, passed in 2007, helps protect servicemen and women… but civilians are still fair game. And while the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was intended in part to help regulate payday lending, lobbying from payday lenders has helped keep the business from being one of CFPB’s early priorities. (Law professor Nathalie Martin makes a compelling case that payday lending should be an early priority for CFPB. But CFPB’s website makes no mention of payday or title lenders.)

Home for the holidays, I’ve been catching up on Top Chef reruns on Bravo. Watching late night satellite TV exposes one to some unusual ads. I saw an extraordinary ad last night: A handsome Native American man in a suit tells me that, if I need money transferred to my bank account right now, Western Sky Financial may be able to help me. His name is Thomas Morgan, and he warns, “Yes, the money’s expensive, but there’s no collateral required, and you can keep the cost down by paying it as fast as you can.”

He’s not kidding about the money being expensive. If I borrow $1500 from Western Sky, $500 is immediately reclaimed by the company as a loan fee. I pay 234% interest on the loan, payable in 24 payments of almost $200 each. In exchange for $1000, I pay $4,756.56 over the next two years. Larger loans offer lower loan fees and interest rates, but the interest rates start to create truly surreal situations. Borrow $5,075 and the 84 scheduled payments add up to $40,872.72.

It’s not a coincidence that Western Sky’s spokesman is Native American. The commercial and website both emphasize that the business is
“owned wholly by an individual Tribal Member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and is not owned or operated by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe or any of its political subdivisions. WESTERN SKY FINANCIAL is a Native American business operating within the exterior boundaries of the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, a sovereign nation located within the United States of America.”

That’s a fascinating legal construction. It’s important for Western Sky to assert its status as a Native American-owned business so it can assert the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Court as the legal jurisdiction for the loan. And Western Sky’s default loan agreement forces borrowers to waive their rights to a jury trial, and to seek arbitration within the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Nation’s jurisdiction. Borrowers also waive the ability to participate in a class action lawsuit, and certain rights of discovery in the case of a lawsuit. It’s possible to opt out of this clause, but only through a convoluted procedure involving a written request.

(I don’t have a good answer to why the legal verbiage makes it clear that it’s an individual, not a tribal business – my guess is that if high-rate lending were an official tribal business, it might come under the purview of a federal regulator… but I’d be grateful for anyone’s insights on why Western Sky insists that this is an individual tribal member’s business.)

In the case of Western Sky, the lender is Martin Webb, who is a member of the South Dakota-based Cheyenne River Sioux tribe. Courts in West Virginia have determined that Webb’s legal status doesn’t protect his business from state and federal regulation, at least as regards loans to West Virginia consumers. (Western Sky’s website won’t let you apply for a loan if you are from West Virginia. The company faces similar bans in Maryland, California and, ironically, South Dakota.) And the Federal Trade Commission, while not ruling on whether Western Sky is based in Cheyenne River Sioux territory or South Dakota, has ordered Webb to stop collecting on debts by attempting to illegally garnish customers’ wages.

Perhaps it’s only fitting that Native Americans – cheated out of their lands by unfair treaties, politically and economically isolated since the foundation of the United States – are seeking economic development by preying on America’s least fortunate. Businesses run using sovereignty include casinos, discount cigarette sales and payday lending, all businesses that target vulnerable populations in the US. That’s the case, eloquently made, by Thomas E. Gamble, chief of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, which is involved in several lending businesses. In response to a request for information from reporters from the Center for Public Integrity, Gamble argues that tribes exiled to remote and desolate areas have had to find creative ways to develop “a diverse economy that can provide jobs, housing, education, infrastructure, health care and other vital services for our members.” How many of the 3,500 members of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma are profiting from their lending business is unclear, but Gamble argues that by permitting lenders to operate within tribal lands, “is no different that South Dakota passing favorable laws in order to attract Citigroup and the like to set up niche industries within its jurisdiction.”

(Here, Gamble is referring to the exodus of banks like Citibank to South Dakota in the late 1970s. Under heavy lobbying from banks, South Dakota overturned its usury laws, allowing banks to issue credit cards with high interest rates. A Supreme Court decision in 1978, Marquette National Bank v. First of Omaha Service Corp., allowed banks to “export” the interest rates of the states they were based in to states where they had customers. States responded with “parity laws”, allowing locally chartered banks to offer competitive rates… so their banks didn’t all decamp to South Dakota. Gamble is correct that South Dakota made these changes to attract business and that these changes were legal. But he’s also making the case that his tribe should be allowed to engage in the sorts of practices that have created financial crises for millions of Americans, faced with punitive interest rates and fees from their credit card issuers.)

