Sick of the US election dominating all media coverage? Dreaming of a future date, perhaps two weeks away, when it’s possible that headlines won’t feature Sarah Palin?

You could always turn to international news, where the question seems to be, “What does the rest of the world think about the US election?”

In other words, “Enough about me, what do you think of me?”

That was more or less my response some months ago when some of the Global Voices team came to me and suggested we try to cover the US elections through the eyes of the developing world. Through the brilliant work of Amira Al Hussaini, support of authors like Hoa Quach and others, we’ve put together Voices Without Votes, a website that collects international blog perspectives on the US elections. Read today and you’ll discover reports on a shortage of pro-Obama yamulkes,
Voices without Votes, comments from the Philippines about a suspicious misspelling on New York ballots, and the reasons Cubans are hoping for an Obama victory. It’s been one of our most successful projects and one that I’m now inordinately proud of.

Just shows what I know.

Dominique Moisi at Real Clear World has an interesting essay wondering whether Europeans are “blue state voters” and Asians are “red staters”. Her argument is that Asians may be resistant to change and concerned about an Obama victory:

…a majority of Asian elites are awaiting the growing possibility of an Obama victory with some bewilderment and even apprehension.

For example, Japanese elites tend to favor continuity over change. In their mind, the hard power of the United States is more important than its soft power, and their vision of a United States that is “bound to lead” is largely unchanged. For them, Washington is above all the strategic counterweight needed to balance Beijing.

Recent image from theworldfor.com.

Guess those Asian elites aren’t participating in the various online polls designed to show how the world would choose to vote. TheWorldFor.com has Obama leading McCain 89%-11%, with only Afghanistan, the Ukraine and the Svalbard Islands favoring the Republican. Those change-phobic Japanese favor Obama 89-11, the same as the rest of the population sample.

Using a similarly unauthoritative methodology (allow people to identify whatever country they represent), the Economist has assigned the world an electoral college, offering electoral votes based on population. Obama’s dominating that competition, 8,954 to 88, with McCain claiming votes from Sudan, Georgia, Cuba and Macedonia. (How’s that for a voting bloc?) Oh, and the Japanese are 86/14 for Obama in their poll.

Foreign Policy’s map is lots more interesting to me, though somewhat less reassuring to fellow Obama supporters. Using data from the Gallup World Poll - which surveys people in 140 countries - they asked slightly more complex questions than “Obama or McCain?” Voters had the option to answer that they didn’t know or refused to answer. And they asked a second question - whether voters thought the US election would affect their own lives.

The addition of the third answer - don’t know or don’t care - is a fascinating one. In the Phillipines - one of the four countries where Gallup saw an advantage for McCain (28 versus 20), the majority (52%) didn’t express an opinion. Don’t know was the overwhelming majority in India, where 7% favor Obama, 2% McCain and 91% don’t have an opinion. Only 6% of Indian voters thought the US presidential election mattered to them - 87% answered that they didn’t know on that question as well. Given the shortage of undecided voters at this stage of the endless US election, perhaps it would behoove Obama and McCain to move their campaigns to the swing states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Even more interesting are the people who actively assert that the US presidency won’t make a difference to their country. 72% of people in Palestine state that it won’t matter who becomes the US president. (Israel is not included in the survey.) They lead a pack of nations that includes oil-rich Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, conflict-ridden Burundi, Pakistan and Lebanon, and some nations that are harder to explain: Estonia, Peru, Chile, Austria. The Palestinians, unfortunately, are probably right. And so are the Burundians, I fear.

For anyone who hopes that global support for Obama leads inexorably to victory… well, it’s worth reading up what happened when The Guardian’s “Operation Clark County” urged readers of that liberal British newspaper to send letters to citizens in a swing county of a swing state. Some argue that the letters - which were not well-received by many voters - swung the county for Bush instead of for Kerry.

One way or another, it’s safe to say that you won’t hear Obama claiming global support via any of these polls any time soon.

In the meantime, I’m getting a great deal more from the comments from individual bloggers from the rest of the world. An interesting - and cautionary - note from Naseen Tarawnah of the excellent Black Iris blog (from Amman, Jordan):

My reluctance to get on the Obama bandwagon has mostly been due to the fact that he has this seemingly cult-like following. He is seen as this messiah of change, and is described and depicted as almost prophet-like. I have a problem with anyone who puts that much faith in a single politician, especially an American president. If the on-going history of America has shown the world anything, it’s that change (in the positive sense of the word) is not a big factor in a US presidency. So I am constantly astonished by any Arab who is entranced by Obama and have to constantly remind myself that most of the fan base in this part of the world comes from a particular more-westernized demographic and have been swallowed up by the wave of US election culture that is dominated by Obama. Everyone is entitled to their own perceptions but I remain realistic to the degree of change that is expected with either candidate in the Oval Office.

Polymeme, my favorite source for news that’s not all Palin, all the time, led me to a fascinating set of photos this morning. They’re from Ilakaka, Madagascar, a town that’s grown from little more than a truck stop into a wild west mining town in about a decade. Ilakaka is currently the source of roughly 50% of the world’s sapphire, and it’s a fascinating case study in what happens when something very valuable can be pulled out of the ground without much capital investment - you get a gold rush.

The main street of Ilakaka, October 2008. Photo by Roberto Schmidt, AFP

What I appreciated about the Globe story - and, as it turns out, several other stories I found on Ilakaka, is that most of the authors avoided, “this is terrible, something must be done” narrative that characterises so much northern reporting about Africa. Ilakaka is clearly a tough place - Jonny Hogg writing for the BBC focuses his narrative primarily on the dangers of the town - but Schmidt’s photos are much less predetermined. He’s got shots of kids working the mines, which are hard to see, but also shots of kids playing, a reminder that mining in these towns is likely far more lucrative than other forms of employment in Madagascar, which helps explain why families are drawn to Ilakaka. I appreciate the ambiguity of the photos and of the frame Alan Taylor puts them in for the Globe.

And then there are the gem blogs. Having almost no interest in precious stones, I hadn’t realized that there were gem bloggers. The answer may be that there’s Vincent Pardieu and people who travel with him. Pardieu and Richard Wise offer a thorough sapphire and ruby tour of Madagascar, touring the forest ruby camp of Moramang as well as the desert around Ilakaka. Richard Hughes, with Pardieu and Dana Schorr, offers the excellent “Sorcerors & Sapphires“, a comprehensive look at corundum in Madagascar.

My favorite observation in this latter piece is the observation that it makes perfect geological sense that Madagascar is blessed with sapphires and rubies. So are Tanzania, Sri Lanka and parts of southern India. And if we go far enough back in geologic time, these countries are close neighbors. (Looking at this map, I’m tempted to research the possibility of gem mining on the Indian Ocean coast of Antartica.)

Perdieu also has an excellent solo article on gems in Madagascar complete with videos of mining sites and photo sets. In all three articles, there’s a good sense of humor about the difficult travel and living conditions associated with these mines - I take this as a reflection on the fact that most mining towns aren’t easy places to work, and that while Ilakaka may be a tough place, it’s got more than a little in common with northeastern Burma or parts of Afghanistan.

How do we get stories from places like Ilakaka, remote locations in Africa with no permanent press presence? Historically, we’d have to wait for something bad to happen - a mining disaster, an outbreak of disease. I see the photos in the Globe as evidence of what might be a healthier form of storytelling - a picture of a place that’s fascinating, whether or not it’s especially “newsworthy” today. The gembloggers are an interesting complement to this sort of reporting. In some corners of the world, the majority of citizen media comes not from locals, but from missionaries and aid workers living and working in these communities. Some, like Sleepless in Sudan, become important spokespeople for these communities.

The hope, of course, is that we start getting reports and perspectives from people who live and work in these communities. Our friends at FOKO Club are working with Rising Voices to help Malagasy youth report on their communities via blogs. I don’t know if it’s realistic for FOKO to work in Ilakaka, but it’s pretty exciting to think about the possibility.

