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< | A New Journalism
- Moving Beyond Institutionalism
- Lessons from Free Software
- Blunting the Tools of Surveillance Capitalism _ * Moving beyond the social media platforms
- Enabling secure news capture_
- Conclusion
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> | Hegemony on the Internet and How Majoritarianism Can Exacerbate It | | | | |
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> | A Bloomberg article narrates a story of Anasuya Sengupta, an Indian activist, who wanted to create a Wikipedia page for a prominent British-Nigerian human-rights activist, Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi. Adeleye-Fayemi is well-known in activist circles for having helped in ending the Liberian Civil War. But she did not exist on Wikipedia, “which meant that as far as many people were concerned, she didn’t exist at all.” Sengupta decided to write a Wikipedia page on Adeleye-Fayemi. She cited several articles from the Nigerian press and clicked “publish.” But a few minutes later, a Wikipedia editor deleted her entry on grounds that the entry was trifling. Sengupta eventually convinced Wikipedia editors to include the entry, but only after a former chair of the Wikimedia foundation—who happened to be sitting next to her at a conference—intervened on her behalf. | | | | |
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> | This isn’t a one-off incident. North Americans and Europeans make up for less than a quarter of the population on the internet, but control most of its information. For example, most content on the internet relating to Africa is written by North-American and European men. Thenmozhi Soundarajan, a prominent Dalit activist based out of New York—who is engaged in publishing Dalit history on Wikipedia—talks about having to use a white male username on Wikipedia to have more articles approved. This is the western hegemony of the internet where white men act as gatekeepers of online knowledge. As Thenmozi puts it, this hegemonic gatekeeping is an impediment “to reclaim[ing] the agency of a mass of people who have historically remained peripheral in the consciousness of the academia and the state, and to bring forth their stories of resistance, resilience, and heroism. In the words of Woodson, ‘If a race has no history, if it has no worth-while tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.’” Thenmozhi’s organization Equality Labs is one of many online groups led by women of color from marginalized communities across the world which challenge this hegemony by sharing their knowledge and histories with the online community. But in India, they face another form of hegemony. One more violent and well organized: this is the Indian right wing. | | | | |
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> | The Indian right wing is organized, tech savvy, and determined to maintain its hegemonic control over South-Asian society. With over 560 million users—not including the number of Indians living abroad—India is the second largest online market in the world. In the run up to India’s 2014 general election, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—then the primary opposition party—and its leader Narendra Modi saw India’s internet penetration as a propaganda opportunity. They created an army of online volunteers who used social media to change Indian’s perception of Modi from being a political pariah—responsible for a genocide in his home state of Gujarat—to being a shrewd technocrat and a messiah in the waiting. This social-media strategy helped the BJP win with a landslide. What began as an election strategy has grown “into a sophisticated machine that includes a huge ‘troll army’ of paid and voluntary supporters who help spread the party’s message on platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter, instantly reaching millions of people.” This troll army has normalized bigotry and hate towards minorities and Dalits. It has weaponized social media websites to spread disinformation and hate. | | | | |
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< | It is time to free journalism. I refer not to journalism the institution, that venerable fourth estate whose wreckage lies all around us. Rather I speak of journalism as an endeavor, an iterative process of collective knowledge gathering, synthesis, and distribution. | >
> | In early 2020, Facebook’s employees in-charge of policing hate speech began to get concerned with Facebook posts of an Indian politician named T. Raja Singh who had called for Rohingya refugees to be shot, called Muslisms traitors, and threatened to raze mosques. This clearly violated Facebook’s claimed community standards. In fact, Facebook has taken down numerous white supremacist pages on the grounds that their posts could lead to violence in the real world. No one had any doubts that Singh was trying to instigate people to violently attack Muslims who were protesting India’s new racist citizenship laws which Modi's government had enacted in 2019. But, the company’s top public-policy executive, Ankhi Das—whose job involves lobbying the Indian government on behalf of Facebook—opposed applying hate speech rules to Singh and other Hindu-nationalist groups. She claimed that curbing hate speech from Hindu-nationalist groups and BJP politicians would affect Facebook’s business prospects in India. A few months later, these hate posts instigated a pogrom in Delhi where Mulisms were killed, raped, tortured, had their property set on fire, and made homless. While Das and Facebook were clear collaborators in the Delhi massacre, Das was not wrong. India’s government has a vindictive attitude towards companies and organizations that do not tow its line. | | | | |
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< | The Net has both necessitated and facilitated this reconception of what “journalism” means. Every day, an amalgam of professionals, ordinary citizens, and activists collectively creates the news. They do so via disparate methods and platforms. The results can be powerful—as evidenced by ongoing protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder—but also dizzying, chaotic, and fractured. Journalism’s future as an instrument in service of human learning depends on our ability harness a new, networked press that is simultaneously egalitarian, prodigious, and distracted. | >
> | This combination of market power and political power gives India’s right wing the power to silence speech that it doesn’t agree with. Sangapali Aruna, who runs an organization which leverages technology to empower Dalits, was in a conversation with Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey. She was talking about women’s safety on twitter following an incident where she was the victim of doxing. At the end of the conversation, Dorsey stood with women activists for a picture. They handed him a poster which read “Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy.” When this picture went online, the backlash from Hindu nationalists and supporters of the caste system was swift and overwhelming. Fearing its loss of market share in India and action from the Indian government, Twitter apologized for that picture. | | | | |
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< | The first step is to identify the restraints. They exist in propertarian views of news rooted an obsolete, ad-based business model. But the ends of journalism are also thwarted, ironically, by the very tools that enable the networked press. Smartphones that document police brutality catalogue their user’s every move. News updates are fed through Facebook and Twitter, where they are either drowned out or reduced to a lure for the Parasite, dangling in news feeds only so long as they snap up human attention. | >
> | The Indian right wing has understood the power of the internet in propagating ideas. It is focused as much on using its brute strength to censor people on the internet as it is on disseminating ideas of Hindu supremacy. Quora, a platform which used to be used by techies to ask questions and give answers has evolved into a platform for Hindu-nationalist discussions and where Hindu nationalists can shape people’s perception on issues that matter to them. Many of the “answers” are outright lies. While Wikipedia has blacklisted a few Hindu-nationalist English “news” websites, the Hindu right wing is trying to gain a hold of Wikipedia in vernacular Indian languages where the most prominent scholars tend to be upper-caste Hindus who have an affinity towards Hindu nationalism and can censor information that can threaten caste hierarchies and Hindu dominance. | | | | |
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< | We must forge a networked press that resists the Parasite, rather than mooring us to it. But we also need to reimagine the concept of what journalism means in the age of the Net.
