 Hello, everybody, and welcome to this virtual event hosted by the Berkman Klein Center, Digital Witnesses, The Power of Looking. My name is Ellery Roberts Biddle, and I am a BKC alum. I currently work with Ranking Digital Rights Project. And it is a pleasure to be back at the Berkman Klein Center, one of my favorite homes in the digital rights universe that we all inhabit. It is a real privilege to be speaking today with these three remarkable women, scholars, activists, journalists, who I will now introduce. We will begin today with Alyssa Richardson. Dr. Richardson is an award-winning journalist, pioneer in mobile journalism, and assistant professor of journalism at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School. She researches how marginalized communities use mobile and social media to produce innovative forms of journalism, especially in times of crisis. Dr. Richardson is also the author of Bearing Witness While Black, African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest Journalism. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Communication, Journalism Studies, Convergence and the Black Scholar, among others. Next up we will have Hanan Virjani. Hanan is a journalist from Niger. She has worked for Africa News, Euro News and France 24, covering business, politics and security. And she has done in-depth reporting on the impact of Boko Haram on populations in the Lake Chad region. As a Neiman Berkman Klein fellow in journalism innovation, she studied how to develop new solutions journalism methods when covering nations undergoing digital transformations. With a focus on ensuring rigorous and effective reporting. Today, she hosts Beyond the Noise, an independent digital journalism project focused on providing reliable information and debunking fake news and myths circulating online in Africa. And we'll conclude with Nana Noachukwu. Nana is a knowledge management advisor for the UK Department for International Development. For more than a decade, she has worked on economic policy, governance and internet related issues. And she's currently tracking and monitoring the manipulation of Facebook and Twitter community safety guidelines. She's also finishing her master's degree in international humanitarian affairs at the University of York in the UK, where she is researching the opportunities and challenges of technology and improving humanitarian response. So to get us started, I wanted to just invoke the name of a dear colleague and Berkman Klein scholar and writer on Chalmina, whose book means to movements. And just kind of came to mind for me as I was, as I was reading and thinking about what everyone's going to be sharing today so I wanted to just read a tiny excerpt from her introduction, where on talks about and links to different sort of currents of digital activism in the the protests in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 following the police murder of Michael Brown and the protest movement in Hong Kong that has been through several waves but a major one of which occurred in 2014. So she she situates us in Ferguson and writes of the protesters, as they raised their hands and fists, they also raised their phones to document share a network with protests across the country. I watched my social media feeds flood with images of people with their hands showing palms facing the camera. The photos reenacted as a performative gesture, the chant that was quickly becoming synonymous with the Ferguson protests. The chant leader would call out, don't shoot the crowd would respond. Meanwhile, half a world away in the subtropical metropolis of Hong Kong, tensions were growing over issues of democratic rights and universal suffrage. A month later in September 2014. The similarities became impossible to ignore students hands were raised to the sky in a gesture against police violence. She notes how these situations have had so many differences but that's the striking similarity of the hands up gesture, reflecting common concerns about police violence. And she points out how online people in in both movements were kind of interacting with each other sharing tactics, kind of using and and remaking hashtags to just as a sign of solidarity. So she writes the internet was essential to the rise of both movements. It made them visible to themselves and to each other. It's really impossible now to think of a social movement without the internet. And as the world comes online communities advocating for change or popping up globally in places large and small, channeling their energies to the streets and to the web. So I can't wait to hear about more movements. So let's kick it off with Alyssa. Thanks so much, Ellery I love that introduction. I love the fact that we're grounding this and the fact that these devices have given ordinary people the power to protest all around the world. I want to anchor or start us off with some observations I made as a mojo or mobile journalists here in the US. So I'm just crossing the world going back and forth between different points in Africa, and here. And so I'm going to give us just a brief history of what black witnessing has looked like in the US as I call it in my book. And then also talk about how some of these tactics are indeed shared internationally. So I always like to talk about 10 years ago, when the iPhone first came out with its first front and rear facing camera. And this is a commercial that my journalism students and I made 10 years ago to show what was possible in journalism. This is ourselves the Morgan mojo lab, and we were situated at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, and it's a historically black college. And so my students were the first ones in the world to work, and an only mojo only environment mobile first environment, and we were invited around the world to show people what it is we were doing in our tiny classroom. At a particular conference we were invited by global girl media to come to South Africa to replicate our process in our curriculum. And so we went at the tail end of the World Cup, and we taught many many girls there how to produce mobile journalism. And while I was on the continent is when I really started to notice that points north were in great turmoil, and as many of you probably remember the Arab spring erupted. During that time, I was getting most of my news about the Arab spring from Twitter, and I was not getting it from the broadcast stations that you may think of most often. One of the things I should also say though, is that as I began to see unrest really spread throughout Morocco, and will actually Tunisia and Libya, I was invited by Morocco I should say just as their kind of violence began to ramp up to replicate the mojo lab there too. And so we taught 40 different girls all across the nation, how to do mobile journalism, so that there wouldn't be violence continuing in that nation. And so I really started to realize that I could do international exchanges with my students, having students in Baltimore, Maryland, Bowie, Maryland, talk to my students back in South Africa or Morocco, just using these devices. And I should also mention that I wanted to go back to school after all of these experiences abroad, because I realized there are people who are paid to read and