Two excellent articles in major American newspapers recognize the importance of bloggers and online authors in building bridges between people in different countries. If you want to understand what’s going on in other parts of the world, it helps to read not just stories about those countries, but the stories people in those countries are telling. It’s hard just to dive in and start reading blogs without context and without knowing who’s worth reading - two stories give excellent advice for ways to dive into current conversations in Zimbabwe and China. (This sort of guided bridging is just what we’ve tried to accomplish with Global Voices, so it’s nice to see a mention of our project in one of the pieces.)

As the political stalemate in Zimbabwe heads towards an apparent conclusion, it will be worth following Zimbabwean bloggers closely. The LA Times interviews two of my favorite Zimbabwean bloggers, Brenda Burrell and Bev Clarke, the founders of Kubatana, a civil society organization in Harare. Some of the passion and perseverence of these amazing women comes out in the interview as they talk about the frustration they feel with groups that want to change Zimbabwe… but are no longer based in Zimbabwe. Bev is very much rooted in today’s Harare, and her posts on Kubatana’s blog veer between careful political analysis to frustrated musings on how one winds down or pumps oneself up in a city that lacks power, hot water and food much of the time.

The Times piece features a few activist Zim bloggers I know and read, like Comrade Fatso as well as some I hadn’t encountered before, like Philip Barclay and Grace Mutandwa, writing from the British High Commission in Harare. It’s pretty amazing that British diplomats have this much online space to speak freely about their impressions of Zimbabwe and surrounding countries.

I wish Robyn Dixon had commented on whether there are bloggers offering different points of view - I’ve been accused (correctly) of failing to represent pro-ZANU-PF voices in my posts on Zim, in part because, with the exception of my friend Dumisani Nyoni, I don’t see many ZANU supporters blogging. (Dumi pointed me, the other day, to an interesting post from a member of parliament affiliated with the faction of MDC that supports Arthur Mutumbara, not Morgan Tsvangarai - it’s a good example of just how complex negotiations are surrounding transfer of power in Zimbabwe. The same parliamentarian, Senator David Coltart, offers a useful outline of the pending powersharing agreement posted on his personal blog - his analysis is a good deal more informative than anything I’ve seen in the media thus far.)

The Wall Street Journal’s Asian edition focuses not on a whole national blogosphere, but on perhaps China’s most remarkable blogger, the incomparable Roland Soong. Roland’s blog, EastSouthWestNorth, functions as an edited aggregator and translator of Chinese media. It’s required reading for anyone who’s interested in China, and it’s been an inspiration to a number of projects around the world. Leslie Hook notes that EastSouthWestNorth helped inspire Global Voices - that’s absolutely true, and Roland’s skill at filtering, translating and contextualizing is something I often point to when I explain the hard work neccesary to bridge between cultures online.

Great to see such inspiring bloggers getting some love from the broader media community.

I had an opportunity to share my observations about “citizen propaganda” in the Russia/Georgia conflict with someone far more knowledgeable than myself - Gregory Shvedov, the editor in chief of Caucasian Knot, a leading alternative news publication focused on the Caucuses, joined the fellows at the Berkman Center for a brief discussion yesterday. Shvedov has been following the conflict closely, both through the reports of journalists associated with Caucasian Knot who are on the ground in Georgia and Ossetia, and through the panoply of blog accounts that have accompanied the war.

Shvedov confirms that there’s been deep interest in “eyewitness accounts” of events on the ground, and that the blogs he’s read seem to include people in Moscow or Tblisi misrepresenting themselves as being on the ground, usually to forward a political agenda. He worries that people are paying more attention to these bloggers - some of whom are misrepresenting themselves - than to reporters he and other publications have on the ground.

This situation presents interesting challenges for those of us who advocate for citizen media or who are involved with projects that aggregate and promote citizen media. If it becomes clear that many blogger eyewitnesses are simply amateur propagandists, it’s going to be harder and harder for journalists to reference and amplify the opinions of bloggers on the ground. It puts an interesting pressure on projects like Global Voices - in citing a blogger writing from Ossetia, are we authenticating that blogger, certifying that the person in question is really an eyewitness?

We can’t offer that authentication - that’s not what we do. We study the blogosphere closely, and we know who’s been blogging for a while, and can often offer background information on the bloggers we amplify. But we’re not a news agency, we don’t have reporters on the ground in Ossetia, and we’re discovering that there’s a real challenge presented by fast-breaking news events: news inspires people to start blogging. It’s not hard to believe that someone in Ossetia would begin blogging shortly after Georgian and then Russian troops came into the region - that blogger would be an eyewitness, and would likely have some interesting insights on the conflict. But she wouldn’t have a reputation or a track record, and it would be difficult to evaluate whether she was actually on the ground, or writing from either Tblisi or Moscow.

We all make decisions about the authenticity of information we receive, either online or offline. I tend to take a story more seriously if it comes from the New York Times than if it comes from the Montgomery County Bulletin. (Friends of mine who lean to the right may suggest that this is an error on my part.) We rely on the reputation and brand of the Times, and the fact that the paper is widely read and fact-checked by bloggers and readers. The Times gets it wrong sometimes - Jayson Blair, Judith Miller - but the reading public tends to be quite aware of those errors.

Reading blogs demands a different strategy. Reputation matters, but it’s less about brand than about longevity, links and comment threads. It’s not hard to manufacture a single, incorrect blogpost and have it survive some scrutiny - it’s harder for a blog to survive scrutiny over a long period of time. If a blog has no history, no incoming links, no active comment threads, it’s hard to value the opinions expressed there any more (or less) highly than those from a stranger on a city street. A blog that’s made controversial and questionable statements will often generate discussions, either on comment threads or on blogs linking to the blog - reading those threads often helps establish whether this blogger is viewed as reliable or with skepticism, as mainstream or fringe within a particular debate. These methods certainly don’t guarantee that a blogger is neutral or non-partisan - they simply make it easier to determine whether that person is a respected voice in an existing community of interest.

These reputation mechanisms don’t work well in the case of breaking news. We don’t check the previous blogposts or the incoming link count of the people who sent mobile phone photos from the underground during the 7/7 London bombings. Those images were believable to the recipients because they came from known contacts - they were believable in the press because the photos were consistent with other individual and professional press accounts. How do we make decisions about authenticity of observations coming from a war zone that’s not closely covered by the professional media?

My sense is that we’ve generally assumed good faith in reading citizen accounts of wars and other disasters. We may need to re-examine that assumption. As citizen media becomes a more influential and closely watched space, there’s a greater incentive to fight information wars on blogs and video-sharing sites, not just in the traditional press.

As I mentioned in my earlier post on citizen propaganda, the Ossetian conflict isn’t the first time we’re seeing propaganda efforts in digital media. We’ve seen evidence both of professional, paid posting by the “fifty cent party” and well-organized amateur efforts in the Chinese blogosphere, especially around riots in Lhasa.

We’ve covered these efforts on Global Voices because our job isn’t to report news, but to report what’s being discussed in a nation’s blogosphere. If that discussion includes amateur propaganda videos, or organized campaigns to post pro-government comments on blogs, we need to cover those posts… but we also need to provide context, helping people understand where these comments are coming from. Are these the spontaneous expression of angry individuals in China, Georgia, or Russia? Are they part of a larger, orchestrated campaigns? How do we value an opinion expressed as part of an organized campaign versus the opinion expressed by an independent individual?

My colleague Judith Donath offered a very useful framework in considering these questions. She suggests that what we’re trying to determine here is the “authenticity” of a particular voice. There are a number of factors we consider in considering authenticity… and perhaps we overvalue some and undervalue others.

In discussing the “fifty cent party” (a group of bloggers paid by Chinese authorities to publish pro-government comments on blogs and in forums), the fact that commenters are being paid makes me tend to take their contributions less seriously. It isn’t clear that we should draw this conclusion - it’s quite possible that the people who choose to work with Party authorities are generally in agreement with Party position on most matters… but somehow the presence of money causes me, personally, to consider these comments as less authentic.

