 So good morning ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for coming I'm Bill Taylor I'm one of the vice presidents here at the United States Institute of Peace and we're very pleased to welcome you here to the Institute if you haven't been here before we'd be glad to show you around and we're very proud of the building allows us to pull people like you in for these kinds of discussions and we hope that the environment is conducive to these kind of policy and program and and regional discussions I think this is a great one that we're here for the Institute for Peace and War Reporting do I get this right here is war and peace war and peace at the Institute of Peace we say peace and war however we can we can do it that way you get you can choose your names and we choose our so we're very pleased that we're teaming up on this discussion here today it's an important one the Institute of Peace has done some work on this and you will hear the kind of work that we've done on back here on this and then you also hear about how this applies to and how it's being put into practice in what's in Iraq and Syria as we're talking about so this I think will be a very good conversation look forward to your participation I'm very pleased that the Associate Vice President here at the Institute of Peace Manal Omar many of you know will be will be moderating this discussion here today Manal has great experience in all of the region that we're talking about here she also has taught me everything I know about about about this region she knows more than that and it's just it's great to have her as the moderator for this thing you are in very good hands and with and she has more information coming from Aubrey for for we will also thank for for the work that they've done so without anything further let me hand this to Manal and I look forward to this discussion thank you very much for joining us here great thank you Ambassador Taylor and I just want to echo Ambassador Taylor and welcoming our panelists and also the topic you know whenever I travel in the region there's a lot of passion centered around the role of media there's a real strong acknowledgement that particularly social media which is harder to control by the state has open channels but there's also a fear in terms of the agendas that may be owned by either state or private sector so I think that this conversation and the fact that it's really rooted in people who are based in the field is going to be an exciting one we're very eager for it to be a conversation so you know all the panelists have asked not to make it any formal type of discussion but really to open up and to hear where your interests are so we will be you know following that format of really listening to what the primary questions are and then again rooting it in terms of what is the reality and what are the gaps in the field I will introduce the panelists you know very quickly I think my role of moderator is to speak as little as possible and to give as much to them as the floor we have the opportunity for interaction through questions so there'll be papers circulated as you think of questions please write them down and pass them on again we'll be asking them throughout the session we also have a hashtag for those who are watching on webcast or anyone who wants to tweet which is hashtag conflict reporting so I know I personally always love the Twitter feedback in terms of live interaction and maybe doing it myself so please feel free to put your thoughts out and then also questions will be accepting via Twitter and the webcast so we'll start with Anand Vegas who's a program officer at the Institute of Peace working on the peace tech initiatives and Anand will give us some you know the statistics and the highlights of the data in terms of the work that USIP has been doing in media we'll move on to Susan Fisher who's the regional program manager for the Middle East with the Institute for War and Peace reporting and she's based in Beirut and will be able to give us real insight in terms of what she's been seeing on the ground and also working on the Syria conflict and then we'll turn to Ammar Shabangir who's the chief of mission for the Institute of War and Peace reporting in Iraq so as you can see a very live panel and I'll turn it straight to you Anand to start us off. I'm going to jump to the laptop and ask you all to crane your heads a little bit since my presentation is going to be up on the screen. Thanks Manal and thank you Susanna and Ammar. I'm really happy to be here my name is Anand Varghese I work at the peace tech initiative here at the US Institute of Peace and I'm going to talk to you really not as a Middle East expert but as somebody who's very interested in the effects of social media the transitions that we're seeing due to social media on the ground in places like Syria and Iraq and really around the world in the places that we work as an Institute and the blogs and bullets project is our initiative that looks deeply at this issue. Before I dive into it I wanted to give you a bit of context about the peace tech initiative itself. We were started about five years ago at the Institute really because of this fact that peace building like so many other fields like journalism like business is undergoing a fundamental shift because of technologies because of media and that shift is happening because of a simple but profound change that takes people in conflict zones you and I and makes us all media makers and not just media makers for our friends and family but media makers for a global audience and this we think is just the beginning. What you're seeing here is now I think a somewhat outdated map. It's a map of Facebook connections around the world at a time when one in nine people had a Facebook account. The statistic is closer to one in six or seven right now and what this means is that conflict zones that used to be shrouded by fogs of war are really becoming data-rich environments. We're getting audio, video, images and a ton of data often that's being generated by the victims of conflict themselves by the people who are experiencing it on a day-to-day. And so the blogs and bullets project and the peace tech initiative in general asks how can we harness this more purposefully? How can we take this and make it part of the peace builders toolkit? So blogs and bullets specifically looks at how new media is affecting conflict and social change. What is the causal role of social media and technologies in the kind of political upheavals we've seen around the world? And we've taken three sort of broad approaches to answering this question which I'm going to break down for you right now. The first is an analytical framework, a nuanced analytical framework. What does that mean? Some of you may recall in 2009 when the Iranian elections happened and the so-called Twitter revolution broke out. It also started a really robust and somewhat divisive debate amongst policymakers, amongst academics about the role of social media in social change and political upheaval around the world. And it broke down into two camps. One camp, the cyber optimists who thought that these new technologies are really opening up amazing avenues for activists and political liberals around the world to create positive change. Another camp came back, the cyber skeptics as we call them, said, no, these avenues are just new arenas where regimes and bad actors are having even greater influence. Part of our thinking was that surely there are more than just two ways to describe this phenomenon. And this is where our five-level analytical framework that I'm going to describe to you comes up. We said instead of thinking about is the internet good, is the internet bad for social change, what kind of effects are the internet and new media technologies having at the individual level? How individual activists and citizens able to engage in topics, gain new knowledge that they weren't able to before? At the collective action level, how are these individuals and activists