Twittering away - the social media and the war in Gaza

Social media use has been soaring for the past four years, as more Web 2.0 services are being added to the arsenal available to citizen journalists and professionals alike, to be loadtested especially in times of strife or crisis. Blogs became mainstream fora for anti-war protests, political discourse as well as firsthand reporting during the second Iraq war; wikis were used to coordinate volunteer disaster response for Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami; Flickr, a popular image hosting service “cut its teeth” during the 2005 London underground terrorist attacks.

YouTube was used by Burmese bloggers to bear witness on the crackdown of the Saffron Revolution in lieu of world media who were banned from entering the country. And Twitter, the wildly popular micro-blogging service, which first saw use as a reporting tool during the California forest fires of 2007, became a veritable Swiss army knife for citizen and mass media alike at the end of 2008, despite being beset by a host of technical and financial problems earlier in the year, which threatened to put it out of commission.

First it was the terrorist assault on Mumbai, lasting three days last November, that generated international interest and saw Twitter used by the predominantly English-speaking Mumbaikars and several media organizations to report on the attacks. Its effect was so pivotal that a false rumor about the Indian government requesting “radio silence” on Twitter was carried by the BBC, to be quickly quashed by fact-checking citizen journalists.

Then, in early December, extensive riots broke out in Greek cities after the slaying of a teenager by police in Athens, and Twitter was used to break the language barrier, as international media were monitoring the #griots hashtag coined by users to report on the protests. Collaborative citizen journalism projects, like Global Voices Online, NowPublic, allvoices and CNN’s own iReport, also coming into their own in 2008, were used to crowdsource original reports, using the abundance of multimedia and textual information emerging from the riots.

THEN CAME GAZA
Then, in late December, the Israeli offensive in Gaza caught the world mostly unaware, coinciding as it did with the holiday season, but also due to the media blackout placed in Gaza several months in advance. The camaraderie surrounding previous uses of social media in times of strife seemed to break down, as they were now being used to report on a traditionally inflamed conflict, couched in extreme political viewpoints and riddled with human rights violations. Israel made no secret of its intent to use social media as weapons in the electronic war waged alongside the conflict on the ground. Simultaneously with the launch of the ground offensive, its Consulate General in New York held a press conference on Twitter and the IDF launched a YouTube channel to provide footage from aerial and ground attacks.

On the Palestinian side, bloggers like journalist and mother Laila El-Haddad (@Gazamom on Twitter) and mostly anonymous Twitter users (@gazanews, @tweetsfromgaza) are playing David to Israel’s media Goliath, trying to influence the international community with dramatic reports from besieged Gaza and pleas for a ceasefire to be effected. As actual footage from the ground is hard to come by and news organizations have mostly been forced to report from the sidelines, Al Jazeera, being the only network with reporters in Gaza, has emerged as the main source of direct information from the conflict zone.

Its Twitter updates from a dedicated account (@AJGaza) routinely precede those of other media organisations by as much as several hours (with the exception of upstart @BreakingNewsOn); it uploads regular bulletins on YouTube and has even rolled out a specialised application, combining online maps, text messaging and of course Twitter to provide a tactical overview of events in Gaza. Meanwhile, a global peace movement is emerging that uses Flickr to share photos from demonstrations, Twitter to republish reports and argue heatedly, and collaborative portals and blogs to collate reports, as it petitions the slothful international community to enact a ceasefire and react to the developing humanitarian crisis.