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Recent high-profile incidents of violence against journalists have highlighted the dangers faced by anyone using social media to report on international events.
As more traditional news organizations might shy away from a story — either because of the potential for violence or lack of access to dangerous places — citizen journalists utilizing social media are picking up the slack. Recent events including the murder of Mexican journalists who used Twitter to report on drug cartels have made clear to online journalists that they can face some of the same threats.
Earlier this year, the United Nations sent out an alert declaring journalism to be one of the world’s most dangerous professions, according to the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. Journalists, both traditional and digital, “report on human rights violations and bad governance,” said the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay. They “give voice to the victims and the oppressed, and contribute towards raising awareness of human rights issues. … Mapping out a UN plan of action on the safety of journalists and to put an end to impunity for perpetrators of violations against them is essential.”
Murders of Mexican Journalists Linked to Their Use of Social Media
According to a Sept. 26, 2011 Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) story, the killing of a Mexican journalist in Nuevo Laredo on September 24 is the first documented case of murder “in direct retaliation for journalism posted on social media.” The victim, journalist Maria Elizabeth Macías Castro, was the news editor of daily newspaper Primera Hora, but she also contributed to a local social media website that discussed the local activity of drug cartels. Her body was found, decapitated, with a note nearby, reading “I’m here because of my reports, and yours,” and the message was tagged with multiple Z’s, showing a link to the violent Zetas cartel, according to a September 25 story in the Los Angeles Times. Article 19, an international group that protects freedom of expression, said in a September 21 statement on its website that “against the backdrop of endemic violence against journalists, social networks and other online communication platforms … are increasingly being used by citizens … to break the silence around criminal activities that are not being reported in the press because of the pervading climate of fear and self-censorship.” The group also pointed out that the declaration of principles of freedom of expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights acknowledges that issuing threats, murder, kidnapping, and intimidation violate fundamental human rights.
According to CPJ, drug-related violence now makes Mexico one of the world’s most dangerous countries for the press. Macías Castro’s body was found almost two weeks after the bodies of two young people were hung from a pedestrian overpass in Nuevo Laredo, according to CPJ, with a note left with the bodies that warned against writing on social media websites. Article 19 reported that the note said “This will happen to all the Internet snitches … Be warned, we’ve got our eye on you,” and that it was similarly signed by the Zetas drug cartel.
“As Mexican citizens, including journalists and media, are increasingly turning to new technology in the face of rampant censorship, drug cartels are using violence to control information on the Internet,” said Carlos Lauría, CPJ’s Americas senior program coordinator, in a statement released September 26 on the group’s website. “This wave of unprecedented violence is endangering the constitutional rights of all Mexicans to freedom of expression and access to information.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a San Francisco-based non-profit, reported in an October 3 story that throughout Mexico, traditional journalists are familiar with the constant threat of kidnappings and violence, which has chilled some coverage of drug cartel violence in traditional media outlets. But “in some parts of Mexico, websites such as Blog del Narco and Frontera al Rojo Vivo and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are able to provide news about drug-related violence that is not being covered in local newspapers or on television.” The EFF story said that people who post information sometimes use nicknames or pseudonyms to disguise their identity, but this is often insufficient: Macías Castro, for example, used a nickname on the website on which she posted.
A state police spokesman told the Associated Press (AP) that the body of a man was found near a Nuevo Laredo monument, “lying on his belly on top of a bloodstained message and a chopped head nearby,” according to a Nov. 10, 2011 AP story. The message read “this happened to me for not understanding that I shouldn’t report things on the social networks,” the AP said. The message said the man was a moderator for a website used by city residents to denounce crime and warn each other about drug cartel gunfights and roadblocks, the AP reported.
Rumors abound in Nuevo Laredo about many details surrounding the man’s murder, according to a November 11 CPJ story. But “the veracity of the reports and photos are nearly beside the point,” Lauría wrote. “In Mexico’s current climate, where CPJ research shows criminal organizations control the information agenda in many cities, what matters is the success of such attempts to scare professional and increasingly, citizen journalists.” (For more on the state of journalism in Mexico, see “Journalism Suffers amid Drug Wars in Mexico” in the Fall 2010 issue of the Silha Bulletin.)
Mexican Citizens Arrested on Terrorism Charges for Twitter Use
Drug violence is not the only danger that social media users in Mexico face. Two Mexican citizens using Twitter were arrested on terrorism charges after they reported rumors they believed to be true about a kidnapping at a local primary school. According to a September 21 statement from Article 19, Twitter user “gilius_22” tweeted a message claiming that five children had been kidnapped at a local school. The tweet allegedly read “I confirm that in the school ‘Jorge Arroyo’ in the Carranza neighborhood 5 kids were kidnapped, armed group, panic in the zone.” The message was re-tweeted by many in the community, and the news spread rapidly. The Governor of Veracruz eventually dismissed the rumor on Twitter. But the Article 19 statement said it was too late “to avert the rapid spread of panic and chaos across the city, with scores of parents rushing to remove their children from school and several schools temporarily closing.”