then with the power of technology, are they empowered to break collective action problems, to organize protests, to mobilize citizens and activists where they wouldn't have been able to before? At the third level, are new media and technology really building into group relations the way we had hoped when the internet was beginning to grow? There was a lot of enthusiasm around its role in breaking down cultural and geographic and political borders. Oddly enough, there was similar enthusiasm around radio and TV and print when those revolutions happened as well. But to what extent are these technologies building bridges that didn't exist before? And at the fourth level, how are regimes reacting to all these phenomena? Are regimes clamping down on technology and activism around that's empowered by technology? Are they co-opting it? Are they left ham-handed and really unable to do anything? Or are they letting it go? And finally, how are technologies, new media and technology affecting external attention to the places where Susanna and Amar and Manal live and work every day and all of our peace builders around the world? Are we confusing our attention on Twitter and Facebook for actual change on the ground? And so this analytical framework really begins to reframe, hopefully, the way we have this discussion around technology and its role. The second piece of the blogs and bullets project has been really to take a step back from the day-to-day anecdotes that we might see on the role of technology. I had a professor who once said the plural of anecdote is not data. And the idea is to take all of the vast amounts of data that are coming out of social media and really begin to use the new data analysis tools and visualizations tools, one of which you're seeing here today was developed by a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Morningside Analytics. This was created in 2009. It's a visualization of really thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Arabic language blogs. And these kinds of tools, along with the data that social media generating and this analytical framework are giving us a ton of new insights. And the third prong of our research is to really engage the private sector. If data is our fodder, it is the bread and butter of these companies. Twitter and Google and Facebook make their entire businesses on the data that we hope to analyze. So engaging them as partners in this project has really been a key part of our approach. I'm going to sort of delve a little bit more deeply into some research that is a bit more specific to the Middle East and the region that we're going to discuss in detail. As I said, I'm not a Middle East expert, but we did have all of this research done by friends and partners at the George Washington University, all of whom are very deeply scanced in the Middle East realities. And I wanted to speak about a couple of the reports and a few of the sort of interesting findings that these reports generated, and perhaps sort of started discussion that then we can continue through the rest of the panel. The first report was published in July of 2012, and it had to do, it was a research based on Twitter data that came out of the Arab Spring. So it looked at Twitter discussions around Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Libya around between January and April of 2011. It actually analyzed about 45,000 links and the consumption of Twitter information around the world and in the region and in these countries themselves. And what we found, one of the interesting findings of this report was that during the Arab Spring, online social networks most important role really wasn't about informing local audiences about protests and other events. Experts found that funds much stronger evidence that new media informs international audiences and mainstream media reporting and not really playing a role in local events. So when hundreds of thousands of people came on the street in Egypt, they probably did it by looking out the window or watching Al Jazeera, not because of Twitter and Facebook. This graph shows researchers saw the location of where people clicked on Twitter links that had to do with each of these countries and during the Arab Spring and found that the majority, at times the vast majority of clicks came from outside the country and really even outside the region. So this goes to the point that I was speaking about that often these tools are informing external audiences, perhaps us here in DC, but not so much local realities. The second report that I want to discuss was published a little bit more recently and was around the Syrian crisis that is ongoing. It was published in January of 2014. It too looked at Twitter data around the hashtag Syria. It was data that was called over the course of around two years from January of 2011 to April of 2013. It analyzed 38 million tweets. And I wanted to talk about a couple of graphs that illustrate the interaction between new media and old media, as it were, more conventional media sources. This graph here talks about, of advance, talks about the fact that Twitter and mainstream media attention to Syria were really highly correlated. So what you're seeing up there is Arabic and English, blue and red, the Twitter discussions and down in the green is the news media discussions. You'll see that the peaks of the Twitter discussions really follow the peaks of the news discussions in vice versa. So there's really not much to support the claim that social media played sort of an inordinate amount of attention to Syria and that media, the regular media were ignoring it, quite the opposite. The second graph, perhaps the last graph I'll show today before I sort of give up the podium, was about the discussion in Arabic and English around the Syrian conflict. And you'll see at the beginning of the study in January, really English and Arabic were equally playing into the discourse around the Syrian conflict. But as the conflict progressed, it really became there was an unmistakable shift from English to Arabic as a dominant language of online discourse. Not only that, there was a substantive sort of variation in the topics that were discussed. Researchers analyzed, for example, the use of the word Obama in the tweets across the course of this study. And Obama was quite prevalent in English discussions, but really wasn't present in the Arabic discussions. Perhaps only at the time when there was a threat of major, a major threat of American intervention, Obama seemed to come up in the Twitter discussions. But really, he only was a figure in the English language discussion on Twitter around the Syrian revolution. So this sort of illustrates a couple of interesting things about the what we can learn from Twitter, what we can learn from large scale data sets. And perhaps I give it now to my colleagues to ground this in the realities that they're facing every day. It's wonderful. Thank you, Anna. And you gave us a lot to think about. And in particular, I thought it was very helpful to give us some of the options to really understand so that we're not you know kind of stuck between the cyber-optimist or cyber-skeptics. And I know that I sit and debate myself a lot in terms of media. And that was really helpful for us to really take into consideration. I want to turn over to Suzanne and Amman. And one of the questions that I wanted to start with is in terms of you know what really resonated listening to Anna and your personal experiences. And then one thing that really struck me as crucial for Amina is the question of how the regime reacts. And you know in terms of Tunisia and Egypt and Libya, you know the dictators really went into a reactionary mode. But with Syria and with Iraq, there was a head start for them to understand that social media is playing an important role. And I'd be interested to see if you saw reactions in terms of the regime both in Syria and Iraq. But we'll start with you, Suzanne. For me one of the most important phrases from your presentation