Spontaneity also appears to be a characteristic that we correlate with authenticity. If I find a comment on a New York Times story comparing Vladimir Putin to Vlad the Impaler, it looks like a spontaneous, heartfelt response. If I find 100 comments all making the same analogy, it looks like an attempt to organize a campaign drawing associations between a world leader and the inspiration of vampire novels. Should I take the apparently spontaneous comment more seriously? Doesn’t the attempt to engineer a meme about Putin and vampires reflect a seriousness of sentiment that’s at least as authentic as an offhand comment?

Remember, the goal here isn’t to determine the accuracy of a statement, but the authenticity. Are people in China really angry about Jack Cafferty’s characterization of Chinese authorities as “goons and thugs” or was this simply an orchestrated campaign? Are thousands of angry Russians commenting on New York Times coverage because they were authentically pissed off? Because someone’s organizing a campaign to encourage them to do so? Does it matter if such a campaign is organized by a clever, web2.0 activist or by the Kremlin? What should we consider as we try to evaluate whether individual blogs are authentic or orchestrated? (Or both?)

Donath had another intriguing suggestion - she wonders whether large-scale text analysis could help detect blogposts that are part of orchestrated campaigns. Assume that there’s a wave of blogposts about, oh, say Sarah Palin. It might be possible to automatically identify blogposts that use similar phrases to attack or defend the VP candidate. A wave of posts all making the same three critiques or offering a similar worded defense might indicate organized campaigns to spread certain talking points. (Or they might just point to the tendency of bloggers to cut and paste arguments from people they read and like.) Even if such a tool didn’t help us figure out the authenticity of sentiment, it could help us avoid reading another half-dozen repetitive posts on the same topic.

Is authenticity the right characteristic to consider when evaluating blog accounts from conflicts? How should we evaluate authenticity when it’s difficult to verify the identity and location of an author?

As Russia slowly pulls out of Georgia and the world of foreign policy wonks contemplates how the Olympics War will change the geopolitical map of the Caucuses, the world of citizen media is busily evaluating its (our?) own performance.

Two good friends have taken the blogosphere to task for its failures during the conflict. Rather than rise to the defense of Georgian, Russian, Ossetian and global bloggers, I wanted to take a look at their critiques and at the phenomenon of citizen media during the conflict and at the emergence of one of the interesting epiphenomena of citizen media: citizen propaganda.

Joshua Foust, a Central Asia analyst who covers Afghan blogs for Global Voices, takes US political blogs to task for, basically, not being very interesting. He notes that “bloggers who normally provide worthwhile insight into conflict provided curiously generic analysis or links to the same”. Most blogs, even those that consistently offer useful analysis, “were still linking to the same narrow set of news sources —sources that offered little more than thin quotes from government officials.” He’s particularly concerned that US bloggers weren’t linking to Georgian and Russian blogs, even though some bloggers were writing in English, and Global Voices was working to round up posts from the region.

I thought of Foust’s critique while listening to journalist David Remnick’s conversation with Bob Garfield on On the Media. Remnick drew a distinction between reporting on the Ossetian war, which he thought was generally good, and commentary, which he thought was pretty poor. His worry was that commentators who don’t know the region well ended up reaching for analogies that might not be applicable: “When you have people who have never been to that region, who’ve probably maybe been to Moscow once in their life, who, God knows, have never been to Georgia or South Ossetia or North Ossetia, never have experienced this and never studied the history of these conflicts. And so, they reach for the first set of adjectives in the thesaurus, ‘thundering tanks’ and all the rest, and the first set of historical analogies that they can possibly reach.”

This problem with analogies is one that occurs in both mainstream and citizen media, in my experience. Early analysis of post-election violence in Kenya made inappropriate analogies to genocide in Rwanda, anticipating uncontrolled, systemic violence that (thankfully) didn’t come to pass in Kenya. It’s probably fair to wag fingers at both bloggers and commentators for comparing Ossetia to the end of the Prague Spring in 1968, but it’s also understandable that bloggers who don’t know the situation well would reach for what appeared to be an appropriate analogy. But Foust’s criticism is on the mark - it only makes sense to look for bloggers in the region and get their perspectives as well.

(Not that I always get this right either. My friend Dumisani Nyoni does a good job of keeping up with my Zimbabwe analysis and tries to balance my conclusions with his perspectives as a ZANU-PF supporter. Looking forward to him extending the arguments he makes in comments on my blog to a longer post sometime soon.)

Evgeny Morozov, a Belarussian journalist who’s fascinated with both citizen media and the different faces of cyberwar, is frustrated by a different form of blogger shortcomings: the absence of citizen war reporting in Ossetia. Morozov acknowledges that Ossetia is pretty far off the beaten path and that it may not be fair to expect there to be many bloggers in the region: “It would be sublimely naive - and condescending - to expect South Ossetians or Georgians to respond to intense shellfire by taking a crash-course in podcasting, even if they did have electricity and and an internet connection.” I’d add that South Ossetia is a region with a very small population - less than 100,000 people in total - and that the population skews high in age, as many young people have left the region, seeking opportunity elsewhere.

Besides the scarcity of blog accounts from the ground, Morozov is concerned with their veracity and reliability: “Most were of poor quality, and many appeared on blogs with no reputation, no previous blogging history (some had been registered only a few days before the war), and carried no identification of a real person with a real name who could claim responsibility for or ownership of them.” On the one hand, one could dismiss Morozov’s expectations as unrealistic… as I did in an email to him, where I pointed out that if tanks rolled into my hometown of Pittsfield, MA (with a population similar to that of Tskhinvali) there wouldn’t be very many local bloggers with established reputations to follow, despite a significantly less serious digital divide.

On the other hand, Morozov is pointing to a very real problem with blogs focused on Ossetia. There’s a wealth of blogs that claim to give eyewitness reports of the conflict, and these eyewitness reports tend to strongly favor one interpretation of events over another. My friend and colleague Ivan Sigal pointed me to OSRadio, a blog that promotes Ossetian independence in English, and features reports from television cameraman Algis Mikulskis. His accounts are profoundly anti-Georgian and include a blurry mess of first person observation, second-hand recounting of journalist’s war stories, and the repetition of rumor… all legitimated by the fact that the correspondent is on the ground in the warzone. How reliable is Mikulskis? How biased towards one interpretation or another of events on the ground is he? These are questions that have to come into play when considering interpretation of events on the ground. Morozov tells us, “the few blogging accounts I did find enlightening were almost exclusively those written by people I had met on earlier trips to Georgia - and whom I trusted. ”

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Julia Ioffe finds Russian journalists writing on their LiveJournals, offering opinions and perspectives that are far more extreme than what they’d offer on air or in print. She cites Russian journalist Dmitry Steshin, blogging as “Krig42″, pledging to stay up all night posting his videos of Tskhinvali as “a personal response to the base claims of Human Rights Watch. These fuckers thought there weren’t enough casualties in Tskhinvali.” These accounts, she tells us, are desperately sought out by Russian readers: “Combine a culture already suspicious of all things political with the natural, magnifying outlet of the free-for-all blogosphere, and you get Russian bloggers searching desperately for the necessarily elusive key to the riddle of this war.”

Part of the reason this war is such a riddle is that we’ve entered a new phase in contemporary conflict: the world of citizen propaganda. We expect - or should expect - that the governments of Russia, Georgia and Ossetia would all be seeking rhetorical advantage in the conflict. Remnick, speaking on On the Media, observes that Sakashvili’s proficency in English gives him a decisive advantage in the US media over his Russian-speaking rivals; the framing of the conflict in Cold War terms in western media further this advantage as well. What may be less expected is that citizen media accounts - blogs of eyewitnesses, journalists writing in a personal capacity, the writings of people who know and are passionate about the region - are actively engaged in rhetorical warfare as well. Georgian, Russian and Ossetian bloggers - whether off-duty journalists or ordinary citizens - all want the suffering of their group acknowledged on a global stage and are all presenting the conflict from their personal perspectives. These perspectives sometimes include troubling eyewitness accounts, and sometimes include amplification of rumors, usually ones that support that author’s interpretive frame.