write and just talk about what they read and wrote, and those people are called professors. As a working journalist at the time I had never thought of academia, but I saw just how much time academics had to really analyze what they were doing, parse what they were doing, make sense of it, and then share best practices. In the week of my grad school PhD experience, Mike Brown was killed. And once again I realized that I'm learning about what's happening in Ferguson, not from broadcast TV, but through black activists on Twitter. And many of them like the ones who were featured here have little more than their cell phone and a Wi Fi connection. The only difference is, by now we were three years out from the Arab Spring and three years away from the Occupy Wall Street movements, which were also mediated by mobile devices. Yet I wasn't seeing any literature about Ferguson at all. I saw a ton of articles and rightfully so about the Arab Spring and a ton of articles about the mobile phones impact on Occupy. But I kept searching, saying surely somebody is going to write something about black people's use of cell phones and how this has been a completely new way of getting the word out. As a girl, I remember sitting next to my dad watching this video of Rodney King being beaten almost to death. I remember my dad who is a son of the Caribbean saying, Jesus, they don't do this to people back home. And I thought back home, well, this is my home. What am I supposed to make of that? What's going to happen to you? What is going to happen to my brother? And as many of you know, Los Angeles where I'm based now erupted after these four police officers were acquitted. And even with the video, I saw this as a watershed moment for mobile witnessing. And I said surely somebody's written about this and I started to scour more. And there were a few articles here and there. But the majority of them were about the legal case itself and not the impact of the video. And so that's when I really began to get this idea that I needed to go back in time to really trace how many times African Americans used technology to shine a light on injustices. And so that's how the genesis of this book can be described as really a frustration with the fact that my people weren't being featured in the canon. I saw all of this innovation, black innovation, in terms of using these technological tools that were not designed for us in the first place to really get the word out about things that have been plaguing us for such a long time. And in order to do that, I knew I needed to go far back in time, not just to the Rodney King video that's nearly 30 years old, but even farther back than that. And so I landed on because it can be very difficult to find in beginning and end points for things like these. I said, even though I know black history doesn't start in slavery. I know that we started originally in Africa. Many of us don't know where. And so we've been torn apart from that from the continent torn apart from even knowing our true true origins. And I think that the way that that is framed often is it's false. I have no other way to say that the Jewish Holocaust, of course, is framed as a great tragedy that affected millions and I know 6 million. We don't have a true number of people who were stolen from their homeland and sold into the transatlantic slave trade. We have estimates like this one. And when I saw this slate magazine animation of just how slavery picked up and took off. Not because there were black witnesses who could share that information, witnesses like Frederick Douglass, who tried to tell us and not one not to three autobiographies, what the slave trade actually was. And so when I began to really study this as a PhD student I thought, why isn't this framed as a Holocaust. In fact, the Jewish community has done a fantastic job of linking back and connecting every current atrocity, or every current anti Semitic act to the original sin of the Holocaust. But African Americans have been trying so hard to do that too to link back all of these systemic injustices to the original sin, which is the slave trade. We have not been as successful because people don't see it as a Holocaust. When I began to interview for the book many people who study Frederick Douglass and study all of the loss that occurred. I thought this was the original use of technology to really hack or shine a light on injustice. And many of the historians that I interviewed said, if you were to dry up the Atlantic Ocean, there would indeed be a trail of bones that leads from Africa to points west. And that horrified me thinking that there were all these lost souls and all these lost stories that just weren't being told. And so I had to think about where can I start this story for bearing witness while while black for me, there are numerous entry points as you saw in that map. And so I decided to focus on the US. And in it I talk about people like Ida B Wells, who took the baton from Frederick Douglass and started to document lynching in her her lifetime. She was able to sneak down from points north down south to track at least 4000 lynchings in her lifetime winning the Pulitzer Prize, posthumously last year for doing so. And as we traveled through time people like the late John Lewis were masters at using technology to plead their case back then the news cycle only lasted 15 minutes in the evening, hence the term 15 minutes of fame. And so we didn't have these 24 hour news cycles you had to stage your demonstration around the time that Walter Cronkite and his colleagues were going to be down there. And so John Lewis knew that the sit in the protest the demonstration the march had to take place at a strategic time, and he used the media to plead his case. And so that brings us to this new vanguard that I'm going to talk about today. As we open it up to question and answer after our other great speakers. I have interviewed 15 top citizen journalists activists who would never refer to themselves as journalists, but instead in the book call themselves truth seekers truth tellers historians family historians. And so some of them are Alicia Garza the founders of Black Lives Matter. I also spoke to the family attorney for George Floyd and Alton Sterling and Walter Scott. There are people in here like David Banner, a former full time rapper and now activist. Also scholars are here e viewing is here Clint Smith is here both from Harvard University and Marissa Johnson who famously interrupted Bernie Sanders on his campaign trail. I just want to share that some of these activists have gone on to international fame from a cell phone. Here's Devon Allen's iconic photograph now on the front of time magazine, as he was documenting his native Baltimore and the unrest that occurred in the wake of Freddie Gray's killing in 2015. This picture hangs in the Smithsonian Museum, one of our most prestigious museums in the nation. He also loaned me a photograph for the cover of my book. Again, this summer becoming one of only three amateurs to grace the cover of time magazine with this illustration this photograph actually of a peaceful die in in Baltimore, that was responding to George Floyd's killing. I also want to note that as a black woman I also feel compelled to bear witness while black, not