Twitter users Maria de Jesus Bravo Pagol and Gilberto Martínez Vera were accused of “disturbing the peace and spreading fear among fellow citizens … by disseminating false information on social networks,” according to Article 19. They were charged with terrorism and sabotage offenses under the Veracruz criminal code. The crime of terrorism, Article 19 said, prohibits “using explosives, toxic substances, firearms, fire, flood, or any other means against the people, public property or services to produce alarm, fear, or terror in the population or group thereof; to disturb the public peace, or to undermine the authority of the state or to pressure it to act.” The charges were later dropped amid intense public pressure, but only after they both spent a month in prison, according to a September 22 story from “Reporters Sans Frontières” (RSF or “Reporters Without Borders”).
According to a September 8 Citizen Media Law Project blog post, the crime carries a sentence of three to 30 years, a fine of up to 750 times the minimum wage, and up to six years suspended political rights. Arthur Bright, an attorney at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, criticized the actions of the Mexican government in the blog. He wrote that the “potential for chilling effects is huge. Why should anyone share information about possible criminal activities in Veracruz if the state might decide to prosecute you if you’re wrong (and even could decide to do so if you’re right)?” If the state had continued with the prosecution, Bright wrote, “I’d expect to see a significant drop in these sorts of warnings. And given the apparent lack of rapid news sources in Mexico, that’s particularly problematic.”
RSF also criticized the incident on its website. “This month in prison makes you think,” the organization wrote. “The Veracruz state prosecutor’s office wasted a lot of time on this pointless case when it still has to solve three recent murders of journalists which have made Veracruz one of the most dangerous states for the media this year.”
Mexican News Organizations Also Under Attack
November also saw an uptick in shooting attacks on several traditional Mexican journalistic organizations. According to a November 15 CPJ story, a group of gunmen attacked Mexican daily newspaper El Sigle de Torreón that morning, “setting a car on fire and shooting at the building several times.” The attack came only nine days after a similar attack on the El Buen Tono newspaper, where gunmen vandalized equipment and set the premises on fire, CPJ reported. El Siglo editor Javier Garza told CPJ that the gunmen set a car on fire in front of the main door, and that before leaving, they used assault rifles to spray the newspaper with about 20 bullets. Nobody was injured. “Criminal organizations will continue targeting the Mexican media unless federal authorities take decisive and timely actions to guarantee journalists’ safety,” Lauría said in the article.
Arab Spring Brings Journalism Via Social Media to the Forefront
In Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, social media have been lauded as a communications conduit that has helped organize protesters and gather support for the pro-democracy movements during the Arab Spring. Although it is unclear what role social media really played in the uprisings, Egyptian users are finding that the military regime controlling the country after the revolution has not embraced freedom for social media, even enforcing a Hosni Mubarak-era Emergency Law allowing journalists and other civilians to be tried in state security courts for critical reporting.
A September 19 “PBS Newshour” story reported that since the uprising “a plethora of new online initiatives have sprung up. Several citizen journalists have become full-on celebrities,” and “news agencies have started disseminating on Facebook … But the red lines restricting Egyptian voices are still there, only pushed back.” The story points out that the military leading the country has punished people who have criticized the army. For example, blogger Maikel Nabil Sanad was sentenced to three years in prison after being tried in military court. In early September, the military raided the Cairo office of Al Jazeera, confiscated some of its equipment, and arrested an engineer.
“For months now, the ruling Supreme Military Council of the Armed Forces has been going to great lengths to hamstring the media and snuff out critical reporting,” said Mohamed Abdel Dayem, the Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists in a September 13 story on the group’s website. “As the self-proclaimed guardian of the revolution, the military council ought to facilitate the work of long-silenced voices in the media instead of shutting them down and threatening them with repressive state security proceedings.”
The ultimate impact of social media remains uncertain, although increasingly diverse voices in Egyptian media have appeared since the revolution. Researchers from George Washington University did a comprehensive study of Tweets about the Egyptian and Libyan uprisings between January and March 2011, and found that more than three-quarters of the people who clicked on embedded Twitter links related to the uprisings were from outside the Arab world, according to a September 16 story on Nextgov, a website that covers the management of information technology in the federal government. Although the number of people clicking on these links from inside Egypt was smaller, interest stayed consistent throughout the revolution, while the clicks from outside the country surged around major news events, such as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, the study said.
At a September 16 panel discussion convened by Nextgov, the website reported, panelists cautioned that although social media can be a tool for harnessing international attention and organizing protests, it “can also be a tool for oppressive regimes to root out and track down dissidents. And paid government tweeters or computer programs can flood Twitter hash tag search results and blog commentary to give a false sense of public opinion.”
– Emily Johns
Silha Research Assistant
