DigiActive.org

Tactic: Facebook and blogs highlight cyclone relief in Burma

Burmese refugees made homeless by the cyclone

Description: International aid is beginning to arrive in Burma, following last week’s devastating Cyclone Nargis, which is believed to have killed at least 22,000 people. Another 41, 000 people are currently unaccounted for. Internet activists go online to blame Burma’s military regime for the slow response and use social media to get aid to victims.

Tools Used: Facebook, blogs

What They Are Doing: Burma Global Action Network (BGAN) created a facebook page to act as a clearing house for Internet users to find and make much needed donations to relief organizations working on the ground. Users are also being asked to upload and view photos, videos and personal stories about the damages Cyclone Nargis has created. Many bloggers have also started to circulate BGAN director Sophie Lwin’s call to action and her disgust with Burma’s government on their blogs.

“I am not going to be sleeping much at all over the next 48 hours, right now their (sic) are people in Burma struggling to save their homes and find food and the regime is in total disarray,” said Lwin. “They need us.”

photo credit: AFP

Tactic: Facebook used in tracking war criminals

Description: Anti-genocide group Aegis Trust created a campaign using the social networking site Facebook to find alleged war criminals in Darfur.

Tools used: Facebook, Google Maps and e-petition

What Are They Doing: Aegis is asking Internet users to provide updates on their Facebook page about the whereabouts of suspects – Sudan’s Humanitarian Affairs Minister Ahmed Harum and Janjaweed leader Ali Kushayb. The International Criminal Court has indicated both men for over 40 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur.

Aegis Trust is also using Google Maps to track the last-known movements of the suspects. Users can also go to Aegis’ “Wanted for War Crimes” webpage to sign a petition that will be automatically emailed to members of the United Nations Security Council.

“The men on the watch list are suspected of hundreds of thousands of murders,” said Dr James Smith, chief executive of the Aegis Trust in a recent statement. “Someone, somewhere, knows where they are. They shouldn’t be allowed to live out their last days in luxury. Their futures lies in a courtroom. That’s what their victims deserve.”

Theory: The Streisand Effect

The Streisand Effect refers to instances when Internet censorship has the opposite effect, actually increasing distribution and awareness of the censored material.

Origin of the Term: In 2003 singer Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for $50 million dollars to force them to remove a picture of her home (see above) from a series of 12,000 pictures of the California coast taken to study the effects of beach erosion. As a result of this peculiar law suit, the picture of her home was disseminated on the Internet and many more people saw it than would have if she had not tried to censor the image.

Application for Activists: How can activists apply the Streisand Effect as a means of countering Internet censorship? The key to the Streisand Effect is distributing the censored material and publicizing the instance of censorship. Without these two elements - distribution and publicity - censored material will not be viewed by a wide enough audience to counteract the original effect of the censorship. The end goal is to show your government that censoring content has the reverse effect, and thus discourage your government from censoring

From a technical perspective, the best way to distribute censored content is by e-mail, though feeds can also be used, as in the case of Amnesty International’s Irrepressible campaign, which allows bloggers to publish a feed of censored blog content on their own blog.

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Action Alert: Free Esraa and her Companions

What? Join one of the Facebook groups pushing for the freedom of the 3 digital activists jailed in Egypt: Esraa Abdel-Fattah Ahmed, Mahamed El Sharkawi,and Kareem El Beheiri

When? Now!

Where? The Facebook groups to join are divided linguistically. Join the one in the language you are most comfortable with, as you will likely be receiving messages in that language from the group.

Arabic: Free Esraa افرجوا عن إسراء ورفاقها

English: Free Esraa and her Companions! أفرجوا عن إسراء ورفاقها

French: Libérez Esraa et ses Camarades. Free Esraa.

Norsk: Free Esraa and her Companions!

How? Click one of the links above to visit the group you would and then click the “Join” button on that page.

Why? On April 6th we covered the story of Egyptian activists using a Facebook group, 6 April - اضراب عام لشعب مصر (April 6 - General Strike for the People of Egypt), to drum up participation in a general strike on Sunday, April 6. The group’s founder Esraa Abdel-Fattah Ahmed, and bloggers Mahamed El Sharkawi and Kareem El Beheiri were arrested by Egyptian police in connection with the Facebook group and the call of the strike.