was right at the beginning when you spoke about transformation because of technology. And I think this is something I've really experienced in the field. Because when I started was out of here actually in 2005, I started to train journalists in Iraq. And at that time there were no citizen journalists on the ground. There was no, there was no Twitter, there was no Facebook. I mean it existed but the majority of the people had not embraced it and definitely not the media sector in Iraq. So it had no role whatsoever in the trainings we did in the beginning in Iraq which was very different than when we started in Syria. But also in Syria I could actually witness the change on the ground because we started to train journalists in Syria, from Syria and in Syria in 2007. So way ahead of the Arab Spring. And at that time we really had to like handpick the people that we work with because there were basically no independent journalists. There were no people who could report freely because the government restrictions were so strong and we had to really find a network of people that we could trust in order to produce content that was out of line with the government-approved reporting. And this situation has changed so much. I mean we had like a small group of people that we could work with and then when the Arab Spring started there were these citizen journalists all of a sudden everywhere they wanted training, they wanted professional skills and all of a sudden there was reporters everywhere. And this is because of the technology they had at their disposal. They could use their cell phones, they could use Twitter, they could use Facebook and this wasn't really interesting shift for us to witness because all of a sudden you had so many sources but this also brought problems with it because you have so many. Before I had a group of people that I trained and I worked with and I knew I could trust them. Then all of a sudden now there's thousands of people report and I have to pick who can I trust. This person says and how am I going to send this happen? How do I know it's true? How do I know that he is not trying to manipulate me? So with the transformation because of technology also comes more responsibility for the consumer of news actually that comes from these countries. And then the social media itself for me it has become kind of an extension of the battlefield. It's not neutral and it's not a neutral platform where people can post their stories but really especially in the case of Syria you can really see how the people on the ground at the opposite sides of the conflict use these platforms as part of their struggle. Like they post stories, they defame people, they attack people and Facebook has reacted to this also by shutting down websites but this is really part of the conflict and the media because we the topic is helping the peace or is it fueling the conflict. I think now media really has both roles and you have to watch very careful what you produce, where you where you put it and how people consume the media. I would just say quickly from my experience. That's very interesting and I think particularly the role of the consumer. I mean there's always been a certain role but the fact that that really has shifted in terms of being able to filter what's actually factual and what's actually part of a larger agenda. Amir? Well I guess the new media hasn't had a great impact in Iraq in comparison to other Middle Eastern countries for a number of reasons. A internet penetration in Iraq is still at the average of seven percent, a little bit higher in urban centers, a little bit lower in rural areas, maybe in Kurdistan region is a little bit higher than that. However internet penetration has been an issue because Iraq has a big issues of the infrastructure and aside from infrastructure even in terms of licensing processes and so on Iraq is still hasn't managed to get the 3G networks running while the rest of the world is running 4G. That's one aspect. The other aspect I guess is issue of the generational gap. The majority of people who use new media tools, Facebook, Twitter and other tools are usually the younger generations, maybe people in their mid-20s and even younger than that. Obviously their views, their world view, their opinion about events in the country differ in comparison to the mainstream population. So during the 2011 and 2012 demonstrations Facebook and social media was used as the main organizational vehicle or tool but as a result and the number of people who showed up for demonstrations for example at best never more than 2000 at any one time. In terms of government reaction to social media, the Iraqi government doesn't have the tools to censor or monitor social media. So what they have done, they tried countering the anti-government or liberal activists online by creating parallel platforms that would speak on behalf of the government and the government and institutions. So I would say so far new media and internet has been a neutral battleground. It doesn't favor one side or the other. It really depends on each side's resources and we've seen this in the election. The level of campaigning on Facebook during last month's election was huge. I mean the majority of the fights were actually online between the liberal camp and the pro-government camp and unfortunately it was not reflected in the streets. Great thank you Ammar and that's actually very interesting to see that the campaigning did go online in terms of finding out what people were able to do and the turnout with the Iraq elections was much higher than people anticipated. Yeah I mean in comparison to the election last time we anticipated to be around 25 percent opinion polls a month before the elections were rating it at 50 to 55 percent and I think it's that would be an accurate reading of the situation in some areas like Salah al-Din and Misan maybe above 60 percent and back that around 52 percent. Roughly now the final figures are not out yet so these are guesstimates informed estimations. I'm very curious that you both mentioned in terms of how that the social media isn't a neutral ground and you know it be very interesting to hear the three panelists kind of expand a little bit more in terms of you know the cyber battles that do take place and how can they be controlled so that you aren't having them I think someone was saying it's better that it's online and not on the street or is it a different form of inciting violence so it'd be interesting to kind of hear your take in terms of the role that this could play in terms of incitement or in terms of taking real debates online and having another way of expression. Well I think when it comes to Syria the government takes the online field very seriously and this is already shown by the fact that there's a thing called the Syrian electronic army which really targets Syrian activists and journalists and try to infiltrate them through viruses malware etc and we've had quite a lot of insight into this because we also run a digital security program in addition to our journalism program so we've been really focusing on the digital threats that activists face and you can really see that the the battle that's taking place on Facebook for example is is a very serious one and you said the government in Iraq doesn't have the capacity to to monitor the activities online or to censor them online. Yeah I don't think the Syrian government has a capacity still to censor it but they definitely monitor it and they try to interfere so there are Facebook pages that are actually just set up for the sake of attacking other people. Muhammad is nodding I'm sure he can talk a lot about this experience he's been attacked on his Facebook page a lot and that people really try to to counter activists stories and the narrative and put out the government narrative and the propaganda of the regime on Facebook and on all those social media they also have these fake Twitter accounts where they just try to flood social media with tweets of the government