only am I a curator and collector of black stories, so that they don't die, and so that they're not misrepresented or push to the side. Finally this summer worked with a team GRX immersive labs to produce my first docu series my first films, and these films really traced what activism look like in Minneapolis, Washington DC Atlanta, and LA, and we did it in this new frontier again hacking technology and pushing further from cell phones to this time doing it within 360. And so these these videos are made for VR headsets, and we were able to sell this production to Oculus Facebook, and had a great opening debut of it last week, but we link in time, just much like I do in the book, the former acts of journalism to today's. And so as I wrap I want everyone to think about just these three overlapping eras of domestic terror that have African Americans have faced in the 200 years that they've been here. And I could start in slavery which led to lynching which then morphed to what we have now police brutality. And in this iconic magazine cover by the great Kadir Nelson one of my favorite artists. And in one painting, what I attempted to do in more than 300 pages of book, and that stitched together what the African American experience has been. In terms of trying to use technology to get the word out about injustices that are needed out against us. And so at the very bottom of this painting. You see a diagram of what African Americans would have gone through, and what we call the middle passage how they would have been stacked up into the halls of these ships. You also see whipped Pete at the very bottom on the right hand side, the very first slave who sat for a photograph for journalists, so people could see what his back look like and what the brutality of slavery look like. You see in the middle the Rodney King video I mentioned, and up above that you see Emmett Till. You also see I am a man, the placards that represent the very last protest that Dr King led before his assassination from Memphis sanitation workers. Medgar Evers is here. A man was lynched yesterday is here the iconic flag that flew outside of the NAACP building. And you also see Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland is here and there's so many people who could not fit inside of George Floyd's even though he was large and mighty. And so as I close out, I just want us to remember that black witnessing is not new. It's something that's been going on at least for Americans for the last 200 years, as we have hacked new technologies to share what is going on. And we have to remember that each generation of witnesses is getting younger and younger. Last summer, a child led us. A 17 year old girl Darnella Frazier was the one who filmed George Floyd's tragic killing. But I thought even smaller than that is this little girl, Diana Reynolds, and I dedicated the book to her. She is the stepdaughter of Philando Castile. She was only four years old when she sat in the backseat of the car and watched Officer George Floyd's shoot him to death. And so, for the littlest witnesses, I think we really owe it to them to continue to push these boundaries of journalism and technology. And I'll stop right there. I'm going to pass it to Hanan. That was very moving. Thank you. And now we'll hear from Hanan. Thank you so much, Elisa for this very thoughtful and I want to say almost emotional presentation. Thank you. That was enlightening. I'm going to try to share my screen now. All right, so just to follow up and maybe to add to what Elisa has talked to us about I will focus because it's basically been my area geographically of interest. I think my entire career on the African continent and Sub-Saharan Africa in particular. I want to say first and foremost when speaking of the use of a utilization of digital tools to sort of call out oppression and to fight for human rights and to basically be an activist. There is a sense that awareness has to be basically the basis of everything. And what we notice on the African continent in particular is that internet penetration has grown increasingly and has grown steadily in the last few years, which has made it easier for people to access information. So the traditional channels of information that we used to have, which were basically broadcast television and newspapers are no longer the only sources of information available and which that has made it more available for a greater number of people to get access to information. And with that obviously then social media had a role to play. So according to a recent study by the UNDP, the growing use of Facebook, Twitter and African news apps and other forms of social media in Africa have increased citizens awareness of political events and changed perceptions both nationally and internationally. It's also given less celebrated actors a voice in global and local discourse. That means that you would have a very particular small group of people with a certain economic background and maybe economic and social background that would have the ability to influence their community and to raise awareness on certain issues. And that has shifted to a wider spectrum of people. For example, increasing Twitter use in Kenya is said to be linked to citizens interest in challenging misrepresentation by the international media in terms of how violence and election campaigns are reported. So you'll see that many Africans across all 54 nations have challenged news channel, traditional Western mainstream platforms such as CNN in the way that they have reported on certain events because they have deemed certain coverages as dated and not fully representative of the scale and scope of the realities that they're faced with. And they could directly challenge such narratives through social media. Similarly, in Nigeria social media has reportedly been encouraged as a result of the Nigerian mainstream presses reluctance to speak and to report on sensitive issues, mainly issues that had to do with Nigerian government officials and also calling out powerful corporations for corruption issues and corruption scandals. So what we really are seeing is that social media is an instrumental tools for a younger generation of African. In particular, Twitter is a form of social media that has revolutionized political discourse and enabled African populations to communicate in new ways. So unlike other platforms, Twitter is easily accessible through a mobile phone, as Lisa mentioned as well. And that gives ordinary citizens a voice also international discourse. And I think that what is also striking what was striking in recent months, particularly during the, I guess in 2020 is that for instance the Black Lives Matter resurgence in the US definitely had an echo on African soil. And it did through Twitter in particular galvanize a certain sense of frustration that Black Lives Matter was not necessarily something that had to be constricted to the American context, but also could make sense in the African context as well. So that's why we saw movements such as Zimbabwe and Lives Matter emerge and basically say police brutality is also a reality that we have faced with a regular basis. And as much as the basis for the oppression is not necessarily race because we're talking about Black Nations, there is