Will digital media make activists of us all?

Screen addicts, clicktivists … popular rhetoric can often be dismissive of social and digital media participation.

However, a recent survey commissioned for the World Economic Forum’s Shaping the Future Implications of Digital Media for Society project asked people in five countries – China, Brazil, South Africa, Germany and the United States – about the impact of digital media on their capacity to participate in their communities.

The results are intriguing. Participants in all countries reported that digital media had increased the amount and quality of their civic participation and community involvement, as well as their feelings of personal empowerment.

From listeners to speakers

More than 40% of the people surveyed said that at least once a week they “like”, promote, post or repost links to political stories, post their own thoughts on political and social issues, or encourage others to take action on a political or social issue that is important to them.

How do we disentangle this from our assumptions about civic participation in the digital era? Yochai Benkler in his book The Wealth of Networks noted how “the easy possibility of communicating into the public sphere allows individuals to reorient themselves from passive readers and listeners (and viewers) to potential speakers and participants in a conversation”.

At the human rights organization WITNESS, we have seen how the increased capacity to create, comment on, remix and share citizen videos and other digital media has enabled people to participate across a range of contexts. In the most dramatic of these, in a conflict situation such as Syria, there are now at least a million items of content that show potential human-rights violations, many of them shot by citizens and non-professional journalists and first-hand responders on the ground.

Footage from the frontline

The groundswell of shot and shared documentation of police misconduct in the US has led to more calls for accountability. In a range of contexts from Turkey’s Gezi Park movement to Occupy and Black Lives Matter, social media has served as a tool that helps coordination between participants in emergent social movements.

Social media also provides an opportunity for participating in the first baby steps of “discursive activism” and for signaling in a collective action context – be it a popular movement against an unjust government or a wave of support and social approbation around a court ruling, such as when Facebook users added rainbow colours to their profile pictures after the US Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage.

Digital participation reduces barriers of entry among the population with access to the internet, particularly in contexts where other manifestations of community organizing and participation might be curtailed. Yet at the same time it privileges communities that do have internet access over those that remain without. This emphasizes the importance of inclusive access to the internet, which allows people to generate and contribute online, as well as access the broadest possible range of information and avenues for online civic participation.

An enabler of expression

And in a world dominated by photos, videos and texts of 140 characters, should we be more concerned about which issues are captured in short-form commentary and sight-bites, at the expense of more systemic issues that require layers of nuance.

Anonymity and privacy also matter. Survey results show that almost 80% of Chinese respondents (in a context of surveillance of social media), and a majority of other countries, report it is important to them. Despite this, governments worldwide are challenging the anonymity of identity and communication that is a facet of many social media and mobile communication technologies, and in the human rights and free speech context a key enabler of expression.

A core topic of discussion at Davos at this year will be how to manage hate speech and extremist content online. How can we better confront the digital wildfire of a video circulating in Myanmar that incites ethnicity or religious-based hatred or the circulation of an ISIS propaganda video? Much of this discussion focuses on the role of platforms in taking down content and blocking users, and governments in regulating content and in engaging in counter-speech against extremist content.

Another perspective considers how we can draw on people’s capacity to create and contribute to online conversations and civic participation to “speak back” in a distributed manner to debasing, violent or hateful online speech or images with positive speech and counter-narratives. For example, the Panzagar, or “flower speech”, movement in Myanmar proactively confronts anti-Muslim vitriol and images on Facebook and public discourse. With models like this, communities that are antithetical to human rights values can be challenged in a more scalable and effective way than top-down solutions and censorship.

Author: Sam Gregory is the Programme Director at WITNESS and teaches on human rights at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and member of the Steering Committee of the World Economic Forum’s project Shaping the Future Implications of Digital Media for Society.

This article is part of a series of posts from the Shaping the Future Implications of Digital Media for Society project. Explore the project content and findings in the report Digital Media and Society: Implications in a Hyperconnected Era. For more insights also see the Whitepaper The impact of digital content: Opportunities and risks of creating and sharing information online.