narrative so that you just because of the sheer amount of tweets you cannot really follow the actual story that's out there. An Instagram I mean that was one of the things that this isn't the Syrian government particularly with Asad's wife there's a lot of the Instagram but I thought was an interesting news. They use all the social media tools that are available and they're actually quite quite good at it. Fortunately the other side is also getting better and better and defending itself against it but so I would say social media definitely they try to use social media to fuel the conflict but it's fortunately also not always successful. Yeah and I think figuring out the role of these tools in incitement to specific acts of violence I think is quite difficult to be honest I know because you know the studies that we we've we're talking about the one in Syria spoke not only about people being incensed by the images certainly the YouTube videos that they saw but also a lot of them were recoiling from a lot of the violence that was being portrayed so there's a there's a sort of double dynamic and I don't know which one leads to incitement now in other parts of the world that we work certainly we've been in places like Burma where a lot of media professionals are extremely afraid about the power of social media Facebook specifically to incite violence, inter-ethnic violence again those causal roles are a bit difficult to sort of tie together but certainly they create an atmosphere of fear. I mean there's so much violence in Syria already that's really hard to trace back a certain incident to like one video in particular but I'm sure there are cases where definitely they play a role but rumors also in general play a role whether they come through social media or like they're spread on the street so if somebody just says this person was killed because he is an alohaite in this village then it might have repercussions even without social media and we saw that the tweets are actually not being followed so closely in the country itself but that the attention is much bigger outside so the external reaction to those tweets might be much bigger and then of course then it's not a violent reaction. I guess the nature of the nature of the conflict comparison in Iraq is different than the nature of conflict in Syria and that's reflected on the tweet sphere and in social media in general in Syria it is being played online as a zero-sum game so it's incitement of violence etc etc in Iraq it's a bit different it's not I mean despite the fact that there is an armed resistance or rebellion or whatever you want to call it in Ambar that has not been reflected on the social media as a strong that has done in Syria so it is more like another classic competition if you like that is using different tools this time and the other factor is the government in Iraq is always playing catch up I mean I don't think they've ever taken the social media seriously until five or six months ago when they I mean we're noticing the number of let's say a pro-government Facebook pages started going up they started taking issues seriously but again I think so far the the government in Iraq doesn't have a real strategy unlike Syria on on dealing with with social media and resistance also resistance on social media so it's just a catch up and I personally believe that even when they started some activities few months ago it's only in preparation for the elections and I actually think few months down the line they will they will lose interest again just one thing to add the learning curve of the Syrian regime in terms of social media was really steep I remember that when we started in Syria Facebook was still banned they didn't and then they opened it because they thought it might make it easier for them to monitor people's activity and to follow who's actually doing what and I still remember that we had journalists or activists coming to Beirut and they told us that at the border they were asked like where's your Facebook as if this was like something you carry in your suitcase with you yeah unfortunately those days are over just a reminder that if you have questions we want it to be kind of as interactive as possible so at all points you can send in a question and Aubrey who's in white will be walking up and down the hall as well yeah as well Carol so again so that we can keep the conversation going on I as you know questions filter in I will you know very selfishly continue to ask the questions on my mind as I throw my phone and on you know one of the things that I think is very difficult because you know I'm on social media a lot and in fact my first trip into Benghazi before the fall of Gaddafi was entirely planned on Facebook and you know I think part of it was email was more the whole trip and everything in all the meetings and just you know the the airport even the UN flight was all planned on Facebook and I thought that was fascinating in terms of just not being able to reach anyone by phone or by email during that period but one of the things that I consistently struggle with is how do you differentiate between what is being trained or being called citizen journalists and between the activists I mean let's forget the other you know agendas but just you know sincere activism versus citizen journalism and how do you you know particularly when you're training people on the ground how do you help them differentiate between the two I think you cannot you cannot differentiate it's becoming harder and harder we have we started out as a traditional journalism organization so we always wanted those I wouldn't say neutral but at least objective journalists who take both sides into account but in a conflict like Syria it just doesn't work you cannot have people who take both sides into consideration and who I mean you can still try that they tell a balanced and and fair story but the people who report on this conflict they are part of the conflict and we just have to accept this there's no way around it and we have many many people in our trainings who would not distinguish between being a journalist or a citizen journalist and an activist it's I think you can tell them try to to use professional skills in your role as a citizen journalist and to include some stuff that you would not do as an activist but you cannot tell him now forget that you're an activist forget that you go to demonstrations that you have a cause when you are a citizen journalist but I think I mentioned the consumer before it's important that we as consumer of citizen journalism have in mind that the people who report to us are not just journalists but that they are part of the conflict and I think this is fed into also with the dearth of any actual formally trained journalists international correspondence in especially in Syria has those citizen journalists have then become the feeding tube into international media reports around Syria so they've tapped into this group and so I think that makes all of these discourses especially in our media a bit more difficult to follow because they're so tied to local political activism and the gray area between citizenship with citizen journalism and activism great, Marjorie anything to add? I think Suzan is 100 percent accurate and it's not just in Syria or Iraq I think we see this across the region that the lines between citizen journalism and activism is extremely blurred and I think the trend is going to continue down that line and in fact we have a problem convincing professionally trained journalists to remain objective, I mean forget about the journalists, so unfortunately I think that trend will continue but I think also in a way that this course has become more honest through this phenomenon of citizen journalists because before we as professional journalists we always pretended to be objective but of course we had our preferences and we have we all come with baggage and we have political opinions and we try to hide them but now it's more obvious that people report on the conflict