Social Media's Influence & Credibility

"The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life.
It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted.

Everything is changing: you, your family, your education, your neighborhood, your job, your government, your relation to "the others. And they're changing dramatically." - The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan

 
I will try to bring some examples about one of the recent popular discussions that we had in our class ''Social media's influence & credibility" with our teacher Nezih Orhon. I must confess, I ended up finding myself ignorant of the subject when I researched more and more. I would like to share with you the one that impressed me the most.

To start with, let us look at an example from an age without social media, a story from year 1994. More than 800 thousand people have been murdered in Rwanda during a very short of time. Pro government radio and TV with hate speech have provoked the genocide. In January 1994, the commander of UN troops in Rwanda, Canadian Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire, sent a fax to Annan's departmentwarning of plans for the genocide, including details of weapons caches, three months before the killings began, and stating his intention to carry out raids on the arms stores. He signed off in French: "Where there's a will, there's a way. Let's go." However, the reply from UN, instructed Dallaire not to take action and instead inform the Rwandan government of the threat. Dallaire requests to beef up his forces in the effort to protect Rwandan civilians were also denied. Instead, his troop numbers were cut. What if Dallaire had a twitter account or staff working under Dallaire had Twitter, Facebook accounts, shoot videos and posted them on youtube, would history might might have been different? Nobody knows.

There is another story which has changed the flow of history with a simple idea. It starts in Kenya, December 2007 when the parliemantary elections held. Soon after the elections, violence broke out, suddenly the government announced a significant media blackout so mainstream media was blocked, too. At that moment, in the media landscape web blogs transformed from being a commentatory to critical understanding where the violence was happening.

A kenyan activist, lawyer and a famous blogger in Kenya Ory Okolloh, asked her commentators of her blog to post her more information about what was going on. Ory thought she would collate them and post them but right after comments began pouring, she realized that she can't keep up even if she posted days and night she cant handle this on her own. She said on her blog there is more information on Kenya right now, than any one person can manage if only there is a way to automate: “Any techies out there willing to do a mashup of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?” Two programmers readers of her blog, raised their hands and said "we could do that" and in 72 hours they launched Ushaidi. UShahidi, which means witness or testimony in Swahili Language, is a very simple way of taking reports from the field whether from the web or critically from a SMS, aggregating it, and putting it on a map.That is all it is, but that is, all what is needed.  It takes that information, aggregates it and puts it on a map enabling Kenyans and the world to report and know incidents happening in Kenya. That manevuer called "crysis mapping".

It was kicked off in January in 2008 in Kenya. Enough people looked at it and found it valuable enough. The programmers who designed Ushahidi decided to make it open source and turn it to a platform.
 Then It's has been deployed in Mexico elections.

 Ushahidi remixes have been used in India to monitor elections; in Africa to report medicine shortages; in the Middle East to collect reports of wartime violence; and in Washington, D.C., with a site to map road blockages and the location of available snowplows and blowers and many many more examples.
 


Ushahidi has proven its maturity in the aftermath of 2010 Haiti earthquake. In this case there came the "crowdsourcing'' up to an international level. There was that strong flow of information coming from Haiti mainly on twitter but much more people needed to map the incoming info on Ushahidi. Patrick Meier, who is in the team of Ushahidi, organized with his friends in Boston in their dorm room and they started mapping. (left)
There was flow of info coming from UN, local and international media, humaniterian and media team on the ground, so they needed more and more human resources for this task. Then came the local and international volunteers from all ages, all different social status, joined their purpose helped in mapping, interpretation of Haitin, following updates and on many tasks.
By his words the map they were working on was ''all alive not static, in everyminute there was new information and new update" and the maps they've produced have been used by many humanitarian and search & rescue teams. They've been praised by many international organizations like UN, Federal Emergency Management Agency, USNavy, WFP, WHO. They generated this massive "standby volunteer task force" and because they were the people making everybody know what is happening on the ground minute by minute.

In the end of that year there started Arab social movements so called ''Arab Spring'' which has organic relations with social media in all aspects. They used social media in mobilizing local and international public opinion, organizing their uprisings. This time, Ushaidi's nternational standby volunteer task force acted as their civic drones mapping all Libya, Egypt esp. Cairo, Tunisia and still Syria.

This map shows where Ushahidi platform has been deployed in the world. That platform which appeared in 2009 how affected the world? It has been implemented on many forms election observatory, natural disaster, violence etc. but how did this happen? Can world come together in such big projects, this platform made us say, yes.  It represents the ability of the world's population to come together and contribute on large scale big projects. It comes from two things. World's free time, world has in total over a billlion hour free time to commit to share projects. That time we had in the 20th century, but we didn't have Ushahidi in the 20th century.  Ancient human motivation and modern tools  to allow that motivation to join up in large scale efforts.

@eneskanli

I would like to detail and inform you how much social media can be credible? Can you measure it? Instead of trying to tell those to you from second hand source, I ll send you some links below. Please check. You'll find it very sensible and analytical.

• Comparing sources used by different media outlets
• Auto-following sources quoted by a publication, as a way for journalists to find experts, and for audiences to connect with voices mentioned in the media
• Tracking and detecting media manipulators
• Developing metrics for source diversity, and developing tools to help journalists find the right variety of sources
• Journalist and news bias detection, through source analysis
• Comparing the effectiveness of closed source databases like the Public Insight Network and Help a Reporter Out to open ecosystems like Twitter, Facebook, and online comments. Do source databases genuinely broaden the conversation, or are they just a faster pipeline for PR machines?
• Tracking the role of media exposure on the popularity and readership of social media accounts

http://irevolution.net/2012/12/03/predicting-credibility/

http://irevolution.net/2012/12/17/debating-tweets-disaster/

http://irevolution.net/2012/12/10/ranking-credibility-of-tweets/

Thanks for reading. Hoping to meet again. Wish it weren't for a homework and I could do more reading and find out more. 


Bibliography: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh_PiVqf8BA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu7ZpWecIS8