I’d find Gamble’s argument slightly more compelling if it were clear that his tribal members were the main beneficiaries of usurious loans. Generally, they’re not. Payday lenders are remarkably creative in finding loopholes in state laws that prohibit usury, and one of the most recently exploited loopholes is “rent a tribe“. Lenders based outside of Native American lands strike agreements with tribal members to “rent” their sovereignty in exchange for a small share of proceeds. A suit from the Colorado Attorney General uses financial documents to demonstrate that the tribes are generally making about 1% of proceeds from the lending business in exchange for “owning” the companies. The rest of the proceeds go to the lenders, whose offices are generally far from tribal lands.

Those proceeds go to guys like Scott Tucker.

Scott Tucker, race car driver, entrepreneur, apparent scumbag.

Chief Gamble’s letter in defense of Native American lending refers to AMG Services, a “tribal business” that manages several payday lending operations. Center for Public Integrity and CBS argue that AMG Services is actually run by Scott Tucker, the alleged gentleman pictured above. Gamble states that Tucker is an “employee” of AMG Services, and Tucker refuses to speak about his relationship to the Miami Tribe, citing a confidentiality agreement. CPI’s investigation discovered that Tucker and his brother were the only parties authorized to write checks on behalf of AMG, suggesting that the Miami tribe’s “ownership” of the company is nominal at best.

The CPI investigation finds that Tucker is one of the pioneers in using “rent a tribe” to protect otherwise prohibited payday lending businesses. Tucker is a convicted felon, who served time in Leavenworth in the early 1990s for mail fraud associated with a bogus loan scheme. After his release, Tucker turned to payday lending, managing a set of shell companies from an office in Overland Park, Kansas. When regulators in Colorado began investigating a Tucker-owned lender, Cash Advance, they faced an interesting challenge: the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and the Santee Sioux Tribe announced that they owned the lenders, arguing that this put the business’s operations outside of Colorado’s subpoena powers. A Colorado court responded by citing Tucker for civil contempt.

Oddly, the citation for civil contempt hasn’t cramped Tucker’s style. He maintains an $8 million home in Aspen in his wife’s name, though AMG Services (the “tribal business”) pays the property taxes. And he likes to drive fast cars. When Tucker was recently ticketed for speeding in Olathe, Kansas, AMG donated $1000 to the campaign of the Kansas district attorney whose office processes tickets. In an odd coincidence, Tucker’s ticket was turned into a parking offense, leaving his driving record clean.

It’s important that Tucker’s driving record stay clean because driving is his passion and pastime. A breathless 2010 Wall Street Journal article celebrates Tucker’s participation in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, a massively popular auto race described as “the Super Bowl of international sports car racing”. The Journal – which has never met a bank it doesn’t like – describes Tucker as “a wealthy private investor from Leawood, Kansas” and marvels at the fact that Tucker apparently has “world-class talent” at motorsports. Nowhere does the WSJ article mention Tucker’s felonious past, or suggest that his driving skills may have developed as an attempt to outrun bank regulators.

A recent article on Tucker’s Level 5 Motorsports notes that Microsoft Office has recently signed on as the company’s chief sponsor. I guess Microsoft looks more sightly on a racing jumpsuit than the logos of payday lending firms. And I wonder whether Microsoft’s marketing department knows they’re supporting the hobby of a man whose money is made by bankrupting vulnerable borrowers.

I started writing this post because I saw Western Sky’s ad and immediately concluded, “That’s got to be illegal.” What’s remarkable, of course, is that it’s not necessarily illegal. Four of 50 American states have taken action against Western Sky, and at least one (Colorado) have attempted to cripple or shut down Tucker’s businesses. But it’s going to take a long time for 50 states attorneys general to bring proceedings against these semi-virtual lenders. And it wouldn’t be surprising to see lenders attempting to service this market across international borders.

One of the most interesting businesses in this space is Wonga.com, an English company that offers short-term loans online, much like Western Sky does. Like Western Sky, Wonga charges very high interest rates – their website advertises a 4214% annual percentage rate. Unlike Western Sky, Wonga claims to be a responsible lender, and does not seek to extend loans beyond their initial term (which, remember, is where payday lenders generally make their profits.) They give money to Kiva.org, and have taken investment from responsible venture capital firms and from one of the UK’s leading charities. They appear to be expanding and now operate in South Africa. It’s hard for me to know whether Wonga competing in the US against Western Sky and others would be a good or bad thing.