are not neutral. Yeah and I think that I mean both of you brought up a good point and actually one of the questions that we have from Twitter from Casey is that you know what how does all of this affect traditional media particularly when you're talking about low internet penetration and you know the generation differences does this mean that we shift strategies focused on social media how do we integrate traditional media you know how does this trend and particularly the work that you were talking about and what is its impact on traditional media? Well in the case of USIP you know we do traditional media programming in Afghanistan we do traditional media programming in Iraq all of them integrate social media so I don't think we make a programmatic distinction and increasingly it doesn't make any sense to make that distinction because the for example we have a youth program in Iraq Selam Shabab you're well acquainted with it's now really lives that community lives online and it was started perhaps by a TV show but to make that distinction now doesn't really make much sense and even in places like Afghanistan where perhaps social media penetration isn't the highest due to perhaps literacy and infrastructure problems mobile phones are then the point of engagement and so making that distinction makes less and less sense from a programmatic standpoint correct yeah I think we also we really try to marry traditional journalism with the new social media I mean they're not so new anymore actually with with social media and with multimedia reporting styles and I think one keyword here is transparency that you make clear who is reporting on what like if we publish a story from a well-known human rights lawyer for example from Syria we tell the people this is a human rights lawyer so that they know this person is somehow involved in the conflict has her own perspective on this whole thing and doesn't think that this is an expert a neutral expert who looks on this from a bird's eye perspective for something so I think transparency in the whole process is very important I think I mean the majority of traditional media they have integrated social media into their operations in two ways both as a publishing or outreach extension if you like and as a tip line so making a distinction between social media and traditional journalism is no longer possible it's part of the same part and the same structure really great and then we have one question from our audience which talks about the role of social media and extremists and how social media is helping extremism and what role social media played in mobilizing and particularly the question of foreign fighters coming into Syria and other conflicts in the region so then should we start with you since the question target Syria um yeah I mean it's really hard for us to know whether the foreign fighters came to Syria because they follow Twitter so they don't really tell you about their motivation why they went to Syria but I think it definitely the problem with extremism is that it gets a lot of attention so once you put extreme views out there they get picked up they get reported on if you put a video that is showing how people negotiate nobody will watch it but if you put out a video where someone is decapitated of course everybody watches it so I think social media is a platform that is used a lot by extremists to get attention and that's of course it's very dangerous Have you seen the same thing? Yeah I actually have doubts about the use of social media as a recruitment tool I have serious doubt about that I agree with Susanna I personally follow a lot of the jihadists chatter online whether it's on forums or Twitter and they have very strong presence but they use it mostly for communication and internal propaganda rather than as a recruitment tool but I mean specifically on Twitter I don't know the jihadists have they have such a love relationship with Twitter particles they are all over the place and they even fight their battles I would actually like to add one point I mean the Syrian regime has been very successful in playing the extremism card from the very beginning of the revolution they were stating that these are extremists or Islamists trying to create an Islamic state in Syria and so this trend was fueled into the social media by them they always stressed this part and then it has become like a story of its own and the international media picked it up and everybody was focusing on these extremists rather than on the peaceful demonstrators and on all the civil society organizations who are still doing a lot of things on the ground they're just not getting reported on because everybody focuses on everybody wants to write a story about al-Qaeda and and Dij and all these extremist groups because they're just more juicy and I think in this case the regime has used social media very successfully I think you're right that the strategy of the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know really took traction in ways that it shifted a little bit of the public opinion on the Syrian opposition not only in the US but I think globally even in the region you hear a fear of you know do we want to do this the I got another question from the audience which is almost the flip side of the question of extremists is but it do you feel that there is a role that the US government particularly State Department CIA or other areas are influencing either Iraq or Syria media is there you know the other side of the influence in tools was interesting that the you know American assistance came in the form of communication tools not in terms of weapons right I don't know to the extent that they're actually changing media discourse but if we have any if the graphs that I showed you have any tell us anything is that if they are shifting it if it's in English it's perhaps not reaching the people who we think they're supposed to reach and they're perhaps speaking to our own discourses and our own attitudes towards the conflict if anything yeah I think your figures underlined this point I was really interested in seeing that the the Twitter discussion is now owned basically by the Arabic speakers so even if they attempt to to influence they would have to do it in Arabic at least it would very hard if they just put out an English tweet but for example the the American Embassy in Beirut they post regularly on Facebook about Syria and I know that these posts are being picked up by journal by foreign journalists but I don't think they have a lot of feedback into the country actually yeah that's great US government funding has played a great role in developing Iraqi media in general or the traditional media or social media millions of dollars were spent by mainly DRL on doing training and capacity building for both journalists and institutions and I think that paid off I mean despite all the shortcomings of Iraqi journalism today in many aspects it's way ahead of the rest of the region including the Arab spring countries and there is still ongoing support for maybe if not traditional media at least new media and social media activists there are different youth of groups bloggers social media activists that still receive if not direct financial support they receive a lot of political and mental support from the US Embassy in Beirut so there is a huge impact but unfortunately it's very difficult to draw a map on the accurate size of that impact because the information is so disparate and people don't talk to each other so and specifically you mentioned if you mentioned CIA I mean how are we going to find out if we know they're not doing a good job exactly exactly another question from the audience that I think is something that is a really good point in terms of do you feel social media has actually given a voice to some of the marginalized groups particularly you know what strikes me but it's not listed in this question is youth but in this question it's like women minorities and you know has it opened a platform that previously might