still a sense that Black Lives Matter everywhere. And therefore, we should advocate for that and we should be showcased solidarity in a way when discussing Black Lives Matter. There was also a way for Kenyans to use Twitter when propagating the messages in relation to the presidential election in 2013. We're using those channels to discuss the stakes of the election, and that is just one example amongst many. So power, the power of social media is, you know, obviously can't be discussed when it comes to raising certain issues and putting them out there in the public sphere to be discussed. Now social media campaigns in particular have grown more intentional and they've become integral parts of advocacy strategies in recent years. I want to take here the example of Nigeria, which I'm sure Anana will expand on with much more knowledge than me, but just to give a bit of a comparison through time. If we look at the evolution of social media accountability discourse in Nigeria, for instance, in 2014 we saw the hashtag bring back our girls social media campaign garden support from people around the world that were concerned about the plight of the 276 school girls kidnapped by terrorist group Boko Haram. And that international uproar contributed in galvanizing basically the fight by the Nigerian government to find them because they were sort of held accountable for their disappearance. And if you fast forward to Ansars, which we saw sort of spread like wildfire on social media. In the end of 2020. Well, there was clearly a difference in the way that the social media campaign sort of played out in the early days of the protests. Many observers noticed that and made the case that what could explain the reason why this digital protests in particular, especially this wave of the Ansars movement gained more attention is because the protesters online appear to be attempting to shame brands and journalists by attacking their Twitter handles and in tweets and asking them why they weren't covering the protests. So people were using the Twitter sphere to really criticize and really like do that in a very organized way. They also use Twitter as well as other social media platforms to rally support for protesters on the ground, inform those that weren't on the ground about what was going on, and also in a way avoid and bypass. And that was repression by police forces, as we know, the retaliation by, by the army, and also armed forces was pretty violent. And around the end of the year 2020. Now, I think that as much as I'm sorry that was meant to illustrate what I was saying about Ansars. As much as we're talking about how great digital tools have been for Africans on the continent, but also in the diaspora. When acting as activists. There's also a sense that we have to be realistic about the situation as it is, and also the disparities and access to the internet itself. According to a 2019 Afrobarometer survey today. I mean, today, 2019 only 19% and 22% of Africans respectively use the internet and social media that frequently as basically their channel for information. And that is to say that of course, there is still that limitation because of economic realities. We understand that basically having internet on your phone is a costly thing. And it still means that there is a digital divide that is quite present younger, better educated, wealthier male and urban dwelling Africans are much more likely to access social media and the internet, which in my in my view also means that certain issues are still not put to the front of. Public discourse, because they don't necessarily have echo so if you are in a rural area and there is abuse happening whether it comes from government or local authorities, then it's going to be harder for you to express that and to, and to create a movement around it. And then when it comes to digital advocacy itself. There are limitations and I think that for the African continent in particular. Those limitations have to do with governments and restricted governments that have a very dated perception of. Well, their their regalia empowers and how citizens are to behave within the state, the state structure. So, governments use very real concerns as excuses to target their opponents and dissonant voices selectively in ways that stifle opposition fair elections and accountability. This man it's vested itself in a number of African countries, especially with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and around March 2020. So there is this national order national security argument that a lot of African governments have have put to the to the forefront. And as they said they've had to take on the fight against what has been done dubbed an infodemic. So the spread of harmful and misinformation and disinformation on social media. Relative to the sanitary crisis and the negative consequences of this fight against fake news in a way has been arbitrary monitoring and restrictions on speech and discourse emerging online. Obviously we know there's a difference between protecting national order and citizens against fake news. And simply alienating people's free freedom of speech and this is something that unfortunately is still very much possible. And especially in the Sub-Saharan African context. In recent years we've seen Angola Tanzania Uganda Malawi Swaziland Zambia just to name a few introduce harsh laws that regulate social media views. In practice, many observers just think that this is a way to instill doubt and fear in social media users and to encourage self censorship. So as to avoid the wrath of the state machinery for voicing the grievances about government and local institutions. So citing national security, for instance, I'm going to take the case of Uganda, which held the general election in the month of January. The government on a January 13th ordered a total internet shutdown and partially restored it days later, but social media to this day remains blocked so you cannot access Facebook on on Uganda and soil because the government is still as much as your most of any so the incumbent president has been reelected and obviously the opposition cited fraud during the election. Well there's just this period of time where they would rather not have too many conversations happening around the election so social media remains blocked blocked and there is also enough evidence to believe that there might not give access to social media anytime soon seeing as Facebook in the lead up to the to the election Facebook took down hundreds of pro government accounts that the social media giant claimed exhibit coordinated inauthentic behavior. And so, recently, President you were in said any threatened that the country would consider permanently blocking the site so I guess if I want to wrap up. I don't want to end on the negative and pessimistic note but I think that with the African context in mind. There is a definite sense that the digital era is opening doors and opening ways for activists and witnesses of, you know, the events are happening around them in communities to really take a stance and be effective in limiting oppression and fighting for their rights, but there's still limitations to that fight. And for as long as we don't manage to we don't manage to secure and really bring forth