When I tweeted about Western Sky last night, a couple of people responded by arguing that if payday lending is too closely regulated, it will simply send the business underground. The opposite seems to be happening at present. Payday lenders have traditionally targeted the poor, and neighborhoods in the US where poverty is endemic tend to feature check cashing, auto title and payday loan businesses. (Nathalie Martin’s article notes that in states where payday lending is legal, there are more payday lenders than Starbucks franchises.) Businesses like Wonga claim to be targeting a wealthier set of customers who see high-cost loans as a convenience. (Why Wonga loans would be more convenient than a cash advance on a credit card, which though expensive, tend to cost less than these loans, is unclear to me.) Perhaps “overregulation” would mean a rebirth of illegal loan sharking – in the meantime, the appearance of TV ads for high-interest loans suggests that legalized loan sharking may be becoming more socially acceptable.

If you’re considering a payday loan or an online, high-interest loan, please read this article first. It’s from the Center for Responsible Lending, and offers a number of less expensive alternatives, including cash advances from employers, cash advances on credit cards, consumer loans from credit unions, payment plans from creditors and military loans.

Kudos to Center for Public Integrity and CBS News, and specifically to David Heath, Laura Strickler and Armen Keteyian for their stories on payday lending and the Native American connection. I cited these four stories (1, 2, 3, 4) in this post. It’s a reminder of the importance of investigative journalism in exposing complex stories like this one.

John Kelly, chief scientist of Morningside Analytics, makes pretty diagrams that feature multicolored dots. The pretty dots frequently tell complicated and subtle stories about the spread of ideas in online media spheres, particularly the blogosphere. (Tragically, I don’t have Kelly’s slides for the talk, which means I’ll be trying to channel a very visual talk here…) He maps social media citations and studies the resulting topologies to understand the spread of ideas.

To understand what conversations are taking place about fact checking, he takes a “semantic slice” of the network. He looks for markers – keywords, URLs and metadata – and offers a “relevance metric” for bloggers to identify the bloggers he believes are most relevant in the space. Then he plots them with a size that shows how well-linked a blog is, and uses a physics model to cluster based on linkage.

Kelly then uses “attentive clustering” to color the graph – people who link to the same sources are colored the same way. There’s a clear cluster around conservative politics, and a visible cluster that’s conservative, pro-Israel. There’s a fringe group he calls “Islam critics”. On the other side, he sees clusters of progressive insiders, progressive outsiders, and progressive media critics. Other clusters are apolitical – economics, law, education, health and healthcare. Web cultures – Gizmodo, Make magazine – are also represented in the map. And there’s a cluster of journalism criticism, which Kelly notes is uncomfortably close to people who watch celebrities.

He characterizes the progressive critics as reasonably well connected to other conversations, and the conservative conversation as largely separate. Unsupriringly, a site like Newsbusters.org gets lots of attention from the conservative cluster… but does get some links from the big dogs on the progressive side. Factcheck.org is the mirror image – the big conservatives, and most people in the progressive space. Politifact is similar. Media Matters is further out towards the progressive fringe, though gets attention from big conservatives. Politicalcorrection.org is even further left.

MRC.org is mainly linked from the right, but gets good response from the journalism commentary cluster. Washington Post’s Factchecker blog gets equal attention from the left and the right, but lots of love from the journalists. CJR is loved by the left and the journalists, and invisible to the right. Sunlight Foundation has lots of traction in the tech community and is stronger thre than in political circles. For a comparison, Kelly offers snopes.org, which seems to be equally noted across the board.

Healthnewsreview.org, a site that focuses on corrections in the health and healthcare space, has excellent traction in one space, but almost no influence in other parts of the mediasphere. This offers some interesting implications for niche communication strategies, but offers some worries about information crossing from subject domains into the main conversation.

Kelly graphs 1000 top sites in terms of who links to them. The graph has two dimensions: left/right and political versus mainstream. The political fact sites range from the left to the right, but are strongly linked to by political sites. Some odd exceptions – CJR is left and fairly mainstream, while NPR is quite central and fairly mainstream.

Morningside has also looked, though in less depth, at a set of Twitter accounts that follow fact checking organizations. They picked a set of key fact checking twitter feeds and grabbed all of their followers. They looked for linkage and clustering and used k-core analysis to choose a densely connected set. What results is a space where conservatives appear to follow political fact checking more closely than progressives. (I’m not entirely clear on how Kelly is determining left-right within this set – I assume he’s hand-checking the clusters that emerge in his analysis, which is his standard operating method.)