not have been accessible well in the Iraq experience it definitely has no question about it can you give a few examples I mean youth and women in particular they are very active on using social media and they are making their voices increasingly heard because as I said most of the Iraqi media uses social media as a tip line as well so there are a lot of events and issues that if they weren't published on social media the traditional media wouldn't have heard about it and it wouldn't have been wouldn't get covered by the mainstream media so social media definitely has played that role yeah I think that's a strong yes I mean that's this true actually for all the Arab Spring countries I remember talking to a Tunisian blogger in January 2011 and she said she was so frustrated that nobody would ever listen to her complaints and she had she felt like they could not change anything and then she did a YouTube video and it was all of a sudden picked up by the mainstream media internationally and then all of a sudden everybody was talking about Tunisia so she really felt like she could reach out to to the world and tell them about what was going on so I think definitely yes one thing to sort of think about here is in our researcher on Syria one thing we found was that it's not so much about minorities but certain clusters of Twitter users began to cluster more together how do I explain that so English-speaking journalists for example became a cluster certain political groups or religious groups became a cluster and they talked less and less to each other so the beginning of our study a lot of their discourse was embedded in the larger Arab Spring discourse they were tweeting retweeting messages from other parts of the region but as the conflict progressed they were becoming more and more insular talking more and more to themselves and really not across groups across regions certainly across countries and languages so that is something to keep in mind so while minority groups or small groups might have more of a voice their audience is perhaps narrowing that might actually point perhaps to a greater influence ironically speaking because if you are if you are an English-speaking journalist or you are a local citizen journalist who can tweet in English you might have a greater influence because the community that you're speaking to is far more concentrated and is paying attention to a much smaller set of much smaller discourse but it is still a small a small discourse but that's very interesting I think this just underlines that even social media also follows just general human behavior because I think also in the real world in traditional media people tend to read the newspaper that underlines their own point of view so within social media you always talk to the people who confirm what you're thinking already and not necessarily have the opposite view yeah and it might also provide another option for people for particularly I'm thinking of minorities to be able to organize and you know have their own platform to then strategize in terms of larger communities there's a question from Karen Volcker from Pure Violence and it says that there's a deep concern about the potential for retaliation either now or at the end of the conflict and what is being done or could be done to mitigate the risk of retaliation for example setting expectations and norms about the acceptability of doing retaliation after through social media or through social media well it's a tough question because I think the conflict I mean the conflict is just still so heated and going on that I think I'm definitely sure that there will be thirst for retaliation in many places because so much blood has been spilled I think in the past we could see that traditional media tries to take this role and they try to do peace building they try to bring people together again they try to to refrain from inciting violence but in social media because you don't have one central place from where it's controlled it's really hard to utilize it I think for this purpose because it's really hard to counter if somebody goes out there and wants to ask for retaliation how do you stop them you can just counter the message but it's really hard to you cannot stop it and maybe that's a little bit of it is the campaigning beforehand to prepare the ground for transitional justice or whatever would need to happen to avoid retaliation but but in terms of direct action I think you're right Amar, do you have anything to add? I mean it's very nice that you mentioned transitional justice a few days ago I was having a Twitter conversation with a Syrian activist from Hama and it started with opinion about the Nusrah front and he was defending them and then I started talking to him about principles of transitional justice and should be based on the individual conduct rather than so and 25 minutes into the discussion he was convinced I mean he started of defending Nusrah front 25 minutes later he was convinced that the best thing was actually transitional justice because then the country would be safeguarded so I think preparation from now on the issue of transitional justice which IWPR by the way has done in Syria we produce a manual on that issue but taking that a step further pushing the message through to all involved parties that this is at once the conflict subsides that's the part that should be taken it's very important it's very important to prepare for that from now using both the traditional and social media I have a question from Casey with search for common ground are these strategies specific to media that can be leveraged to bridge divides and I think she's referring she says that we've talked specifically about social media and incitement but how can we use it to bring people together I know that you've touched on it a little bit but maybe giving some examples where that's been used or demonstrated example not really I mean in Iraq as I said the use of social media is very limited so I haven't seen personally in Iraq an attempt to use social media to bring people together maybe to to start a discussion yes and to continue a discussion at a limited level because as you said exactly there are certain communities and clusters that keep getting narrower so I haven't seen any attempt at achieving what you just asked at a larger scale there are I mean in somewhat more hearteningly I think there are attempts at a higher level to talk about exchange 2.0 which is something we've talked about a lot here at the institute but that really refers to using online tools as a way to bring students together perhaps to compliment or replace in cases where it's difficult to manage logistically physical exchanges between students and the State Department has really taken this up there are a couple of organizations like Celia who have been really pioneering in this field using online tools to make conversations between the West and the Muslim world is the way they put it but what's key to the way they do this is that it's all very much curriculum driven so these are willing participants sometimes less willing but certainly people who are who are coming to the table and then being walked through these interactions with people with whom they might not have had any chance to interact of course this is happening at a much higher scale like I said is between the Muslim world and Americans and people from other parts of Europe perhaps but maybe there's a there's a model there but it's quite heavily managed I mean and to kind of build on Casey's question one of the things that I've seen happen within a lot of conflicts and I'm thinking specifically of the Libya conflict was the role of the diaspora and you know particularly Libyans in Europe and the US really having very strong opinions but then people inside Libya feeling disconnected from some of the recommendations that were being made and it almost created a new form of of conflict between the diaspora between people in country and that took form both in an unhealthy way but then began more