Moving Beyond Institutionalism
I have been part of journalism the institution. I saw the crumbling up close. The old model of for-profit journalism required ad revenue, which required eyeballs. So we chased them—we spent hours pushing stories on social media and perfecting our headline SEO. We still tried to do good work reporting the news. But the stakes were crystal clear. At one reporting job, my salary was tied directly to how many page views my stories got.
I do not mean to say that professional journalists are obsolete. There will always be a need for those trained in the art of storytelling and investigative reporting. Organizations like ProPublica? show that new models of non-profit journalism can produce superior content. We must go farther, however, to move beyond institutionalism to a more dynamic view of what journalism can be. The journalistic creation of knowledge no longer ends once the nightly news clicks off or the newspaper goes to print. Journalism is constantly becoming, and all of us on the Net can have a role in making it so.
Lessons from Free Software
Free software offers an analogue for what journalism can become. Free software produces a better product because subsequent users are empowered to tinker with and improve a program’s source code. Likewise, “free journalism”—enabled through creative commons licensing and collaborative platforms like wikis—can generate more dynamic reportage. News outlets and bloggers are empowered to borrow, organize, and add to information produced on the Net. The results can be powerful. Consider the Tunisian blogger collective Nawaat, which in 2010 curated hundreds of otherwise censored videos during that country’s uprising. Or Global Voices, whose volunteers translate citizen-sourced articles from around the world into more than 50 languages.
Free journalism invites readers into the process of news creation. Imagine new, hybrid journalism platforms that house professional investigative and accountability journalism, while also offering dynamic spaces for citizens to engage in collaborative news creation by posting their own content, or that of others on the Net. Paid or volunteer editors could help sort and verify crowdsourced content to ensure it serves journalistic goals. Most importantly, these sites can be run cheaply, potentially allowing them to be sustained through user contributions rather than through advertising or paywalls.
Blunting the Tools of Surveillance Capitalism
Moving beyond the social media platforms
It is premature to advocate that the networked press immediately disassociate from the tech platforms. Facebook and Twitter remain useful newsgathering tools. We should, however, cease to treat social media platforms as a locus for journalism. The process of knowledge creation requires continuity—the ability to locate, link together, and preserve information culled from disparate sources. From a technical standpoint, Facebook and Twitter are ill-equipped for this. Nor is their attention imperative aligned with the mandate of journalism to serve the public. We must instead build new, collaborative spaces where communities can gather to engage in collaborative journalism. This can include creative commons repositories where citizens can upload media for anybody to use.
The law may also help equal the playing field between journalistic gathering spaces and the tech giants. Despite their precise curation of user news feeds, social media platforms (unlike news outlets) are not considered publishers for the purposes of tort liability. Nonetheless, any Section 230 reform should be approached carefully, since imposing liability for crowdsourced content may hinder the hybrid journalistic models described above.
Enabling secure news capture
Likewise, an immediate retreat from smartphones as a tool for newsgathering is perhaps unlikely. However, law and technology can help prevent those in power from using smartphones to surveil or incriminate newsgatherers who seek to expose corruption or abuse. Open source encryption apps like Signal already exist to enable newsgatherers to securely capture and transmit media. These apps can only do so much, however. Politically, we must continue to push for legislation that safeguards encryption technology and limits how technology firms can track, store, and use mobile data.
Conclusion
I propose an idealized vision for the future of journalism. I am not naïve; this is neither the journalism we have, nor one that we can create overnight. Law and technology can create the conditions in which news content can be securely captured and widely shared. We can equip individuals from a young age with the technical skills to contribute to our networked press. But we must also undertake a more fundamental reconception of journalism as a collectively owned and pursued public good—a process of knowledge sharing that every human can both benefit from and contribute to. | >
> | As we try to re-democratize the internet, we need to be aware of social imbalances which exclude people from enjoying the freedoms of the internet and political majoritarianism which can threaten to capture a nascent internet democracy. |
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