Even a highly partisan site like politicancorrection.org has substantial followership from the right. Kelly drills down and sees clusters of followers in the Occupy movement, in the union and labor space, and in the eco/green space, as well as beltway insiders and people who study media. But he also sees a cluster of followers of conservative politicians, and a cluster around conservative media personalities.

How might we explain this? It could be that Twitter is where conservatives are making their stand in social media. Conservatives may be watching Twitter very closely and responding to each of these fact check interventions. It’s hard to know, though, as Kelly notes that Twitter is a space of “non-authentic actors”, both automated bots and coordinated groups of humans.

Lucas Graves, a doctoral student at Columbia and a research fellow at the New America Foundation, frames a discussion on fact checking by offering a detailed landscape of the fact checking movement. (That discussion is under Chatham House rules, but Lucas has been kind enough to allow me to post notes on his presentation.) He suggests we consider three groups of fact checkers:

– Reporters at organizations like the Associated Press or New York Times who conduct occasional fact checking after a debate. We can consider these people professional journalists engaged, part-time, in fact checking.

– Full-time, dedicated fact checkers like Politifact, Dactcheck.org, and the Washintgon Post’s fact check columns, which Lucas calls “the elite fact checkers”.

– Political and partisan fact checkers, like Media Matters and Newsbusters. They’re engaged, in part as media critics. But they also do work that can be very high quality fact checking.

All three types of fact checking appear to be on the rise. So Graves suggests we consider the origins of the movement. Some trace fact checking to the 1988 US presidential campaign and the Willie Norton ads designed to damage Dukakis. Others trace it to Ronald Reagan’s presidency and his gift for generating misinformation. Graves invites us to consider I.F. Stone’s newsletter, produced through 1950s and 1960s.

Stone was a muckraking journalist who worked within mainstream print journalism early in his career, and who – after being blacklisted – published a newsletter titled “The Weekly”. Graves shows us what he believes is the first fact checking box. It appears in a 1958 issue of The Weekly, and it begins with a statement from Dr. Edward Teller, where he contends that the global risk of nuclear fallout is equivalent to the dangers of being an ounce overweight, or smoking a cigarette a month. It’s followed by an authoritative rebuttal from an established source, in this case, four paragraphs from Bulletin of Atomic Scientist. Graves points out that Stone was, by no one’s account, an objective journalist. He wore his liberal politics on his sleeve, and believed in calling out hypocrisy and deception where he found it.

Is fact checking a specialized genre of news practice? Or should every reporter fact check? Brooke Gladstone has argued that the only way to check the spread of lies in the media is to fact check incessantly, in each paragraph they publish.Is it plausible to produce journalism in this way? Should we accept a system in which one article tells us what politicians said in a debate, and another, separate article that tells us which of those statements were true?

How big is the fact checking space? Graves has searched for the term “fact check” in Nexis – he finds 153 mentions in 2004, versus 371 in 2010. At the same time, he sees a decrease in the term “ad watch”, and a brief spike around “truth squad” in 2008. There appears to be a trend towards increasing fact checking identified as such, and some convergence on the term “fact check”, and a move away from only fact checking political ads.

fact checks appear most often in September and October – in 2008, 82% of fact checks appeared in those months. But that figure dropped to roughly half in 2010.

Using this set of data – stories that mentioned the phrase “fact check”, Graves notes that the term appeared primarily in dedicated fact checking articles in 2000 and 2004, but is increasingly common in “ordinary” articles since then. Still, the term appears most often in dedicated fact checking articles.

He returns the discussion to I.F. Stone to ask what role partisan fackcheckers serve. He asks us to consider a claim made by rightwing candidates and pundits that Obama had called Americans “lazy” while speaking at a business forum in Honolulu. Elite fact checkers agreed that the claim was false. Politifact called a statement made by Politifact “mostly false”. The Washington Post Fact Checker gave the Perry statement 4 Pinnochios, their strongest rating of untruth. fact check.org characterized the statement as “lazy rhetoric”, with Obama’s words taken out of context, intended to mislead.

Media Matters analyzed the claim, focusing on ten instances where conservative pundits, mostly speaking on Fox News, offered the same claim. It was presented as media criticism, Graves notes, but the analysis was indistinguishable from “elite” analysis. So do we evaluate Media Matters simply by considering the quality of their work, or do we take seriously their political biases?