It’s probably naive to expect citizen accounts of a war zone to be less politically biased than those from professional media, but in a situation where one believes professional media to be part of a propaganda strategy, it’s understandable that readers would turn to bloggers for an “unfiltered view” of events on the ground. Interpreting these views - as Morozov observed - involves making judgement calls about trust, reliability and bias… much as reading professional media does, when one suspects that analysis is biased and not neutrally framed.

What’s most interesting to me is the ways in which citizens have become actively involved in these propaganda battles. The “cyberwar” so breathlessly described by many professional journalists is little more than one set of propagandists trying to make the other side’s propaganda inaccessible. Unlike in the Russian/Estonian “cyberwar”, where denial of service attacks made key government services inaccessible, most of the attacks in this conflict are oriented more at defacing Georgian or Russian websites and discussion boards, or simply making them unreachable. (See “Misunderstanding Cyberwar“.)

These rhetorical battles are springing up in a variety of online spaces, not just blogs and message boards. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Morozov reports about a controversy brewing over a segment on Fox News, posted on YouTube. Shepard Smith interviewed an Ossetian woman and her aunt, who blamed the violence squarely on Georgian forces, thanking Russian forces for their intervention. (Morozov implies that Smith is attempting to silence the women - I disagree with that characterization, and invite you to watch the video and draw your own conclusions.) On YouTube, the video has generated passionate comment threads, and as Morozov reports, has launched speculation that YouTube has been supressing traffic statistics on the video to diminish its visibility.

Russians aren’t the first to turn to YouTube to make their case for their nation’s actions. During the Lhasa riots, a number of Chinese videographers produced montages explaining their view that Tibet was an inseperable part of China, or challenging what they perceived as Western media bias in coverage of the riots. These videos were in English, intended to persuade a non-Chinese audience to either change their views or acknowledge another point of view. It’s easy to dismiss the presence of such user-generated propaganda as the result of government initiatives like the “fifty cent party” (wumaodang), a team of online commentators paid to put forth pro-Party views on the Chinese internet. But while David Bandurski’s done a great job documenting Chinese-language commenting that appears to be organized by the Chinese Cultural Ministry, there’s no indication that efforts like anti-cnn.com or the web videos referenced above are anything other than citizen propaganda. (Imagethief has an excellent piece looking at “angry Chinese youth” and reminding us that there’s a difference between being passionate and nationalistic and being brainwashed.)

Even more than the Lhasa riots, the conflict in Ossetia is tailor-made for citizen propaganda. Analysts in the US - removed from the conflict both in distance and knowledge - are likely to rely on existing frames that may not represent events well or accurately. Citizens of Russia and Georgia are well aware that international opinion matters in the resolution of these events and turn to citizen media tools to make their cases. Their audiences, perceiving that professional media is biased against their interpretation, may place more credence on “eyewitness accounts” than they would if not already frustrated by mainstream accounts. Reading anything in these circumstances becomes a challenging task, navigating the stated and unstated agendas of anyone who’s speaking, discounting and revaluing all opinions based perceived biases.

Academic research, at its best, is about asking interesting questions and then designing experiments to answer them. One of the toughest challenges is designing experiments that are both possible and capable of answering the question at hand. The gap between the set of possible experiments and convincing experiments can sometimes be a vast one.

Just like the former US secretary of defense, you go to publication with the data you’ve got, not the data you’d like to have. And different data can lead to some very different conclusions, which helps explain why two competent groups of researchers can answer a question very differently.

I’m interested in questions of whether the internet, and specifically the rise of the read/write web, is broadening or narrowing the perspective of users. On the one hand, the rise of pervasive read/write media means that lots and lots of people are creating content - tens of millions by some counts - which should make a great wealth of perspectives and viewpoints available to the internet user. On the other hand, the structure of digital media means that it’s very easy to select just the media you’re interested in… a scenario Nicholas Negroponte termed “the Daily Me“.

Negroponte thought the Daily Me was an exciting thing. Cass Sunstein thought it was worrisome and wrote a book (twice!) about the reasons it troubled him. An academic debate continues to rage, pitting Sunstein the skeptic against a long list of cyberenthusiasts, including Yochai Benkler and Henry Jenkins.

This is the sort of question social scientists love to explore: thorny, complicated, but ultimately testable. All we’ve got to do is look at some people who spend a lot of time online and others who spend little and see who’s got a broader view of the world. Piece of cake. (The < SARCASM > tag may not be rendering properly in your browser.)

In October 2004, John Horrigan, Paul Resnick and Kelly Garrett released a paper called “The internet and democratic debate” as part of the Pew Internet and American Life project. They didn’t lack for confidence in their conclusions, subtitling the paper, “Wired Americans hear more points of view about candidates and key issues than other citizens. They are not using the internet to screen out ideas with which they disagree.”

The first sentence of the subtitle is experimentally true - that’s what their research demonstrates. The University of Michigan School of Information and Pew IALP conducted a study which surveyed 1500 Americans, some who used the internet to follow the news, some who didn’t. They asked participants whether they’d heard certain political arguments, in favor or against particular political candidates or sensitive issues. Out of a set of of eight arguments (four for a candidate or an issue, four against), broadband internet users had heard 5.5 arguments, while respondents as a whole had heard 5.2 and non-internet users had heard 5.0.

The tougher question is what significance we should attach to this result. The study sees a slightly larger gap in knowledge between people with strong political opinions and the average respondent (5.6 for strong Kerry supporters, 5.7 for strong Bush supporters) - perhaps people with strong political opinions get broadband so they can track politics more closely? Maybe rich people have more leisure time to hear political arguments and more money to buy broadband connectivity? It’s difficult to determine which variables are correlated without doing regression analysis, which attempts to isolate the inpact of each variable.

The Pew report promises that regression analysis has been done and that “Internet use did have an indepedent and positive effect on the number of statements people heard about the candidates.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t include the analysis, and it’s not clear whether internet use is a major or small factor, or whether other factors are better predictors of having heard a large set of arguments.

More difficult for me to swallow is the connection between awareness of political arguments and diversity of viewpoint. I don’t consume a lot of right-leaning US media (to my detrminent - I’d likely be a better informed citizen if I did), and I’d heard all the arguments on the left and right of the issues presented. I’d be willing to guess that I’d heard many of the “right” arguments from “left” media, sometimes in posts that began, “The right is trying to sell argument A - here’s why it’s wrong.” I’m tempted to conclude that Horrigan et al. found a correlation between internet usage and a more-informed citizenry - a correlation that may not be causal, as one can imagine people with a strong interest in being well-informed might seek out broadband internet, or might be wealthier and likelier to have broadband.

But concluding that internet users “are not using the internet to screen out ideas with which they disagree” seems like it’s blurring an important distinction between knowing the other side’s arguments, and having listened to someone make a persuasive case for them. But the distinction quickly points to the difficulty of determining how one would measure a broadened perspective. Is it knowledge of other opinions? A softening of one’s political stances to acommodate other positions? Are we looking for knowledge, for sympathy, or for some sort of change to demonstrate an ideological diversification that comes from online media?

Henry Farrell, Eric Lawrence and John Sides are intrigued by the same question explored by Horrigan and friends. They approach the topic in a paper titled “Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation in American Politics“. The title invokes a related set of political science arguments - Habermas and others have argued that societies depend on a healthy public sphere where issues can be freely deliberated. Sunstein’s recent research on this topic focuses specifically on deliberation, where he makes the argument that deliberation with like-minded fellows can lead to increased political polarization. (My objections to the Pew study might be summarized by saying “knowing the other side’s key arguments isn’t the same thing as good-faith deliberation.”)

