Social Media Companies Have Absolutely No Idea How to Handle the Gaza Conflict

http://betabeat.com/2012/11/social-media-companies-have-absolutely-no-idea-how-to-handle-the-gaza-conflict/

by iProject • 14 years ago

84 78 14 years ago

001sky8• 14 years ago

Terrorism is by definition anti-civilian warfare. Welcome to the future. Now we get dis-inter-media-ted media-ted violence. A sort of Gawker.com meets 9/11. Ugly all around. Don't forget, the "News" media will show (and make money from) all the baby killing, too. That's part of the strategy of terrorism, too. The complicity of the media to distribute the "message", because they can't resist (the ratings).

lostnet• 14 years ago

Strangely, I think this is progress.

The system of independent reporters going to partisan press conferences really muddles the independence of reporters and gives a false air of legitimacy to the claims of spokesmen.

Things should be claimed publicly and then reporters should report, fact check, and reveal inconsistencies.

But next we need a global forum that no politician could credibly not see so we can force questions and make it politically damaging not to answer.

Then they will want their old media arraignments back. :)

mmakunas• 14 years ago

I agree. Technology and media over the past two decades have done more to sanitize war (and thus make it more palatable). It's good to see the oposite happening. As dickc says, "twitter brings you closer." The more we experience the reality of it, the better our decisions will be regarding it IMHO.

sageikosa• 14 years ago

Goes back farther than that. German metal band Accept had a song on their 1986 "Russian Roulette" album called "TV War" basically lamenting the (already present) desensitization towards war brought about by bringing it safely into the living room while it remained "entertaining and far-far away".

pfraze• 14 years ago

Yeah, I certainly don't see it as a negative change. I think twitter is an informal (to the point of low-brow) place for this kind of information, but it is a broadcast messaging network. This is what it's made to do.

Tipzntrix2• 14 years ago

I think it's more that Israel and Hamas have no idea how to handle the Gaza Conflict. Using "official" Twitter accounts to announce invasions? These are meant for small status updates of 140 characters or less, not full-scale assaults.

cpeterso• 14 years ago

What happens when someone like Anonymous hacks these "official" Twitter accounts, announcing (fake) attacks. People will get hurt.

Tipzntrix2• 14 years ago

You called it. Well, you called it after Anonymous released their own twitter account proclaiming their intentions, but you called it.

slurgfest• 14 years ago

Social media companies do not have the tools or the responsibility to "handle the Gaza conflict," particularly not by some unprincipled decision to selectively censor one party to the conflict. This isn't just a matter of Israel. Propaganda is inherent to war, and is nothing new on these websites.

qq66• 14 years ago

It would be interesting to imagine social media companies behaving, legally and morally, as "common carriers" that don't censor any legal content, similar to the protections given to ISPs that comply with processes to remove illegal content. There's no serious objection to Google Search being able to find morally repugnant content -- people realize it's a "dumb" tool that will find anything that's out there. How could (and should) YouTube try to achieve the same thing?

joe_the_user• 14 years ago

I think these sites are already acting like common carriers because their users more or less expect this.

I suspect that is where a lot of the resistance to "promoted posts" is coming from. Most people don't object to promoting posts but feel like pushing a button on Facebook to do it would be "cheating" and hate that idea.

Humans value fairness highly...

ars• 14 years ago

Israel has been frequently criticized for losing the media war vs the Palestinians.

This caused people to equate the two as if targeting civilians vs militants is somehow equal.

Which is why "The IDF is letting no social media channel go untouched." They are trying to learn from their mistakes.

three144• 14 years ago

But it's still incompetent. You'd expect the IDF to keep saying things like "We extend our condolences to the innocent people killed by our missiles. We wish we had a better way to stop the missles. We hold Hamas responsible for murdering their fellow Palestinians by creating this conflict." Instead we get "Ahmed Jabari: Eliminated."

maratd5• 14 years ago

> You'd expect the IDF to keep saying things like "We extend our condolences

The point of propaganda is to project strength, not to apologize.

The reason this conflict exists in the first place, is due to a vast lack of perception of strength on either side. A squirrel doesn't pick a fight with a bear. It just doesn't happen.

In short, Israel doesn't have the balls to end this and Hamas doesn't have the means.

jcr• 14 years ago

Apologies to PG if this thread degrades into a political discussion when politics are clearly against the site guidelines (linked on the bottom of every HN page).

The coverage by Peter Kafka of AllThingsD is also worth reading:

http://allthingsd.com/20121114/social-warfare-israel-live-tw...

The social sites used to keep in contact with our families, friends, fans, and favorites are now being used for this?

What side you're on is irrelevant; using the communication tech we've created to celebrate and promote death and harm as forms of propaganda and entertainment is just wrong.

It was wrong when the Syrian rebels posted video of the execution of 10 Syrian Army members. It was wrong when the Libyan rebels posted video of the execution of Kadafi. It was also wrong for the Israeli Defense Force. And the list goes on and on...