Who is organizing the action? There are slightly different officers and admins for the 4 groups, but Egyptians Hany Elkhayat, Samy Harak, Wael Nawara, Manal Fahmy, and Mohamed Zaki Elsheemi seem to be involved with most of them. Dina Ibrahim is the sole admin of the French group.

DigiActive News: Radio Interview (in Australia!)

Last week, DigiActive Co-Founder Mary Joyce was interviewed for the Australian community radio program The Fourth Estate with Daz Chandler. You can take a listen below by clicking the green arrow:

Topics discussed include the motivation for founding DigiActive, examples of how activists are using Facebook to organize international protests, whether digital activism is elitist, and why it’s a good idea to use online commercial tools for activism.

DigiActive News: DigiActive Top 50 Web 2.0 Challenge

Part of what we do at DigiActive is figure out how to use otherwise innocent commercial online platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter for activism. However, there are tons of interactive online tools out there and we can’t review all of them. We need your help!

Fortunately, we are not alone in this effort to co-opt the Internet for the purposes of social justice. If you are one of those people that likes to figure out the activist use of new online tools, we invite you to watch the following slide presentation, which features the top 50 Web 2.0 tools to support teaching an learning (it was creating by technology instructors in a school district).

Our challenge to you: figure out how digital activists can use these tools. Watch the slide show and then investigate the tools that interest you most and think about how an activist might be able to use that tools in a campaign for social change. E-mail your suggestions to Mary @ DigiActive.org and we will post the most creative activist tool use suggestions on DigiActive.

| View | Upload your own

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Campaign: Help Fouad Mourtada

Description of Campaign: On February 5, Moroccan Fouad Mourtada was taken into custody for posting a joke profile of Prince Rachid (the King’s brother). Two weeks later, he was sentenced to three years in prison and fined over $1000 on a false charge of document identity fraud. The goal of this campaign is to reverse this sentence, which is horribly out of proportion to the offense committed.

Digital Activism Tools: YouTube, web site, G-Chat, Skype, Facebook, digital video, digital photography

How These Tools Are Being Used: First there was the official web site, www.HelpFouad.com with an e-petition asking for Fouad’s release. Members of the campaign both inside and outside Morocco communicated using G-Chat and Skype. Then there was the Facebook group, Help Fouad Mourtada. Through the Facebook group and offline social networks, rallies were organized this past Saturday at Moroccan embassies and consulates in 8 cities around the world (Rabat, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Washington DC, Montreal, Madrid, and London). Digital video and photographs were collected from these rallies made into a video to promote the cause (see below).

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Action Alert: Take a Photo for Fouad

What? Take a photo of yourself and your friends showing support for Fouad Mourtada, who was sentence to 3 years in prison for posting a joke profile of the Moroccan King’s brother on Facebook.

When? Now!

Where? Send the picture to helpfouad AT gmail.com, the official e-mail address of his campaign

How? Create a sign with a statement in support of Fouad and then take a picture of yourself, a friend, or co-workers, holding the sign.  Then send the picture to the e-mail address above.

Why? to show that many many people support Fouad.

Who is organizing the action? The Committee to Help Fouad

Action Alert: Sign the Petition to Free Fouad Mourtada

What? e-petition protesting the 3 year prison sentence of Fouad Mourtada, who posted a joke profile of the Moroccan King’s brother on Facebook.

When? Now!

Where? on the Help Fouad web site at http://helpfouad.com/7437/index.html

How? go to the above URL and sign the e-petition
Why? to show the international opposition to this injustice

Who is organizing the action? The Committee to Help Fouad

Con: Facebook Activism Doesn’t Match the Real Thing

The following comment is by Mike Eber, a student at the University of Michigan in the USA. He tried to organize a march on campus using Facebook. The event’s Facebook page listed 230 confirmed attendees, with about 350 more saying they would “maybe” attend. However, only 20 people actually showed up for the march. Here he argues that the Internet is still not a replacement for offline contact and organizing:

Interactive social networking makes self-expression easy, to the point that the ease itself is its flaw…. This is exactly what plagues Facebook communication. Can sending an e-mail or joining a Facebook group equal the sincerity of using valuable time to participate in a demonstration? Probably not. But consider it in more personal terms. How does writing “happy birthday” on a friend’s Facebook wall, for example, compare to a customary phone call?

Although Internet organization might be the grassroots forum of the future, the behavior of the Facebook generation has not caught up with our pre-Internet expectations of human behavior…. For this to change, we must put our money where our mouse is.

Source: The Michigan Daily