Habermas believes that deliberation is an essential ingredient in a healthy society. Sunstein worries that polarized deliberation can make society worse, and fears that the internet enables this sort of polarization. Farrell abd friends point to another complication - citing Diana Mutz, they see evidence that deliberation with people who hold other opinions can lead to increased tolerance but to decreased political participation.

To test whether internet users are more polarized than non-users and how this might affect their participation, Farrell and friends look at a different set of data, the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. This is a much larger sample set than the Pew data, covering 36,501 participants, but since the researchers didn’t control the questions asked (they were proposed by a large set of researchers) they’re forced to mine the data they have. 5,481 respondents reported reading blogs, and 3,948 listed one or more blog they read. The researchers coded the blogs and discovered that 2,312 respondents reported reading one of 476 political blogs.

Using this data, Farrell and crew classified blog readers as “carnivores” or “omnivores”. Omnivores consumed both left and right leaning blogs, while carnivores consumed only right or left. There are a lot of carnivores - 94%, according to their analysis. Unsurprisingly, folks who read a lot of left-leaning blogs tend to be politically left, and vice versa across the ideological divide. The researchers see a similar pattern in television news consumption - viewers of Fox News tend to be from the right, while viewers of other networks skew left.

This polarization in consumption appears to be correlated to political polarization. The carnivores are not only more polarized than the average citizen, but roughly as polarized as US senators, folks whose political success often depends on their strong, steady party alleigance. (The CCES political opinion data is designed to be comparable to the NOMINATE data collected on senatorial votes.)

The small group of omnivores - 6% of those who report reading political blogs - don’t seem to face the demobilization Mutz warns of. All the blog readers participate at a higher level than the average citizen, other than right-wing carnivores, who participate at roughly the same level as the average respondent.

Farrell and his collaborators conclude with some confidence that blog readers are significantly more politically involved and polarized than the average citizen, a result that might seem to be at odds with the Pew results. After all, Pew’s study concludes that wired Americans “are not using the internet to screen out ideas with which they disagree.” But if we ignore Pew’s interpretation and just focus on their data, the studies are more compatible. Both Pew and Farrell see internet users as better informed than average citizens. Farrell would likely tell you that some of these well-informed internet users are carnivorous blog readers, who are knowledgeable about political arguments through their voracious consumption of ideologically-compatible blogs.

My interest in these experiments has less to do with questions of political polarization and more to do with interest in international news. Are internet readers more inclined to look for information about other countries, since they’ve got such a wealth of information at their fingertips? Or are they more inclined towards information on their home countries, since they can easily choose to avoid international news. Extrapolating from Pew’s data suggests that wired readers might consult more sources and perhaps consume a more diverse diet; Farrell’s research points to a strong homophily effect, which suggests the possibility of geographic cocooning.

Guess I’ll need to design my own experiments using whatever data I can as a proxy to indirectly answer the question… and hope other researchers find other data and other methods to challenge my assumptions.

The Economist has an online feature this week on Digital Nomads, people for whom mobile connectivity has become a central part of life. The piece features three videos, with the CEO of Sun Microsystems, Jan Chipchase of Nokia in Tokyo, and a podcaster and IT worker in Mumbai. The last of these is the most interesting - Abhishek Ashok Kumar documents a week in his life via voicemail, photos and video, and presents a picture of modern-day India where mobile communication is essential for everyone from mechanics, taxi drivers to IT workers.

It’s somewhat surprising that the reality Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, shows in his slideshow is somewhat more mundane than the world Kumar shows off - sure, Sun’s got a clever system that allows workers to customize a workstation with a smartcard, but “workplace hotelling” is so 1990s. Roadside repair services that advertise by painting cellphone numbers on the Mumbai streets? That’s exciting.

I’ve become a big fan of chef Anthony Bourdain, first through his snarky, obnoxious and profane books about the restaurant industry and food around the world, and more recently through his excellent television show, “No Reservations“. The show portrays Bourdain travelling around the world - or sometimes around the corner - in search of unique culinary experiences. Much of the time, the show makes the case that you should visit a place you know little about simply to eat the food - his show on Ghana was so joyful and positive that the Ghanaian tourist board should simply send DVDs of it to any potential tourists. The very best shows, in my opinion, aren’t just travelogue, but provocative political statements - his show on the US/Mexican border made a passionate case that the border needs to be looser, not tighter, and that anti-immigration activists didn’t understand the unique cross-border culture.

Last night Rachel and I caught up with Bourdain’s recent travels to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and encountered one of his best political episodes. Bourdain freely admits that Saudi Arabia hasn’t been high on the list of countries he’s dying to visit - a former heroin addict and current, unabashed heavy drinker, the Kingdom’s attitudes to alcohol alone seem like they’d be sufficient to keep him away. But No Reservations ran a contest encouraging fans to submit videos encouraging Bourdain to film a show in their hometowns. The clear winner of the contest and interview process was Danya Alhamrani, a remarkable Saudi woman born in Bismark, North Dakota, and raised between Bismark and Jeddah. With business partner Dania Nassief, she’s the founder of Eggdancer Productions, a media production company in Jeddah unique in that it’s run by two women.

Alhamrani is very clear in her videotape that she wants to bring Bourdain to Saudi Arabia to challenge his preconceptions - and America’s perceptions - of what her nation is and isn’t. She succeeds with Tony, at least - he’s surprised by the warmth with which he’s received, and observes on his blog:

Fact is we met a lot of funny, good natured, very, very generous people over there. They actually had the capacity to laugh at themselves. They were all too aware of how they look to outsiders. They watch “Friends” and “Oprah” and “American Idol”.

Many, many of them were educated abroad. They were scrupulously devout in their faith without being humorless.

It’s clear from the show that the humor and warmth which which Bourdain is received has a great deal to do with Alhamrani, who is clearly a remarkable figure, and one of the most natural bridge figures I’ve ever seen on a television screen. Her North Dakota background means she understand more or less precisely what Bourdain is inclined to believe about Saudi Arabia, allowing her to line up and then mow down stereotypes. Because she lives in Jeddah as a Saudi, not as an expat, she knows where to go, who to see and how to show Bourdain the markets and greasy spoons that always serve as his happiest locales. And because she’s apparently a force of nature, her agenda of challenging preconceptions comes through every shot of the episode.

I’ve never been to Saudi, and am not likely to make the trip as a tourist any time soon. But I found myself reacting to certain moments in the show based on my limited knowledge gained through Saudi bridgeblogs. Alhamrani and Bourdain visit a local fast food restaurant, and he’s briefly confused as to whether they should sit in the “family” or “single” sections. Alhamrani explains that the single section is only for single men - the two of them together were a family, and their meal took place in a booth surrounded by translucent glass. Bourdain asked the predictable question - whether this form of isolation was insulting to Alhamrani as a woman - she explained that it wasn’t something she found frustrating, but something that single men often resented… something that had been clear to me from reading Ahmed Al-Omran’s brilliant Saudi Jeans blog. As a young, single Saudi man, Ahmed is a feminist at least in part because he’s frustrated about the ways in which the Kingdom’s attitudes towards women end up marginalizing men as well.

There’s nothing better than visiting another country - preferably in the company of someone who can bridge cultural gaps and help you experience the actual country rather than the tourist simulacrum - for changing opinions and attitudes. Amy Teuteberg, Bourdain’s producer, finds herself - to her great surprise - writing about her fondness for her abbaya, which allowed her to blend in on the shoot to a much greater extent than in other shows.