democratic tools that will be inherent to the systems where all of this is happening. There will be limitations to this kind of advocacy. And that was that's all for me. So I'll just let Nana talk. Thank you. Hi everyone. Good evening. I'm really glad to have this opportunity to have this conversation so I'm just going to share. Okay, so I'm going to talk through some of the points on this on this slide. Sorry, it seems like my slides are moving. Okay, so Nigeria's leadership across political cycles believe it's digital natives are running a parallel disrespectful government. This is why because they've gone from the party in the relationship building, finding some places to go online to going on to organizing protest and still partying at the same time right, what can talk like they say. Nothing different has happened, nothing spectacular happened, nothing changed. It's simply that how digital natives grow up, the Nigerian government has refused to grow up. This is in the sense that Nigerian government transitioned from a military regime to a democratic leadership, while still maintaining the tenants of a military regime. These digital natives, some of them have never seen a military government before and can really not relate. But Blumer says that social movements are like a collective enterprise that seeks to establish a new order of life. In my opinion, this, you know, can be true, especially for Nigeria's social media space. It has morphed from being a playground for digital natives to a reformative and revolutionary social movement platform. This is because while the government focused its energy on politicking with mainstream media and shrinking civic freedoms, young people have focused on innovative ways to break that chain. Young Nigerians have leveraged technology, mobile phones, pull up your phones wherever you see anything happening, take pictures, take videos. They've leveraged their phones, leveraged emails, social media tools to retain a grip on this fundamental freedom. First of all, around advocacy, young people have moved from taking these phones to taking pictures of their wellbeing, fulfilling good and all that, to using it to hold government accountable. We call around movement organizing. In 2012, Nigeria experienced its first largest wave of people gathering together, people who don't know each other, people who connected through social media. That was occupying Nigeria, if anyone remembers the story. It was a movement sparked by increased fuel prices. On January 1, 2012, the then president of Nigeria, good luck, Jonathan, increased the pump prices for fuel in Nigeria. People who were already suffering the biting of the economic hardship took to the streets. This is using WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, people met up at different spots, organized vehicles to pick up each other, people who could not walk, there was food, there was medical treatment, a lot more things. And at that point, it became an awakening, not just for the young Nigerians, but also for the Nigerian government in understanding how powerful social media was. Going from occupying Nigeria, we went through a movement called Save Bargega. Save Bargega was a very widely shared hashtag on Nigeria's social media space, which focused on lead poisoning in Nigeria's Zanfarah states in northern Nigeria. This was where illegal mining had gone on for a long time, and this type of mining was sanctioned by the states, because there was some kickbacks happening at the expense of young children who were dying without the Nigerian government doing anything. Because of pictures that had flooded social media, young Nigerians took to social media to hold the government accountable, organizing protests, taking to the streets in order to get the government's attention to doing what it's supposed to do, to do right by its citizens. Then can bring back our girls, the movements that sort of shook Nigerians, and the points that we understood that we were at sort of some war, and the Nigerian government was not paying attention at that time. I would say in my opinion that this was the movement that kind of crashed Good Luck Jonathan's government, because at that point the people had lost faith in the government. So it was Nigeria's young people responding to the way governance was conducted in Nigeria and decided not again. Then we have not too young to run. Nigeria's young people haven't realized how much power they held in their hands through all the movements that we had organized on social media to the way we had bonded together, come together to get things done. Realize that voting all the people into power wasn't going to be enough. We wanted to run for office. When people began asking questions on why can't I run for office at age 30, they realized that Nigeria's constitution was restrictive, and we again took to advocacy, put together a bill that reduced the age limit for running for office. And in so doing, got an amendment to the Nigerians, Nigeria's constitution for to tell you how significant this is constitutional amendment in Nigeria is very difficult because not only are you going to get it passed at the two houses of assembly you would still need the states at least 24 states out of Nigeria's that is the state to sign off on it. And we did that we made that happen. Then there came answers. Hanam have talked on how organizing social media organizing work during answers and she was correct. And even more so beyond social media organizing young people have constantly till date, continue to hold Nigeria's government accountable on telling the truth as to what happened at leaky store gate. On other ways that Nigeria's young people have utilized social media accountability with driven the conversation from socialization of digital citizens to developing accountability tools we have budget tracker. We have followed the money. We're doing public finance management on social media, because we can, right, we're able to look at Nigeria's budget have conversations around it. Those sacred areas where mainstream media is afraid to go because the government has issued warnings, sanctions fines to mainstream media, we've decided to use social media to do the things that they think we can use it to do. In advocacy and citizen education young people have taken democratization of information very, very seriously. Not only are we teaching ourselves, we've realized that what's up beyond being a tool that most people utilize for this information can literally be used for education. And what's up is one of the most popular social media platforms in Nigeria. We've leveraged that space to share information around democratic processes oppressive bills, particularly the social media bill that for the past three years has re, you know, has been re-engineered in one form or the other, wearing its head. And most recently is wearing his head as a journalism bill. Where anybody who supports, who can report on information, whether you own a blog, a social media page, whether you run, what's it called, you run a podcast. The government is now insisting that you have a journalism degree before you can do that. Of course, we all know that they're trying to stifle the voices of the young people with mobile phones. The young people who can