towards a healthy way of building bridges between the two communities through social media because that was really the only way that the two groups could interact have you seen anything like that emerging other conflicts where you're seeing social media playing a role or you know whether positive or negative but particularly the role of the diaspora and interacting with people in country definitely in the case of Syria I mean that the Syrian diaspora has been using social media a lot and a lot of the Facebook pages that got really a large number of followers were from the diaspora I mean also obviously because journalists rather follow an English website than a Facebook page than an Arabic Facebook page so language plays an important role but it also has created this controversy because the people inside on the ground they say it's easy for you to talk and we are the ones who are fighting on the ground and we are the ones who take all the hits so but I think also it has changed a little bit and they feel that they have to be in this together that they have to cooperate in order to find a solution that it cannot be done neither by the people outside or by the people inside alone that they have to come together well I guess in Iraq it's a bit different I mean diaspora doesn't have much say in events in Iraq or politics because the system is open I mean you have elections you have freedom of movement it's more or less a normal country more or less so the diaspora doesn't have much influence on whether on opinions or on events on the ground and no one takes them seriously anyway that's interesting I'm Maher I'm going to push you a little bit on that because one of the threads that continues to emerge actually in both conflicts is the sectarianism and if you in Stimson Center was actually studying a lot of the tweets and a lot of the social media sites and tying them to actual events on the ground and as you guys already said it's very hard to prove any causality but there was an interesting correlation between them and I think that you know just be specifically on sectarianism in the diaspora it there tends to be very strong language used in social media one way or the other I mean in the Iraqi context my reading is that it's always initiated from the inside I don't see initiation from the diaspora from the diasporas it's mostly reactions to what's already being done published and disseminated from inside the country and one of the reasons why they don't have so much influences because they don't have information I mean if we look at sectarian activism or promotion or propaganda for Iraq it's mostly Facebook I mean we can't we can't easily discount Twitter the majority of that work is done by individuals who are placed places of action I mean it's not even nationwide so and they have information they provide figures pictures etc etc so whatever comes from abroad from the diaspora is nearly a reaction and doesn't have the influence that you think on events inside the country that's a really good point I think particularly about like access to information and the legitimacy of what's coming out I think that's a I think it's slightly different in the case of Syria I think again here the regime plays a rather dark role I mean they really have been trying to use social media to fuel sectarianism by spreading false stories about attacks on Christians by spreading false news of attacks on any minority inside the country but I don't really know or it's really hard to measure what kind of repercussion this has inside the country I know that it gets the attention of the media of the international media a lot and then it plays in the favor of the regime that they think oh they're there to protect the Christians they're there to protect the minorities but I don't know if anybody actually goes and kills someone because of a story that was posted online or I think the sectarianism is obviously there but I think it's there without social media and I think you're unfortunately probably right the next question is from Tara from the Iraq Foundation and the question is can the panelists comment on use of information communication technology tools for secure exchange of information to protect journalists it's a big issue I think with imparity for crimes against journalists and you know specifically focusing in on Iraq well IWPR has I would say serious information security and internal security program it's a regional program so participants from all over the region are allowed to participate including Iraq however as I mentioned earlier I think the Iraqi government's tools on censoring and monitoring digital technology whether it's the internet or mobile phones or phones at large are limited in comparison to the capacity of neighboring regimes so although it is a threat it is still not a bigger threat as we would think however I think that down the line maybe a year or even less Iraq will probably be catching up and increasing its capacity on monitoring and not only journalists but political opponents in general so and I think in the next year or two digital security issues must be taken seriously in Iraq in particular we at IWPR take communication and information security very seriously we have a program that's called cyber Arabs I'll just mention it and it trains activists and journalists human rights defenders in digital security in order to enable them to communicate securely online usually it's around it's a five-day training where they learn about how to equip their files how to communicate securely on email how to hide data files on their computers and we have had many many Syrians for example in these trainings especially from the government controlled areas where they still have to communicate through the government infrastructure on IT and it's really important because now as I said before they were not so savvy and they asked where's your Facebook but now they know what to look for and we had a case of an activist that we trained who came to a checkpoint and they seized his computer and his mobile phone and they knew what to look for but fortunately he had learned how to hide those files very well and they didn't find anything so he could pass through so it's really it can save lives to know how to protect yourself and more broadly speaking I think one of the I guess positive outcomes of a lot of the revelations about NSA for example has been that the awareness across the board has increased about the need for this security and also the technology companies themselves have been quite become quite vested in making sure that these that they're not branded as being part of a government surveillance operation for example coincidentally I think I don't think these two things are tied together but Google ideas who is Google's think tank who's been working quite a bit on activist security around the same time released a number of tools for encryption for anonymization and so I think you know broadly speaking these tools are becoming quite a bit more prevalent they're not just in the margins of sort of tech geek communities this is sort of coming out into the mainstream and people's awareness more broadly is increasing I mean that's absolutely fascinating because I haven't heard of any type of training and one of the first things I want to do is actually find a way to take that training because I know it's my biggest fear going into countries if someone picks up my phone not only am I in trouble a lot of people I work with they're in trouble there's a question from Twitter and it brings up I think a really good point that I've seen kind of debated online quite a bit which he refers to as slacktivism when social media starts replacing particularly for Western audiences starts replacing like real live protests or activism and I think that you know you see this quite a lot people saying don't just press like do something so be interested to see kind of what is the you know what is the impression in terms of if that's true and also are there ways to counter that where