But if you can’t go, you can always read. Reading the Global Voices Digest this morning, I came across Ayesha Saldanha’s translations from Saudi blogs about slavery and worker’s rights in Gulf nations. The frustration and anger in these posts at the treatment of “guest workers” makes it very clear that some Saudis are very upset about the situation workers face and looking for ways the situation could be addressed:

When I listen to the real complaints of workers, I can’t help but think that they are largely being treated like slaves… Not only do some companies request a month’s salary from workers in order to renew their residence permit, but other companies prevent workers from having a day off in the week, and others won’t allow any excuse or leave, even in the case of illness. One worker told me that he had been working in Saudi Arabia for three years and hadn’t been able to perform Umrah [pilgrimage to Mecca] because the company refused to give him two days’ holiday.

…

The greatest problem with us is not Islam, of course; we take pride in our customs and culture and our Islamic spirit – but we don’t apply it on the ground. One day try stopping at a busy traffic light near a work site or industrial area, and see how, in 45 degree [113 Fahrenheit] heat, the workers are crammed into a lorry meant for equipment, or for sheep at most… But the greed of the factory or company owner prevents him from buying buses, which might cost no more than 40,000 Riyals to transport the workers from their accommodation to their workplace. If the matter was in my hands, a case would be brought against any company transporting its workers in lorries, and it would be ruled that the owner should experience this transport for a week. (In my dreams!)

Ask yourself now, when was the last time you brought a meal from a restaurant for your driver or housemaid? And how often have you let the driver use your mobile phone to talk to his family, and what about the maid? Does she still write letters and send them by post?

Do you have any doubt that this is slavery?

Moldova is a place I only know through books. One of my favorite travel books is “Playing the Moldovans at Tennis” by Tony Hakws. It’s a classic of the “odd travel” genre, a trip through a little-known (in the west) Eastern European nation to settle a bar bet: Tony Hawks bets a friend that he can beat each member of the Moldovan national football side at tennis. The only logical resolution is for him to travel to Moldova (and Israel, as a couple of the Moldovan players play for Israeli sides) and challenge each player to a game.

Moldova doesn’t come out as a promising tourist destination in Hawks’s account, but he’s clearly grateful for the enthusiasm and good humor of the people he encounters along the way. The nations fares less well in Eric Weiner’s excellent “The Geography of Bliss“, a book in which Weiner travels the world visiting nations that show unusual levels of happiness or unhappiness. Moldova is one of the latter, and Weiner isn’t really able to find many people happy about living in Moldova… though many observe that the vegetables are very fresh.

Weiner offers a possible explanation - Moldova is caught between two cultures, Romanian and Russian, and doesn’t have a clear sense of national identity. Whether or not this theory is accurate, it’s certainly true that there’s a deep split in Moldova between Russian-speakers in the eastern Transnistria region, many of whom would like to see the region split and join with Ukraine or become an independent republic, and the rest of the nation, which is culturally closer to Romania.

My picture of Transnistria is a dark one, based solely on Hawks’s experiences there - which center on a scary experience with local tycoon who owns a football team and who ends up briefly kidnapping him. Transnistria frequently appears in reports about arms trade from former Soviet republics, with accusations that former Russian weaponry is exported via Odessa in the Ukraine. Between Hawks’s narrative and news stories about “frozen conflicts” in the former Soviet Union, I have a mental image of Transnistria as a dark, spooky place filled with vampire-infested castles and public markets where rocket-propelled grenades are lined up next to the vegetables… which, of course, are very fresh.

Which is why it’s always nice to chalenge imagined places with images from the real ones. Lyndon Allin has a set of translations on Global Voices from a Transnistrian Live Journal community, where Russian-speakers are talking about government propoganda, misallocation of health resources, and funny stories about uncooperative bus drivers. Basically, the same discussions that take place in any politically active blogosphere are taking place in Tiraspol.

Which has me thinking about the power of stories. On the one hand, the fact that I opened a link in today’s Global Voices Digest had everything to do with the previous stories I’d read about Moldova. I don’t pay attention to every story on Global Voices - who could? - and I tend to click on stories that appeal (as, I suspect, everyone does.) This usually means African and middle East stories, and stories I feel some sort of interest in. And Hawks and Weiner have brought me to the point where I’m sufficiently interested in Moldova to click. But they may also have given me a picture that’s so impossibly dark and depressing that a sunny picture of a cinema in Tiraspol is interesting to me simply because it’s vastly more… normal… than my mental picture of that breakaway republic. The storytellers have gotten me to pay attention, but they’ve also given me a frame for the stories that may be so inaccurate that I pay attention in the wrong ways. (See previous discussion on David Weinberger’s “Ninja Gap” here, here and here for lots more thoughts on storytelling, framing and media interest in developing nations.)

Doing a bit of reading on Lyndon Allin, the translator who wrote the Global Voices story, I discovered that he’s an ideal guide for me in getting to understand Moldova. Many of the bridgebloggers who get involved with Global Voices are people who want their countries and cultures to be better understood by the wider world. Some are people from the US or Western Europe who’ve fallen in love with little-known parts of the world and want to bridge the gaps between their experiences and their world at home. That’s been my story since heading to Ghana as a 20-year old grad student. And it sounds like Lyndon had a transformational summer in Chisinau almost a decade ago that has him committed to explaining Moldova to the wider world. Sorry we didn’t get to talk more at the GV summit, Lyndon, and thanks for helping bridge the gap between the Moldova I’ve read about and the one actually lodged between Romania and Ukraine.

Another day, another book chapter. No, not the book I’m hoping to write over the next n months - a book on citizen media in crisis situations being put together by a pair of academics in Britain. Given that some of the folks mentioned in this piece periodically read this blog, and that lots of readers are interested in how citizen media might be used in crisis situations, I thought I’d post a draft here in the hopes that y’all might have additions, subtractions, corrections and thoughts. Please feel free to use the comment thread to offer any thoughts you might have. Apologies in advance if I don’t respond to all comments promptly - I’m about to stop pretending to be an academic and pretend to run a global citizen media organization through its “annual” meeting.

Citizen Media and the 2007 Kenyan Election Crisis
Ethan Zuckerman, Harvard University
Draft - 6/20/2008

The crisis surrounding the disputed 2007 presidential elections in Kenya served as a stark reminder of how fragile young democracies can be. It also put into sharp focus the power new media technologies give citizens of developing nations to report news and organize responses to crisis situations. A number of Kenyans demonstrated how technically sophisticated and globally connected their country is at precisely the moment when their leaders demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice the nation’s reputation for stability in exchange for continued governing power.

While Kenyan citizen journalists and community organizers have a great deal to be proud of in their response to an electoral crisis and the concomitant ethnic violence, information technology was also used both by the government and civilians to amplify tensions and coordinate violent attacks. The technologies used by citizen reporters and community organizers were the same ones used by forces in the government who sought to rig the election, and agitators who attempted to expand ethnic violence. One lesson from the use of information technology in the Kenyan crisis is that the technology itself is neutral. It can be used powerfully to give citizens a voice in crisis situations, or used to aggravate those same crises.

A Brief History of the 2007 Elections

Mwai Kibaki became the third president of Kenya in 2002 after winning a landslide election against Daniel arap Moi, who was widely accused of corruption. Kibaki promised to address problems of government corruption and experiences some early victories, leading the IMF to resume lending. The resignation and flight of John Githongo, anti-corruption advisor, in early 2005 was a major blow, and suggested that corruption problems might be endemic to the Kibaki government.

Kibaki, who had promised a new constitution when elected, put a draft constitution up for vote in November 21, 2005. The constitution consolidated presidential power, making it easier for the President to fire uncooperative ministers. Raila Odinga led the opposition to the referendum, choosing an orange as his campaign’s symbol, opposed to the banana chosen by Kibaki. The defeat of the referendum was viewed as a major embarrasment for Kibaki as well as a precursor to a challenge by Odinga in the next presidential elections.

On December 27, 2007 presidential and parliamentary election pitted President Mwai Kibaki and his Party of National Unity (PNU) against Raila Odinga and the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM). Odinga led in polls before the election. Early results showed substantial losses in parliament for the PNU, and suggested that Odinga led Kibaki - at the same time, delays in announcing election results raised concerns about possible election rigging.