report instantly, all under the name of ethical journalism. Who says we've not been ethical, right? Around security, in Nigeria and forced disappearances have become a thing. We've had young people taking from their homes, taking from their offices, taking from just walking along the road. Naturally, the policemen who are supposed to guard you, people who you're supposed to go to when a person is missing, have in one way or the other encouraged these enforced disappearances. For instance, we've had a running hashtag now for more than a year that says, where is Daddy Yata? Daddy Yata is a young man who has constantly opposed the Nigerian oppressive government. And suddenly one day he was taken from his home. Till today nobody knows where he is. Young people across social media have called out and asked the government, where is Daddy Yata? Till today, nobody has responded to that question. It's amazing how silent the government can get when one of its citizens is taken. And more recently, a couple of days ago, a young man who serves as a special assistant to the governor of Kano State was taken by government forces. A hashtag surfaced on TV and on social media everywhere. And the hashtag was free. This was funny because this man had been very aligned to the government until most recently he started speaking out against the hardship that was feeling everywhere. We are experiencing forced custody. We have no security. There's so much going on at the moment and it appears that the Nigerian government is silent about it. And he spoke up about it. A few days later, he disappeared. When he reappeared, he was thanking all the young people who made sure that the government released him. There's been young people have using these tools. We've kind of harnessed with, this is why the government feels that there's a parallel government that's running on social media. And they're very, very focused on shutting it down. This is because we've created a system where we look out for each other. We've created a system where we document the things that are happening to us. We've created a system where we're asking questions, questions that the FOI cannot answer. Questions that the government has refused to answer. Questions that mainstream media, TV and radio stations can no longer ask. Nigeria's civic space is shrinking, shrinking faster than you can say freedoms, right? And one of the things that we know that is that it's very common to be written out of history in Nigeria. Till date, pockets of Nigeria's ethnic groups still fight for recognition of their stories on how the Nigerian state has oppressed them. From Masaba massacre that happened in the 1960s and the Biafran war, all the way out through Odim massacre that happened in the 1990s. And the killing of the Shiites in Kaduna state, which happened in the 2000s, which is just a couple of years ago, right? To be more precise, that was about three or four years ago that this happened. Nobody has a knowledge the story of these people. The people who have tried to ask questions, the Niger Delta people who were massacred, they've tried to ask questions, the government has designated them a terrorist organization. The Shiites have tried to ask questions. The government has designated them a terrorist group. The independent people of Biafra have tried to ask questions. The government has designated them a terrorist group. The only way pattern in the answers movement, the government froze the accounts of persons who were linked directly or indirectly to the answers movement. To be able to get their accounts unfrozen, they went to court. They spent months and months and only a few weeks ago were their accounts unfrozen. And that since last year, since October till a few weeks ago, when they were released, when their accounts were released back to them, these people have had to survive on the goodwill of friends, family, and social media people. Even with the images and videos that happened during answers, the Nigerian government has constantly denied the deaths that occurred, the beatings, the gunshots. The government has constantly denied repression or extinction of rights. Digital activists document stories by archiving posts debunking false information. However, during the answers, we faced a very, very difficult situation. I say this, you know, with some sadness because it affected me directly. We set up a group to be able to collect stories and archive stories from the answers, while debunking stories that were not, you know, that were not accurate or directly linked to the answers or directly linked to gunshots from government sanctioned agents. One of the things that we did not account or we did not take into account, one of the things that we didn't know was that we would have government sanctioned bots, loading social media with false information. And in trying to sanitize the space, we focused on debunking that false information as they came, we debunked it. We worked about two weeks into the protest and we sat back, evaluated and realized that we had mostly false stories and that the government was now relying on the information that we provided from debunking those stories to say that these things didn't happen. One of the biggest challenges that digital activists in Nigeria face is lack of training. While we have the passion, while we have limited skills, while we have the eagerness to want to take on some of these tasks, the truth is that most of us became accidental digital defenders. And we scramble, we look for the things that we have. And in order to assess some of these trainings, sometimes it's expensive. Sometimes it requires getting into a place like the BKC. Sometimes it requires reaching out, cold calling to organizations that you feel have worked in on these areas. Sometimes you never get any response. I know that this is a slow process, but we keep curating our lessons, we learn to do better. And I know that as technology evolves, Nigerian young people will continue to evolve with it. We'll keep learning, we'll keep telling our stories, because again, one of the biggest things in Nigeria is to be written out of history. Thank you very much for listening. Wow, thank you, Nana, those. These are all such moving presentations and I want to clap. Yes, I don't, we don't do that anymore, but just a little bit. So we have some great questions coming up here in the question and I, and I know this was noted at the beginning but please feel encouraged to use the question and answer tool. Some questions have already gotten answers, because Alyssa is really on the ball. So we have a couple here and I will just, I'll start with Jessica field, one of our colleagues at BKC, and she writes, one of the distinctive qualities of digital media and its shareability, meaning that audiences can shift dramatically and sometimes is its shareability, meaning that audiences can shift dramatically and sometimes in unanticipated ways. And there are some ways black journalists and activists are thinking about their audience and their control over it. Particularly, I'm thinking about speaking in safer like minded communities, versus the power but also personal danger of a broad reach and I think that speaks really well to some of what Nana was just sharing with us. Who, who would like