Maybe there's some minimal good in just knowing how violent others can be, but when I wonder if our communication tech can be put to far greater and more beneficial uses like promoting peace and resolving differences, I remember the words of Douglas Adams:

"Meanwhile the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different cultures and races, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

yew• 14 years ago

I think rather the opposite is true. People communicate about violence, especially warfare. As Twitter et al transition from 'businesses' to 'methods of communication' this sort of thing will become more and more common.

The alternative, of course, is irrelevance. (Or convincing people to stop being violent. Ha.)

mercurial• 14 years ago

> Maybe there's some minimal good in just knowing how violent others can be, but when I wonder if our communication tech can be put to far greater and more beneficial uses like promoting peace and resolving differences, I remember the words of Douglas Adams:

> "Meanwhile the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different cultures and races, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

That's a good quote, but I think modern society's take on violence is to make it highly scenarised. A Brave New World kind of violence, where you know where the good guys and the bad guys are. One could hope that increased media coverage would lead to less wars, because people would realize how disgusting it actually is. That is, until you realize the Romans watching the gladiators also got their violence along with the daily bread.

tkahn64• 14 years ago

Unlike in Europe and here in America, a war is happening in Israel and all Israelis under 45 are either active soldiers or reserve soldiers. I have family in Tel Aviv that was forced to run into a bunker earlier today. I have a friend from high school that is stationed at the Gaza border. It's not an abstract, far away event. The tweets are directly relevant to Israeli society.

anthonyb6• 14 years ago

That still doesn't make it right to post tweets glorifying murder.

maratd5• 14 years ago

> It was wrong when the Syrian rebels posted video of the execution of 10 Syrian Army members.

And I'm sure you ran to HN to protest when it happened, right?

> It was wrong when the Libyan rebels posted video of the execution of Kadafi.

And you were vigorously denouncing it then too, right?

> It was also wrong for the Israeli Defense Force.

Oh. We finally get to the reason you posted.

angersock• 14 years ago

Anyone want to throw together a scoreboard while these idiots butcher innocents and each other?

You would need to scrape Twitter to get events, you could scrape EXIF data on the coverage photos and use D3 to visualize the results, and use HTML5 audio to run a reading of Twain's "The War Prayer" in the backgruond.

You could even expose a simple REST API to let the IDF and Hamas POST targets and PUT munitions/attacks, and then give some neutral body a key to confirm attack success or failure.

We could have badges. We could have freemium content--exclusive access to kill videos, or you could buy coins to sponsor your favorite charity for repairing the region.

It'll be great.

EDIT: Come now, sarcasm detectors. The above is meant in jest (mostly).

R_Edward• 14 years ago

Star Trek: TOS did it. Except after identifying which people were killed in the virtual attacks, those individuals were contacted and ordered to report to the collateralization center for the official results of the attacks to be consummated. Not particularly surprisingly, Capt. Kirk and the Jolly Enterprise Crew yet again violated the Prime Directive to set those silly savages' back on the True Path of All that is Right and Proper.

codeulike• 14 years ago

see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4791367

_delirium• 14 years ago

A scoreboard in the form of continually updated, and often publicized, kill counts is actually a pretty traditional part of warfare. Dispatches throughout WW2 announced how many Germans were killed vs. how many Americans in a particular engagement, and those were compiled to produce incrementally updated per-battle tallies. Newspapers and newsreels republished that kind of information regularly as well. Sort of the wartime version of baseball box scores.

nhebb• 14 years ago

I'm halfway through Six Days of War by Michael Oren, and I think the most obvious thing that social media companies have done to handle the conflict is simply to exist.

[Kindles suck for skimming back though a book, and I don't have an eidetic memory. My apologies if I get any of these facts wrong.]

On the first day of the 1967 conflict, based on glowing, but false, reports from the Sinai outposts, President Nasser and Egyptian military leaders thought that they had knocked out most of the Israeli air force, when in fact the opposite was true. The cascade of misinformation not only aided Israel's efforts against Egypt, but it also lead Jordan's King Hussein to commit to the conflict in the West Bank. Similarly, news of Egypt's success is thought to have emboldened Syria and lead to the battle in the Golan Heights.

Now, 45 years later, with the social media and other communications channels available, there is less chance that the conflict could escalate due to false information. (It could still escalate for other reasons, of course.) It's just a theory, but maybe Israel's in-your-face social media strategy is a blunt retaliation to any Baghdad Bob style reporting taking place within the Arab world. Their goal might not be to provoke the enemy, but instead to dampen any groundswell that might occur due to false reporting.

flyinglizard• 14 years ago

There was a lot of internal criticism of Israel's media handling throughout the previous conflicts. Israelis consider themselves the defenders, and the policy of sparingly releasing information over the conventional channels just made it look like a sinister government that tries to hide something.

Personally, I find the tone of the current campaign a bit too brash but perhaps this is more effective than dabbling with the finer rhetoric and points of this conflict. Israel's media activities won't make any Hamas supporter switch sides, but they are important for the wider neutral population which isn't aware of the details and isn't actively supporting one side or the other (it's the "Oh why can't they have peace" or "Let's nuke the Middle East and be done with it" crowd).