One answer is to consider whether the fact checking is successful in reaching across political divides. Politifact and fact check.org are both frequently cited by CNN, and by less partisan networks. Partisan networks (Fox News, MSNBC) mention the two, but they’re each responsible for less than 1/8 of the mentions. Media Matters and Newsbusters are very rarely mentioned on less partisan networks – 2/3rds of their mentions are on the partisan news sites. And the biggest reach for Media Matters is on Fox News, which specializes in attacking their coverage.

Somedays it seems that everyone has joined Twitter. And then a new account comes along and raises interesting questions about what the service is for and how it should be used.

Welcome to Twitter, Harakat Al-Shabaab Al Mujahideen Press Office, now tweeting at @HSMPress.

Al-Shabaab is the militant organization waging war against the Transitional Federal Government (TFG, for short) of Somalia. They’re an offshoot of a more moderate Islamist organization, the Union of Islamic Courts, which was ousted by the Ethiopian military, backed by US support and intelligence. In the wake of their ouster, extremists associated with the movement reformed as Al-Shabaab (“the youth”) and have been fighting over control of Mogadishu and southern Somalia. In designating Al-Shabaab a terrorist organization in 2008, the US state department asserted ties between Al Shabaab and Al Qaeda – a backgrounder from the Council on Foreign Relations questions the strength of those ties, but points out ideological similarities between the organizations.

Recently, Operation Linda Nchi (Swahili for “Protect the country”), which involves the cooperation of TFG, Kenyan, Ethiopian and French troops, has been attacking Al-Shabaab positions within southern Somalia. The mission is a response to the kidnapping of Kenyan civilians and aid workers from the Dabaab refugee camp in Kenya, allegedly by Al-Shabaab. The mission has raised concerns about possible human rights violations, and some Kenyans have raised questions about whether their country should be engaged in a possibly lengthy war with their neighbor. Others have pointed out that attacks against civilians in Nairobi are likely to be linked to Al-Shabaab, pointing to the importance of ousting the militants.

Operation Linda Nchi has had a presence on Twitter since October 27th, when Kenyan military spokesman Major Emmanuel Chirchir began his Twitter feed.

Good to be here to give you the right and official information

October 27, 2011 7:24 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@MajorEChirchir

Major E. Chirchir

The major has been an avid correspondent, answering questions and inquiries. He’s also used Twitter in some very unusual ways, attempting to alert civilians in Somalia that their towns will be under attack:

#OperationLindaNchi BAIDOA, BAADHEERE,BAYDHABO,DINSUR, AFGOOYE,BWALE, BARAWE,JILIB,KISMAYO and AFMADHOW will be under attack continously

November 1, 2011 11:38 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@MajorEChirchir

Major E. Chirchir

#OperationLindaNchi The Kenya Defence Forces urges anyone with relatives and friends in the 10 towns to advise them accordingly.

November 1, 2011 11:39 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@MajorEChirchir

Major E. Chirchir

Whether this “please tell a friend” strategy will actually save lives is unclear. It’s fascinating (to me, at least) to see the electronic version of leaflets warning of incoming bombs…

So perhaps it’s not surprising to see Al Shabaab responding with a Twitter presence of their own. Major Chirchir’s feed features regular updates on military actions:

#OperationLindaNchi 3rd Dec; Attack at Hayo, 11 TFG soldiers died, 54 injured 25 flown to Garissa and Nairobi, 40 Al Shabaab’s killed

December 6, 2011 1:52 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@MajorEChirchir

Major E. Chirchir

And so does Al Shabaab’s:

6-DEC: Mujahidin forces attack #Amisom base in Dharkenley District, #Mogadishu. 3-hour battle resulted in some #Amisom casualties+base burnt

December 7, 2011 12:47 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@HSMPress

HSM Press

But it’s hard to imagine seeing some of Al Shabaab’s tweets on an official military feed:

7 Uganda-trained TFG soldiers surrender themselves to Mujahidin in #Mogadishu. They are welcomed after proclaiming repentance from apostasy

December 7, 2011 12:56 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@HSMPress

HSM Press

That Al-Shabaab is using social media isn’t entirely surprising. They’ve developed a reputation for issuing well-written English language press releases, and had maintained a website, chat rooms and other web presences. (Many have been removed – it’s not clear to me whether they were removed by the decision of ISPs hosting them, or whether those companies came under government pressure.)

And Al-Shabaab has shown a willingness to use multiple media platforms to spread their message. Omar Hammammi, aka Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, an American muslim who joined Al Shabaab in 2006, has an extensive collection of videos on YouTube, and has recently been releasing rap recordings, including “Send Me A Cruise“, a plea for martyrdom by cruise missile.