Three days after the elections, the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) declared Kibaki the winner of a closely contested election, with a margin of 230,000 votes. Kibaki was quickly sworn in as President as members of the ECK held a press conference to express concerns about voting irregularities. Riots erupted in the Kibera neighborhood of Nairobi, an opposition stronghold. The new government banned live television coverage of the protests and deploying troops to keep the peace and block demonstrations. Odinga attempted to hold an alterate inauguration on December 31st, but the event was banned and Uhuru Park, where it was to be held, was sealed off by riot police.

The situation took a brutal turn on January 1st when more than 100 ethnic Kikuyu (the tribe Kibaki belongs to) were burned to death by a gang of Kalenjin, Luhya and Luo men (tribes associated with Odinga) in a church outside Eldoret, in the Rift Valley. Over the next weeks, as African and international leaders flew into the country to mediate, clashes between ODM and PNU supporters, and between Kikuyu and minority ethnic groups were responsible for more than a thousand and at up to 600,000 internally displaced persons.

In early February, as party leaders began negotiations in earnest, violence slowed, possibly reflecting the political nature of the clashes, or perhaps as a result of the separation brought about by internal migration of threatened ethnic groups. On February 28th, a power-sharing agreement mediated by Kofi Annan was signed by Odinga and Kibaki, establishing a new position of Prime Minister, to be held by Odinga. Lengthy negotiations led to agreements on composition of a new cabinet, creating seats for 40 ministers, an unprecedented and expensive number.

Digital Media in Kenya

Understanding the role of citizen media in the elections crisis requires a brief history of Kenyan digital media as well. With an estimated 3 million internet users, Kenya has one of the highest levels of internet penetration in sub-Saharan Africa, at 7.9%. (Of major sub-Saharan African countries - i.e., discounting those with populations under a million - only Zimbabwe and South Africa have higher net penetration.)

More than 12 million Kenyans - roughly 30% of the population - have mobile phones, as compared to a continent-wide penetration of 20%. Kenyan companies have been early adopters of mobile money transfer systems like M-PESA and complex SMS-based systems like Kazi560 which matches jobseekers and employers via their phones.

Against this backdrop, it makes sense that Kenyans would emerge as early adopters in citizen media. Prominent Kenyan blogs, including Daudi Were’s “Mental Acrobatics” have been online since early 2003. Starting in 2004, Kenya Unlimited has aggregated posts from individual blogs on a central site and provided a “webring”, a navigation mechanism that links related weblogs together. In 2006, a nationwide blogging contest - the Kenya Blog Awards or “Kaybees” - helped bring together individual Kenyan bloggers into a community. Afrigator, an African blog aggregator based in South Africa, cites two Kenyan blogs in its list of top twenty blogs, giving the country the second best representation on that list (after South Africa, which dominates.)

Kenyan bloggers have an influence beyond their online readership. They’ve emerged as source for ideas and stories for mainstream papers. Indeed, this influence has included cases where newspapers have taken stories, word for word, from blogs and have been forced to apologize for their plagarism. (See my paper, Meet the Bridgebloggers, for more on this story). Kenyan bloggers have not been shy about using their online platforms to agitate for political change. Ory Okolloh, author of the popular Kenyan Pundit weblog, launched Mzalendo in early 2006 , a site designed to provide increased transparency and insight into the Kenyan Parliament.

Blogging the 2007 Elections

Several Kenyan bloggers took pains to document the 2007 election, but there’s little indication from their posts that any anticipated the unusual events that would follow the election. In the midst of a thorough post describing his voting experience, and the precautions taken by the ECK to prevent election fraud, Daudi Were observed:

“One thing I noticed was that no one was wearing any political party merchandise and the conversations in the queue were distinctly non political. Rather than being divided, by queuing together to exercise our civic duty and responsibility we were bound together in a sort of patriotic camaraderie. We all felt it was worthwhile to take part in the vote and that ultimately was what mattered.”

The joy in a smooth functioning democratic process extended through the 28th, as it became clear that the elections had ousted a large number of incumbents. Ory Okolloh noted:

“Folks this is a historic election by Kenyan standards, regional standards and international standards - I don’t think there is a precedent for the number of incumbents that are going down despite having massive resources behind them and attempts to bribe voters. And I challenge you to find an election in the Western world in recent times where people have come out with such determination, conviction, and a strong sense of civic duty . I’m very very proud of Kenyan voters and you all should be no matter who you are supporting.”

The tone - and focus - of coverage changed sharply on December 30th, as it became clear that the disputed election would be declared in Kibaki’s favor. The ban on live media reports particularly incensed Okolloh, who had been monitoring TV, radio, the internet, SMS and local gossip to produce several election updates per day. When the live coverage ban was announced, she declared:

“All live broadcasts have been suspended by the government. The order was released as ODM was addressing their press conference. This is now officially a police state. So we have no idea what ODM is saying, and what the security situation is around the country. ”

In the wake of a ban on live media, some Kenyan bloggers responded by redoubling their efforts as citizen reporters. Reeling from the violence in her native Eldoret, Juliana Rotich began posting brief bulletins on
refugee movements, fuel shortages, road and airport closures. Some were posted via SMS using Twitter to disseminate messages to a wider audience; others featured photos and were uploaded to Flickr using a GPRS modem. Daudi Were took to the streets on January 3rd, following ODM activists as they attempted to march to Uhuru Park to attend a banned rally. His photos document the empty streets of the usually-bustling capital and the tense standoffs between activists and security forces, and provided insights on the confrontation hard to find in international media covering the confrontations.

As it became clear that Kenya would be in crisis for more than a few days, bloggers began to search for ways to share their workload. Okolloh, who resides in Johannesburg, returned home on January 3rd, after a difficult debate over whether she should stay to document the crisis or prioritize the safety of her young child. Three days after arriving in South Africa, she added a new feature to her blog: “diary entries” written by guest bloggers and submitted to her via email. In the month the diary was active, it featured 26 posts from a variety of Kenyans, including regular bloggers who sought an opportunity to reach a larger audience and from people who had not previously published online. The tone was sharply different from Okolloh’s opinionated, but news-focused, reports - the diaries were personal reflections on the crisis, providing context for readers interested in how the crisis was affecting individual Kenyans.

In her first post on returning to Johannesburg, Okolloh proposed another form of distributed reporting, a Google Maps mashup that showed incidents of violence reported throughout Kenya:

“Google Earth supposedly shows in great detail where the damage is being done on the ground. It occurs to me that it will be useful to keep a record of this, if one is thinking long-term. For the reconciliation process to occur at the local level the truth of what happened will first have to come out. Guys looking to do something - any techies out there willing to do a mashup of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?”

The reaction to this idea, one of nine points in a long roundup, helps demonstrate Okolloh’s influence and reach in the blogger community. (Technorati lists Kenyan Pundit as the #15,282nd most popular blog in its index, a very high rank for an Africa-focused blog. At the peak of its popularity during the crisis, 0.004% of all blog posts on the internet linked to Kenyan Pundit, a level comparable to regular linking to Global Voices Online, one of the 200 most popular blogs in the world. Within three days of her January 3rd blog post, a prototype version of the system she proposed had been built. By January 9th, it was live at Ushahidi.com. (The term
Ushahidi means “witness” in Swahili.) A day later, a partnership with Kenyan mobile phone operators allowed Kenyans to post reports using an SMS shortcode.

The authors of the Ushahidi system were, without exception, people deeply involved in Kenya’s citizen media community. David Kobia, the lead author of the system, administers Mashada.com, the leading bulletin board site for Kenyans and the Kenyan diaspora. The chief architect of the system was Erik Hershman, author of the Afrigadget and White African blogs. Bloggers Daudi Were and Juliana Rotich built partnerships with NGOs in Kenya to promote the service and generate reports from outside the web community. Hershman reports that 75% of Kenyan blogs linked to Ushahidi by January 10th, helping launch the site to local and global audiences.