Overall it's a good step forward in the accountability of governments towards the common people.

_djo_• 14 years ago

I'm surprised that none of the reporting on this has mentioned the Kenyan use of Twitter to promote their military offensive in Somalia against al-Shabaab. That includes breaking the news first of the amphibious assault on Kismayu. Their spokesperson's handle is @MajorEChirchir.

I think this might a good trend, despite the (in my view unnecessary) brashness, as both Hamas and the IDF employ spokespeople for the sole purpose of getting their version of the story out and I believe it's better to get that directly via Twitter and other communications mediums rather than through press conferences.

As others pointed out, this also frees up journalists to spend more time doing actual investigate reporting and it changes the scope of a spokesperson's job from saying a lot of nothing to a room of journalists to making their country or organisation's case to the world at large.

pron4• 14 years ago

The mutual bloodshed is terrible, and, as a resident of Tel Aviv I'm personally affected, but there is one thing that has always perplexed me a bit, which is the perception of the actual ferocity of the conflict. Obviously, every death is a terrible loss, but this forum is fond of numbers, so while we're on the subject, here are some numbers:

The total number of deaths in the entire Israeli-Arab conflict over the past 70 years or so, is - according to Wikipedia - under 100,000. Out of which, about 25,000 are Israeli, a similar number are Palestinians, and the rest, I guess are casualties of all the other fighting arab countries combined, although the total seems to me a bit high. That's the total for the past 70 years.

By comparison, in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, Wikipedia puts the number of deaths at about 30,000 in each country in the last year alone. And the Mexican drug war has claimed the lives of about 56,000 since 2006; some estimates go as high as 100,000.

So, not to compare suffering, but the entire Israeli-Arab conflict has claimed, over the last 70 years, more or less the same number of lives as the drug war in Mexico in the past 6.

I'm not even sure what I wanted to say by that.

001sky8• 14 years ago

There is actually some merit to the notion that this is one of the <least> violent times in Human History. But I wouldn't trust that intuition very far. The world is becoming a much more dangerous place as we speak. But for comparison, The US has been at war for 12 years, with under 5K combat deaths including the invasion of IRAQ and what-ever-u-want-to-call mess in Afghanistan. Thats comparable in order of magnitude the civillian deaths of the single day 9/11 in the US.[2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualti...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks

nandemo• 14 years ago

The Iraq war alone has resulted in at least 100 thousand total deaths (including civilians) according to the most conservative estimates. How is the 5k figure relevant? That's like AlQaeda claiming 9/11 wasn't very violent, since they lost only a dozen combatants.

nivertech3• 14 years ago

2 million murdered in Darfur and South Sudan - nobody cares.

1 Hamas terrorist killed - CNN breaking news.

Make your own conclusions.

noibl10• 14 years ago

I'm not sure what you wanted to say either but two things are notable about your comment: 1. you broaden the context to include the entire history of the Israeli-Arab conflict, 2. you make no distinction between military and civilian casualties.

Between 1860 and 2010 there were a reported (by Israel) 3,971 Israeli civilian casualties of terrorist attacks.[1]

Between 2000 and 2012 there were a reported (by Israel) 3,034-3,726 Palestinian non-combatant civilian casualties of IDF operations.[2]

Obviously, tank battles in Sinai are not going to produce the same casualty rates as wars of attrition fought at street level in densely populated cities. Air strikes on Gaza (10,000 people / km2) are precisely on the same order of devastation though. The broader you make the context, the more you mask that fact.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_casualties_of_war

[2] http://old.btselem.org/statistics/english/Casualties.asp

pron4• 14 years ago

Well, I don't know how many non-combatants die in the cartel wars, but I guess I'm saying that the Israeli-Arab conflict is lesser in magnitude compared to past and present violent conflicts around the world, perhaps contrary to perception. So it's not Vietnam-big (where millions lost their lives); it's Mexican drug war-big.

Of course, while not a big conflict in terms of actual warfare, it carries a lot of political influence worldwide.

Zenst• 14 years ago

It is interesting that such conversations would be on private phone lines between the two countries. Though it is in many ways nicer for both sides to play with words than weapons. First side to challenge the other to a game of peace wins.

It is also worth mentioning that when a individual or group of start taking to social media in with such posturing intent that the countries goverments try and often suceede in closing them down. When countries do it then the moral echo of any form of standards becomes defining. Free speech is just that as long as it is just words.

Let them play chess or farmville, pixels alot easier to replace than people.

rhizome• 14 years ago

Is there any reason to believe that this story in itself is part of the IDF social media strategy?

jpdoctor• 14 years ago

I can't tell if this is a good thing or bad thing.

Good = it will publicize and make the horrors of war very accessible. This is the biggest jump since Vietnam (the first war to achieve widespread broadcast on TV into living rooms daily.)

Bad = it will inflame the irrational players further.

mcpie• 14 years ago

I won't make the horrors accessible. It will merely serve as a live propaganda feed mediating and obscuring the suffering happening on the ground.

Social Media Companies Have Absolutely No Idea How to Handle the Gaza Conflict

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