Needless to say, not everyone is thrilled that an extremist organization is using Twitter to disseminate its news:

Will al-Qaeda be allowed to use #Twitter? No. Then why is @HSMPress – Somali terrorists – going unchecked? Freedom stops with violence.

December 7, 2011 2:33 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Ed_Husain

Ed Husain

And it’s not hard to imagine that Twitter may end up fielding some questions from the US government, which has declared Al-Shabaab a terrorist organization, and might conceivably argue that providing Al Shabaab with a platform to express themselves could constitute “material support” to a terror organization. (It helps that Twitter is free for Al Shabaab to use, and that Twitter doesn’t review new users of the service.) There’s always an argument to be made that the account in question is not, in fact, Al Shabaab… there are several Al Qaeda accounts that appear to be fakes (including a very funny one retired on 9/11/11). Heck, there’s even a parody Major Chirchir account.

I’ve made the argument that corporations who make possible the digital public sphere need to support people’s right to speak freely, even when that speech is unpopular. (That’s the subject of the talk I gave at the Chicago Humanities Festival a few weeks ago.) That means ensuring that Wael Abbas can post about Egyptian police brutality on YouTube… and I believe it means making it possible for Al-Shabaab to share their views via Twitter, even while I condemn those views.

Anyone know whether there are other extremist, terrorist or militant organizations using Twitter in this way? How has Twitter reacted thus far? And if – as I suspect – Twitter is making their platform open to all types of speech, including inflamatory speech, do you agree with my argument that this is ultimately a good thing?

I’m traveling too much this fall, not getting enough time with my family or my students, but there are occasional trips that would simply be a mistake to miss. For the past two years, I’ve traveled to Nigeria with my friends and colleagues Colin Maclay and Mike Best. On our last trip, we ended up working with Nollywood directors and producers to brainstorm new business and distribution models for the field. This week, Nollywood filmmakers are in Atlanta, Georgia, visiting Georgia Tech and engaging in a discussion on the future of the industry.

They’re having some fun, too. Zik Zulu Okafor is working on a film while he’s here, a story of a Nigerian hero who finds himself at university in America, wrestling with relationships at home and abroad. As we’re having a discussion about the aesthetics and business model of the industry, Georgia Tech students are auditioning for the production in the next room over.

And we’re surrounded by some marvelous folks who, who’ve been generous in sharing their talents.

That’s Hausa rapper Ziriums – Nazir Ahmad Hausawa – performing his hit “This is Me” in front of an appreciative crowd, who looked up from their goat and jollof rice to cheer him on. The handsome dude dancing with him is Zeb Ejiro, one of the fathers of the Nigerian film industry. The beautiful lady who comes into the frame is Monalisa Chinda, one of Nollywood’s hottest contemporary stars. On the surface, it’s the sort of warm moment that happens often when you’re lucky enough to hang out with groups of Nigerians. But it’s richer and more complicated than that.

There aren’t many Hausa rappers in Nigeria. The language, spoken primarily in the predominantly Muslim north, isn’t heard as commonly in the commercial capital, Lagos, and when Ziriums looked for a contract from a Lagos record company, he tells us that he was not warmly received. And his work has proven pretty controversial at home as well.

While Ziriums’s music is rooted in his culture and faith (he’s the son of a religious singer, and his early performances were Boyz To Men songs rewritten to praise the Prophet), it’s also deeply political. One of the tracks he’s best known for is a reworking of Busta Rhymes’s “Arab Money” as “Government Money”, a satirical track that busts on money-obsessed Abuja. When Ziriums dropped his own album, it featured a track called “Girgiza Kai” – “Shake Your Head” – which pilloried the governor of Kano State.

The governor wasn’t pleased, and the song was banned from local radio. According to this report from Carmen McCain, his website was also blocked in Kano – while I can’t verify that, this would be a very unusual instance in Nigeria, where the internet has remained largely uncensored. (Carmen has contacted me – while the song was banned from local radio, his site was not blocked.) Ziriums now lives in New York, for fear of arrest or harassment in Kano, and is using digital means to ensure Nigerians at home can hear his music and his message.

So it’s not just a warm moment when one of the pioneers of Nollywood cinema shares the mic with a controversial political Hausa rapper – it’s a reminder that Nigeria, for all its complexity and conflict, is a place where respect for each other’s culture and creations can cross lines of language, religion and generation.