Ushahidi is best understood as a form of collaborative citizen journalism. Individuals submit reports of violent incidents - as well as of peacemaking efforts - via a web form or SMS message, including details of the incident, its geographic location and supporting information, including photos or video. Ushahidi’s administrators attempt to verify reports, cross-checking against mainstream and citizen media reports, resolve multiple reports into a single record and make the reports visible on an interactive map. The result is a powerful visualization of the complexities of violence and peacemaking in post-conflict Kenya.

The Ushahidi project is now focused on creating a sustainable, open-source platform to allow citizen crisis reporting anywhere in the world. The platform was adopted in late May 2008 by United for Africa, a South African project that documents xenophobic violence. On May 28th, Ushahidi won the NetSquared N2Y3 mashup challenge, a prominent software competition which awarded the project a $25,000 first prize.

Who’s the Audience for Crisis Media?

Since Ushahidi is built by SMS and web submissions, but chiefly visible via the web, it’s worth asking whether the main audience for the site is inside or outside the country. This question is complicated by the fact that the possible audience for these projects inclues Kenyans living domestically and Kenyans in the diaspora as well as non-Kenyans. Kenya’s diaspora is a powerful political and economic force - some estimates put remittances from the diaspora at more than $1 billion US per year, more than 2% of GDP. Diaspora Kenyans have held political debates in Washington DC and stay deeply involved with national politics through groups like the Kenyan Community Abroad.

Some of the most innovative efforts in response to the Kenyan crisis were aimed, wholly or in part, in motivating the Kenyan diaspora to support reconstruction efforts. Mama Mikes, an online business that accepts payments via the web and delivers goods to addresses within Kenya (a system some have termed “alternative remittance”). During the crisis, they began offering diaspora Kenyans the opportunity to give online, purchasing relief materials which the company staff delivered to displaced persons camps in the Rift Valley. Mama Mikes documented the materials purchased on their staff blog, thanking donors by name and documenting their trip to the camps. To encourage donations and support, either through Mama Mikes or directly to the Red Cross, Juliana Rotich began photographing conditions in displaced persons camps and food distribution efforts One effect of this coverage was to add transparency to the relief efforts and reassure donors in the diaspora that goods were reaching people in need.

It’s difficult to determine the extent to which citizen media efforts affected news coverage and perceptions of Kenya outside the diaspora population. (It is beyond the scope of this essay, but a future research project might consider the extent to which Kenyan citizen journalists were cited in the mainstream press in the weeks the crisis was most intense.) But it is apparent that many Kenyans were concerned with the international perception of their country in the wake of the crisis.

A group called Concerned Kenyan Writers, led by celebrated Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, sought to organize Kenyans to write op-eds in international newspapers with intent “to present a human face to the Kenyan post-election crisis; to counter the static images and impressions of escalating violence and anarchy in the foreign press and to document this turning point in our nation’s history for posterity.” In editorials like Wainaina’s “No Country For Old Hatreds” in the New York Times, authors challenged portrayals of the crisis as an eruption of ethnic hatred, suggesting instead that the events reflected systematic manipulation of ethnic stereotypes by political parties seeking political gains. Bankelele, a popular blog focused on banking and investment in Kenya, challenged the narrative that Kenya would become another Rwanda with sober, thoughtful analyses of the implications of the crisis for Kenyan economics.

It’s also clear that many Kenyan were interested in raising their voices, either through projects like Ushahidi, Concerned Kenyan Writers, Kenyan Pundit’s diaries, or via their own blogs. On December 30, 2007 - early in the crisis - Daudi Were posted instructions on starting your own blog in response to the avalanche of comments he’d received on his own posts. Many of these comments criticized existing bloggers, or demanded that certain posts or comments be removed from the Kenya Unlimited blog aggregator. Daudi responded, “If someone writes something you disagree with by all means let your voice be heard as you present your counter view, and the best place to do this is on your own blog.” This raises another open research question: did the Kenyan elections crisis cause more Kenyans to start blogging? Will they continue beyond the crisis? Should efforts to introduce citizen media to new populations focus on crisis response efforts?

A Darker Side to Citizen Media

It’s an oversimplification to view online reactions to the Kenyan crisis purely as a proud moment for citizen media. One of the most dramatic lessons of the crisis is that technologies useful for reporting and peacemaking are also useful for rumormongering and incitement to violence.

As the Kenyan crisis unfolded, many cellphone owners received SMS messages that urged them to drive neighbors from their houses: “If your neighbor is a Kikuyu, just kick him or her out of that house. No one is going to ask you anything.” Messages included expressions of ethnic hatred, warnings that one ethnic group would attack another, and rumors that implicated Kenyan companies and institutions in promoting violence. The Nation Media Group, a major Kenyan media company, was forced to issue a press release specifically to counter rumors that its vehicles were being used to transport arms throughout the country to increase violence.

Kenyan mobile phone operators cooperated with the Kibaki government to send messages to subscribers, urging them not to send or forward inflamatory messages. Juliana Rotich reported receiving the following message on her mobile phone in Eldoret: “The ministry if Internal security urges you to please desist from sending or forwarding any SMS that may cause public unrest. This may lead to your prosecution”. On January 1, 2008 Ory Okolloh reported “Bulk sms has been blocked by the government to prevent guys from sending inciteful messages.”

Firoze Manji, a Kenyan human rights activist and editor of Pambazuka News, pointed out that these messages from the government had the effect of challenging legitimate political organizing via mobile phone. Blocking bulk SMS may have been intended to stop spreading ethnic hatred, but it also created obstacles for the ODM as they attempted to organize rallies and protests. Manji was particularly offended by a message from Kibaki shortly after he was inaugurated, urging all Kenyans to remain calm: “How did Kibaki get my phone number? This is a major breach of privacy.”

The ministry of information may have been premature in threatening prosecution for forwarding messages that incited violence. The Nation reported on March 1, 2008 that the government had compiled a list of 1700 people who had forwarded messages that incited ethnic violence. However, “there is no law governing hate speech over mobile phones, radio and television.” Groups like the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights have been pushing such a law, unsuccessfully. It’s possible that concerns about the role of SMS in the crisis situation may reopen debate on electronic hate speech.

Ethnic incitement wasn’t limited to SMS messages. Bloggers discovered that their comment threads were becoming increasingly hostile and featured many hateful sentiments, sometimes expressed in tribal languages so as to be understandable only to members of that group. Daudi Were’s post on January 4th, 2008, outlining the guidelines to comment on his site left little doubt about the content he was being forced to moderate:

“I am not here to spoon feed you or even debate with you what does or does not make valid commentary. My younger cousins who are just out of their teens and about to join high school know the difference between intellectual and valid commentary and hate speech. So do you. I will not enter into a lengthy debate on whether your comment, that we should “finish” this or that tribe is valid because of some socio-economic-political-historical injustice you quote. For crying out loud our country is burning. You fuel the flames here and I will burn your comment, i.e. I will delete it.”

Moderation problems became so intense on Mashada, Kenya’s leading bulletin board site, that David Kobia had to take extraordinary steps. He shut down the site for a cooling-off period, and briefly explored paying moderators to continue their work, as they were quickly resigning after trying to cope with floods of hateful messages. On January 29th, he shut the forum down entirely, noting “Facilitating civil discussions and debates has become virtually impossible.”

A few days later, Kobia launched a new site, I Have No Tribe. Like Ushahidi, it was centered on a Google Maps mashup. However, this mashup showed posts from Kenyans around the country and around the world wrestling with the statement, “I have no tribe… I am Kenyan.” Kobia redirected the Mashada site to the new site, and it rapidly filled with comments - combative as well as supportive, as well poems and prayers. Kobia reopened the forums on February 14th, having elegantly demonstrated that one possible response to destructive speech online is to encourage constructive speech.