you're also having a social media but a live active movement as well I think it's very true but it's also it's very easy to judge I mean if you live outside Syria and you just if you follow the events on Facebook the only thing you can do is press the like button or maybe you you donate somewhere or so but we in Beirut we've had the experience and that we train people in certain capacities and then they don't really put them into action because they're so busy following everything on Facebook this is sometimes really frustrating and you can see that they posted something at 3 a.m. in the morning and then the next day you ask them if they fulfilled their assignments and say no I was too busy and you say yeah okay you were too busy on Facebook and I think it's really easy to confuse being active on Facebook with really being active on the ground and that but on the other hand it is a great communication tool people can network on Facebook they can put the message out there so I wouldn't condemn it in total but you have to put it to use in a good way and I think we should not dismiss slactivism quite as much a couple of years ago Malcolm Gladwell wrote these sort of seminal or at least argument starting piece on this which is the revolution will not be tweeted where he dismissed slactivism as being you know or internet based activism as being slactivism and not really having any roots in proper organizations and the kind of infrastructure you need to make the kind of change that happened perhaps in the 1960s during the civil rights era Zaynep Tufekchi who is a researcher at I think she's University of North Carolina has been talking quite a bit we've had her here at the institute talking quite a bit about how the role of these loose ties as you called it in building the base of support that all of these infrastructures then can then draw upon in order to create the kind of change that's necessary so selectivism is not to be dismissed completely I think it has a role in creating the foundations for large-scale change though the need for more formal infrastructure is probably still there why do you just mention that you planned your entire trip to Olivia on Facebook so there is a practical use of course for it so that's it definitely so one one more question and we're actually going to go back to the question about kind of credibility this is a question from Muhammad Abdullah in terms of you know we're all saying that there's a difficulty to vet the information coming from social media and that you know the question says that there's a lot of false wrong misleading news on the web in addition to the question of the role of the media the consumer but you know is there a threat or a fear that bringing social media this type of thing will actually start to lose all credibility for social media sure I mean I think the the ma'am Muhammad knows a lot about this so it's a bit of a leading question we've had him on a panel to we've we're it's a tough one we've had him on a panel to answer just this question he couldn't answer it so now he's putting it back to us no I'm joking but revenge beautiful yeah yeah but I think the the main fear comes from the lack of editorial structures right so we we used to trust editorial structures in the formal news sector if you want to call it that and those structures just don't exist in in the Twitter sphere or the social media sphere so in response I think we've we've seen certainly in the case of Syria a lot of informal but still structures emerge that the role of curators has been touted quite a bit for example in the western media Andy Carvin Sultan al-Qasemi have really made sense of a very confusing Twitter discussion certainly around around Syria and said okay here people you can trust here tweets you can trust and he Andy Carvin for example they've used Twitter not only to take information in but then use Twitter to verify the information so the role of these quasi editorial structures is still quite important so we might not have the formal structures of a newspaper but these curators sort of acting as online editors for us as external consumers and I think that human element that structural element just won't go away they will emerge sooner or later I think I would say the risk is now lower than in the beginning of social media days because people have learned they have learned that they cannot just blindly trust any video that's being put up there or any tweet that's being put now they look who put up this tweet where who is this person where is he or she based and then you have those curated list of people that they know we can trust this person and this person and then you use Twitter as a verification tool and also the traditional media has reacted to it by actually establishing verification departments within this editorial structure that use certain techniques they try to look at the pictures that are being treated is it consistent with the weather at this time is it the landscape that you see does it is it really Syria or is it maybe Lebanon or the uniform that somebody wears is it the type of uniform that they really wear so there's many of many verification tools by now that can actually help you to identify fake videos rather quickly that's great that's good to know Ambar yeah I I think the users of social media learn very quickly and they are very savvy so it's no longer very easy as like in six or seven years ago to just post anything online and people just take it at face value it happens but great well thank you very much before I close I just want to turn to you if there's anything that you want to add or you know discuss amongst yourself or you know anything that you haven't had a chance that you feel is very important to share I want to make sure to provide you that not in the form of a question but in form of any final comments can I take my prerogative as a panelist to ask them a question yeah of course you can I've been curious you know that attacks especially in Iraq I'm certainly in Syria I'm sure attacks on journalists have been an increasing concern certainly for IWPR have you seen similar levels of attacks do you study the attacks on citizen journalists is it something that worries you or is there some way that you try to address it or okay in Iraq in particular I'll be very specific in Kurdistan the pressure on journalists is definitely higher than the rest of the country okay the political system is fairly stable and they don't take opposition in a good way so there is definitely a focus on let's say limiting the freedoms of journalists whether professional journalists or citizen journalists in the rest of Iraq it goes up and down in direct correlation with the events when the security is bad obviously there are sort of increased number of attacks on journalists on citizen journalists or activists alike when the security situation is fairly stable than number of attacks and intimidations and harassment of journalists go down so so far I mean I don't believe there is a systematic planned campaign or intention to harass and limit journalists however the the existing legal framework allows both impunity and allows any party not only government really to take on media whether physical harassment or lawsuits to take on media and so it is a journalist and that needs fixing and this is one of the things that we are working on for example okay well in Syria citizen journalists are definitely being targeted as well and the the problem is that they're not only being targeted by one side by the regime but that they're also target being targeted by the other by the extremists by Daesh and by all those other groups and really face a large number of risks and actually the the number of journalists of citizen journalists being killed is almost higher than the number of traditional journalists being killed thank you all thank you for the very important work that you're doing and for shedding light on this topic and thank you for coming to USIP and being with us today and all your questions thank you