Social media has key role in battling state suppression

While concern grows about the use of social media to spread falsehoods, it does at least allow information to circulate that governments might prefer to suppress, the Worldviews on Media and Higher Education Conference, held at Canada’s University of Toronto, was told.

In a session on the responsibilities of the media and higher education when dealing with truth, ‘post-truth’ and reconciliation in South Africa and the Middle East, journalists and educators shared first-hand accounts of reporting and media challenges in these countries.

Morgan Waters, a former executive producer for Al Jazeera English and currently an editorial consultant for the Qatar-based broadcaster, said journalists had to struggle with real professional difficulties in covering the Arab Spring movements that began in late 2010. A prime concern was discerning between what state media in places like Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere were saying, and the opinions of people on the streets.

“How do you paint a picture of madness?” she said, in describing the confusion that reigned at the time. “In every country you had state media saying their side, and social media and these activists saying the other.”

The government-controlled media provided one point of view, “which was denial. It was characterising the protesters as terrorists – that happened quite quickly – as liars, etc”, while social media was filled with chaotic perspectives posted by a disenfranchised population.

“They weren’t even trying to communicate directly to us [the media]; they were trying to communicate to their fellow country people.”

Independent media’s vital role

In such a situation, verifying facts was, and remains, a vital role of the independent media, and that is what Waters and her colleagues struggled with, at a time when many digital online investigation “verification tools” available now were not in use.

“This was a battle of these two narratives, and not everybody was telling the truth. The state media certainly wasn’t telling the truth,” said Waters.

Nevertheless, she said journalists couldn’t ignore the information stream from government-controlled media because there were grains of truth to be gleaned from their coverage. But they also could not sit back in their newsrooms watching Facebook posts from the activists and trusting in their veracity.

“They weren’t professional journalists; they didn’t understand that there is a difference between fact and rumour,” she said. “They might hear something from one of their fellow protesters and then tell you that’s what actually happened.”

The only way to responsibly assess the reality of events during the Arab Spring was to get reporters on the ground to track down the protests, something Al Jazeera and other outlets did, at great risk to their journalists, she recalled.

But as tough as these challenges sound, discerning truth in the pre-digital era, before the advent of social media, was considerably more difficult, panellist Teboho Moja reminded the audience.

A professor and director of higher education at New York University and former chair and current member of the board of University World News Africa, as well the chair of the Centre for Higher Education Trust in South Africa, she recalled how, at the height of its power, the apartheid-era government in her homeland had almost complete control of information dissemination through print media and radio (television came late to South Africa, in 1976).

This allowed the state to use the media to heavily imprint on the population its policy of living ‘separately’.

Messages engraved

It was so effective that Moja said she still hears from people who say that “life was good under apartheid”. She said it makes her realise that “the messages have been engraved so much in their brains that they cannot see themselves being free today”.

However, just as protesters in the Arab Spring found a way to circumvent the state press using social media, so, too, did those opposed to apartheid find a means of communicating.

As Moja told the Worldviews’ audience, the unique way the Black population did so in her country was by literal word of mouth: “We had our own ways of passing messages and information from one school to another,” she remembered. “The person that brought our dry cleaning was the messenger that would give messages to pass from one school to another.”

And the creation of these personal networks enabled a generation opposed to apartheid to find their own truth and force an end to White minority rule.

With the establishment of majority rule in South Africa, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established in 1996. To many, the TRC seems an admirable way to address the dark era of apartheid. But Melissa Levin told the panel there were problems with what she considers the kinds of truths it produced.

Levin is a lecturer in African Studies at the University of Toronto and also project coordinator between the university’s Jackman Humanities Institute and South Africa’s University of the Western Cape Centre for Humanities Research.

“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, like any other social process, deals with facts on the ground. But then there’s the interpretation of those facts and how we understand those facts and what becomes the truth. And truth is a contested thing,” said Levin.

She believes this caused the TRC’s work to be deeply limited by the context in which it emerged, in respect to understanding the truth about apartheid. “In post-apartheid [South Africa], the facts aren’t necessarily contested, but the truth around those facts are.”

Unearthing information

Finally, Amira Hass, a veteran journalist based in the Occupied Palestinian Territories for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, said unearthing more information is a key tactic to overcoming false narratives.

“If people had the facts – I’m not even talking about the truth – but if they had the facts they would understand. [And] this information would accumulate into knowledge, which means a more participatory engagement with the information, with the facts.”

The journalist was open about her political beliefs, acknowledging to the audience that her left-wing upbringing has helped create a very stark definition of truth for her.

“The truth is always with the dispossessed and the subjugated. And those who are subjugating and dispossessing do not care about the truth,” she said.

“They will always try to control the truth and to deform it. Or to create imagined truth, which represents their interests, the interests of a very clear segment of the population.”

For Hass, this has led to the belief that those who are subjugated must be aware of this if they hope to garner the attention of the media and get their message out.

University World News is a sponsor of Worldviews.