What is the difference between communication and propaganda? Communication is President Obama announcing his re-election on Twitter with three words and a picture. “Four more years”, a simple, elegant and eloquent message. The picture was of Obama hugging his wife, a happy, relieved, relaxed look on his face. It was PR at its best, showing the president not in presidential mode but as a husband celebrating a big event with his wife. Later came the acceptance speech and all the razzmatazz, but the tweet came first. Propaganda is the Israeli Army announcing that it had killed Ahmed Jaabari on Twitter. Once again three words and a picture, in this case “Ahmed Jaabari: Eliminated”, and a poster like picture of Jaabari with the word ELIMINATED stamped across the picture and a few lines to tell us what Israel thought he had done to deserve being killed. With one press of a button Israeli supporters could retweet the image and send it across the globe. Propaganda at its best. Israel has been live-tweeting its attacks on Gaza. After killing Ahmed Jaabari, it even posted on Twitter a video of the “pinpoint” strike that killed him and it has continued giving us a blow by blow account of its assault on Gaza as well as images and accounts of Israelis being attacked by rockets fired by Hamas. Hamas did not take long to respond, they took to Twitter too so that we now have a war of words to match the real war being waged on the ground, and just like the war on the ground, @Alqassam brigade is no match for @IDFspokesperson; one has a mighty army with planes, tanks and state-of-the art weaponry and the other a limited arsenal of rockets. Do you remember back in the days of Saddam and Mubarak, when during the Gulf War Mubarak famously said that he had seen in on CNN? The Gulf War brought pictures of war direct into our living rooms through our television screens. We could watch grainy footage of bombs being dropped in the night. It was the first time that we could see a war in a faraway place (or not so faraway place) in real-time. But CNN is a television channel and somewhere in a studio an editorial team was responsible for making sure that what was aired could be aired. It was not propaganda, it was news. But tweeting is on an entirely different scale. It enables anyone to communicate with millions of people at the touch of a button. You can propagate any story you like with vicious efficiency. There is no one checking your facts, there are almost no controls on what can be posted; the official controls if there are any, come afterwards, after a tweet has already been tweeted. So for instance, if we think of the current scandal engulfing the BBC, people could and were tweeting the same information that the BBC wrongly presented in its Newsnight program. The difference is that the BBC has an editorial team that is responsible for checking the veracity of the stories before it allows them to go on air. Clearly they didn't do their job properly and the result is that some of them have had to resign from their jobs. Social media do not have those safeguards. Responsibility rests solely with those posting the content. It is akin to giving a gigantic loudspeaker to anyone who wants it. You can stand out there in the street and say anything you like. If what you say is uninteresting, no one will pay attention. If on the other hand you start saying amusing or interesting things, a crowd will gather and follow you. Those who disagree with you will tell you. Ditto if you say something offensive. Rebuttal is easy and quick and just as it is easy for you to say anything you like, it is easy for others to point out any errors you make or to start making fun of you. Essentially the process is one of amplification, it allows you to communicate with a worldwide audience rather than just the people around you and to do so directly, without any gatekeepers. As it happens, Twitter, just like Facebook or YouTube, does have a code of conduct for its users. If you break its terms of service, they may take down your account or delete a tweet. Generally this is following a complaint, but they also act directly when appropriate. Its terms of service tell us that “you may not publish or post direct specific threats of violence against others”, and yet they have allowed the war tweets and the videos of bombings, why? The more important question is one of precedent. This is the first time a government has used social media to report a war live on air. The poor executives at Twitter are out of their depth; this is not what the little bird was made for. There are serious ethical questions to be answered about showing people being killed almost live on air. There are also questions about allowing a state, any state, to use you as a propaganda tool in a killing campaign. It's easy to just let things happen, to lie back and observe; the war is happening anyway and all that Twitter is doing is allowing for people to report what they are thinking, doing and seeing. If only it were as simple as that. You cannot separate actions and consequences; if you give people a platform for violent propaganda, you become part of the propaganda machine. Is that really what Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et al. want to become? – Imane Kurdi is a Saudi writer on European affairs. She can be reached at [email protected]
