| intertwilight on Tue, 24 Apr 2018 10:22:05 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> please read - and how can this possibly be combatted? |
hi Jaromil,in effect we hadn't originally planned on doing this type of work explicitly but the situation in South Sudan, where we had begun a number of open tech related initiatives with local partners, steered us into it. A series of clear incidents where we could see probable causality between online activity and on-the-ground violence (proving causality between social media and directed violence is extremely difficult without clear groundtruthing mechanisms) led us to discussions around the use of social media from the 'outside' diaspora (i.e. in Canada / USA) and their effect on a hot conflict in a place with low technical infrastructure. Of course it's not unique to South Sudan, and where the issue was considered 'non-existent' a couple years ago the huge media and political attention given to it now brings rise to articles from all over the planet, including the one cited in the NYT. Because these conflicts have been out of Zuck/FB's focal range (despite the 'interest' in African tech entrepreneurship ... see the visit to iHub Nairobi a year or so ago) they have not been proactive in applying their regulations to regions where their income generation is minimal. This is a vacuum that conflict influencers (who in some cases are paid) have been very good at exploiting.
Later this month there will be an interesting conference on related issues in Berlin hosted by the Disruption Lab Network http://www.disruptionlab.org/ ... It may be good to pick up this conversation there in case any netttimers can attend!
Cheers, Stephen On 24.04.2018 09:23, Jaromil wrote:
dear Stephen, Thanks for your message indeed. Knowing of your continued engagement in crisis areas I think your experience is really worthed a thread. On Mon, 23 Apr 2018, intertwilight wrote:The issue of using social media in conflict situations is real (in many different ways) and those that are the most savvy in their use have the potential to be effective influencers ... either for conflict mitigation or its exacerbation. I simply wanted to point out some tools and resources for conflict mitigation that are being used or developed.The fact that 'conflict mitigation' for social network hatespeech is a task falling on the shoulders of NGOs is a somehow unwieldy deja-vu. "theoretically" this would be a liability for the social network corporations making enough money out of relentless extraction - and injection of frauds a.k.a "fakenews" ads - to cover for it. but no. deja-vu being that NGOs are left to deal with the debris. what is also grotesque are the conditions of "lower-level" operations in social network corporations that have to deal with hate speech (and as it was done in your case, often commit mistakes... not sure you want to tell the story). This can all well be a subject of studies, as those conducted by @quillis at ITU.dk, or of court-cases perhaps. I believe the bottom-line question stays the same since a century or so: after capitalism leaves a mess, who deals with it? I find that anglosaxon societies, while being heavily liability based, have never found a practical answer. I don't believe philantropy is a viable one. Finally, incarcerating Zuckerberg and the likes may be a step forward? ciao
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