to, you could all speak to this, but who would like to, to go first. So I'll just say quickly that one of the things that we've noticed is that, especially with a George Floyd video that the circulation of it is not just for people who would care about it most intimately African Americans but that it really spread to people from all walks of life. But with that, the risk was that black people will be re traumatized by looking at that video, while others would be kind of looking at it more casually yet still affected. And so we saw this in terms of the news media looping it over and over again with the casual air for sports highlight and so one of the things that I did last summer was go around to media colleagues, spoke at the National Association of black journalists and Hispanic journalists, joint conference, and really shared with them that while we know, while we have no control over the audience and how this thing spreads at the top at the legacy media level. We can be very conscious of making sure that we are not showing African Americans die on primetime television because no other race has to. So when I think of those kinds of implications of unintended purposes, or even how white supremacist groups were using the Floyd video to try to get a hashtag trending that had people posed in the way that Officer Chauvin would have been over at the top of Floyd. I'm really glad that social media took those down. But for a while when Trayvon Martin was killed, the unintended kind of consequence of having those videos and images out there, where that people teenagers white teenagers had this whole Trayvon meme where they were laying like him on the ground with their mouths open in this postmortem kind of posture. And so while we have no control over these videos, journalists can do a much better job of making sure that these videos don't live on their site, and that they're not using them in exploitative ways. So that's just my angle. So I wanted to add something to what Alisa just said. One of the things that stood out for us was also during curating videos during the answers to be able to debunk things that happened was also being mindful of the families of the people who are involved in those videos right. Particularly we had a story that was published by Wall Street Journal that was false right. We reached out to those people we had obtained the video of the person's death from the family, a family member who had shared it with us under the promise that we wouldn't share. Now Wall Street asked us to provide proof of that death. We couldn't until dates we can share that video. It's very gory. And we were torn, we're sort of divided between sharing this for integrity purposes and not sharing this. What now happened was government agents, government is government managed to lay hands on the video and Wall Street did not listen to us when we reached out to them. And when the government debunks that particular information, it came in with the theory that international community had the hand in trying to destabilize the nation using foreign media and that people like us were working with them to support the destabilization of the nation. And sometimes you have to consider how would people feel if this goes out versus how would people see me if they think I'm lying. So it's, there's always that, there's always that problem. And maybe to add to what both Nana and at least I have said I think that just speaking to the last point in that question that had to do with personal danger. What we've observed, just what I've observed speaking to investigative journalists in particular in Zimbabwe or Uganda is that the personal danger part of all of this is is is very important, right. To continue doing their job and still be present on social media. So there is definitely this balance to strike between being able to voice certain issues on platforms which are very public and and open to anyone, such as Twitter but also using more private and more secure platform such as signal, which is becoming more of a of a of a tool that's being used by professionals but I think that what you were saying earlier Nana about the lack of training when it comes to maybe not activists per se but people who are acting as citizen activists or citizen activists is that the lack of literacy or knowledge of the tools that are available to them that might be more secure than you know your, your WhatsApp that everybody uses or Facebook groups or stuff like this so there is definitely I think a little adjustment period that we might have to undergo at least on the African continent as people really understand what the risks are as as useful as those social media platforms are what the risks are for the way that you use them in a very like public way. And to build on this and and incorporate sort of a part of a question from from Rick Rohr in the Q&A. The, the major technology platforms that's that facilitate or enable so much digital activism now. Every one of you has touched upon them but we haven't gone sort of straight at them yet. I just, I would, I think it would be wonderful this for this audience to hear any of you to talk about the kind of all of the challenges that exist in for for groups that are using these big US run Silicon Valley profit driven platforms for this kind of work. I mean, I don't, you know, I don't need to rattle off all of the problems and challenges and questions that activists all over the world have to face when you know you know that Twitter is the best place to get the message out and you know that it's privately owned space and that your platform can be taken down, or, you know, flag does disinformation, and you don't have a lot of control over, over when that might happen and for black activists United States, just as activists in Africa, getting, you know, being able to push back against those platforms is really difficult. So I guess I just wondered, I think it would be great to hear a little bit about what are the trade offs that activists think about when they're when they're choosing which tools to use for what types of work. And, and how do you, how do you build in or factor in resilience in doing this kind of work. Okay, so let me take that. For instance, one of the easiest tools or easiest platforms for us is three dice instant. There are a lot more government people on there that provides you maybe brings you closer to the governance structure of your country or whatever system you're trying to speak to. However, for us, I'm just going to speak specifically to people who are in this part of sub-Saharan African. For us we have, first of all, the jurisdictional issue where policies do not are not lateral. They don't apply across nations as to everyone. The policies that apply on Twitter to people in the UK in Germany in the US are different to what applies to us. And also secondly, there's the contextual lack of contextual knowledge that's evident in both platforms. Facebook is making efforts to cure some of that, you know, by employing employing more people from this part of the world. Also trying to get, say, citizen contributions or user contributions to developing the platforms. I'm not so sure there's a lack of some sort of lack of clarity on how Twitter is trying to solve that problem on its own. We sometimes Twitter takes down a post that's harmless and lacks, you know, because of a lack of context, while leaving a post as clearly problematic because of a lack of context, right? We face some of those challenges. I think that we try to mitigate by archiving, you know, people archiving their tweets and archiving their posts, trying to ensure that this stays longer on the Internet. It's also not exactly a very, say, foolproof system, but it's working for now. That's some of the, you either take being heard or getting off the platform. Then there's also the privacy challenges. We know that this is a for-profit platform. They're not open for, they're there for the business, right? So you know that you stand at risk, even no matter how anonymous you appear on Twitter, you are at risk of having your information handed over to the government once they present something that says that this you've committed some sort of crime. And the truth remains that what poses as a crime in your country is different from what is a crime in a different country. In my country, for instance, your sexuality is a crime, right? You can express yourself. You can say certain things. And when you do and someone is looking for you, it's easy for Twitter to hand over your information because all you need is to present an email, a government-backed email with a letter on a government-backed letterhead. So there's that thing that we have to have at the back of our mind that while you use these platforms, you're also very vulnerable. And lastly, I would say storage of information. For instance, people who work as digital defenders or digital activists mostly work as funded programs, right? So that means if your funding runs out, you're done. You know, it's either that's just high attrition rates when it comes to materials, knowledge, things that you've treated, things that you've stored. So you know that social media is not exactly the best place for you to store those things because once your funding runs out, you move on to other things. And maybe the staff or the people that work with you move on to other things. What happens to the Twitter account that they use to share some of the knowledge, some of the information? There's so many things that you have to think about. So while we try to find ways to mitigate some of those challenges, we realize that there's really truly no alternative platform for us to use. So the tradeoff is freedom of speech versus fighting a capitalist venture. That's excellent. Would Alyssa or Hanan, would you like to weigh in on this before we wrap it up? I think none I said it all. Terrific. I'd love to hear just if there are final thoughts or, you know, things that you could encourage everyone watching here today to keep in mind when you see this kind of reporting in mainstream media, when you see it on social media. If you're thinking about supporting or participating, what are things that people can take away from this and learn? I think here in the U.S., the main thing that we learned this summer is that this kind of witnessing needs to be protected. There are all kinds of hacks that cops are coming up with now, specifically in terms of playing copyrighted music during someone filming them so it will be pulled and flagged on social media outlets. You also have social media that's designed to disappear on TikTok and Instagram after 24 hours, so ephemeral video then compounds the problem of the state interfering to disappear this kind of activist journalism. And so in as many ways as we can, I think we have to work not only as academics or lawyers or ordinary citizens to help preserve as much of this as we can, because as we've seen in the capital siege on January 6th here in the U.S. We will need this kind of footage in some cases to solve hate crimes, to solve killings. And so these are some of the things that people are trying to shine a light on as activists. They're crying out in many cases. This is a last resort to get this kind of video to the public. And so it behooves us to save it and to make sure that people receive justice when they're featured often in their last final moments. I think that what I would like to emphasize on and I don't think I had enough time to talk about the sort of distinction there is on the African continent between the culture and the social media culture. So when we talk of, speak of Nigeria or a country of that scale and without many people there and who have access to social media, the social media campaigns such as Ansar's, yeah, definitely get a certain resonance, but there are many countries which have gone through similar turmoil in recent months. I think of Anglophone Cameroon, which has been in crisis for the last four years. I think of a recent wave of protests in Gabon that is happening right now because of austerity measures and because of the entire crisis as well. And also regime and government restriction and how that their attempts to make waves on social media is not being as fruitful as not really sort of becoming as having as much echo in the rest of the world. I think that what I'd like to maybe have people think about is how we can help countries where maybe the campaigners, the activists aren't being as successful as Ansar's activists have been to really be able to reach to the other side so as to make their voices heard in a more effective way. And I don't have a solution for that. I think that there's a lot of training that has to come into play. The fact of not knowing where certain places in the world are located also makes it difficult for that information to come to you. But so there's definitely a sort of huge divides between regions in a sub-Saharan level and that's something that I've been looking into more recently because you see like little social media campaigns emerging but dying down very quickly and not getting as much efficient impact as they would want to. Not really much to add but just to say that for the past four weeks I've taken myself off social media. This is an experiment to gauge how much information gets to the everyday person who doesn't have access to social media. And I realized I've missed a couple of things, a lot of things. I didn't know the full crisis had gone up. I didn't know that some stuff had happened in the last phase. There were so many things I didn't know. It kind of helped me understand how much there's still a gap that exists between the everyday person and those who have access to digital devices that they can access social media with. And also those who have access to those devices but do not understand how to connect themselves to the internet. There's still a lot more that needs to be done, right? I'm hoping that one day we'll be able to find some sort of link or how to directly reach out to people who are not in these spaces where we have these conversations. It's a kind of way that we'll be able to reach out to them without having the government be so repressive or be so restrictive in the way people access information. That's it really. So, archive documentation of human rights violations, amplify messages in solidarity, and remember the spectrum of digital engagement. That's been a terrific discussion. Thank you so much, and thank you to Berkman Klein for bringing this together. Thank you.