Daily Times

When Mohammed Bouazizi lit himself on fire outside the Tunisian municipal office in December 2010, no one could have thought his eventual death to be the catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution that led to the demise of the 23-year reign of the Tunisian president, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. In neighbouring Egypt, prior to January 2011, if you were to walk into any local cafe, you would hear, and most likely partake in, conversations about the tyranny of the government, corruption of the police and the time for revolution. These conversations were soon happening online as well. News of Tunisia’s revolution and outrage over civilian Khalid Said’s brutal murder led Egypt to eventually plunge into its own revolution in January 2011.

These string of revolutions are known as the Arab Spring, and a lot of the work for this was done online. Mass rallies and protests were organised on online forums, reports of abuse by police forces were shared on Twitter, and renewed feelings of patriotism were fostered on Facebook pages. Even today, the “We are Khalid Said” page remains among the most popular/liked pages within the Egyptian community. But the revolution then not only changed history but also proved that even back in 2011, tech-journalism played an integral role. Five years later, this role has become even more important.

The world today is so reliant on social media and online applications to receive news updates that for a large majority of people holding a newspaper might be foreign altogether. Nevertheless, individuals today are more aware than they have ever been. With Twitter on their fingertips, news often breaks on Twitter feeds first than it does on live news channels. Journalists are increasingly using Snapchat to report live from the field. We have never been closer to the stories being told, and consequently with the medium of reporting changed, awareness and viewership has increased.

However, the core importance of tech-journalism is overshadowed by the mainstream nature of it. For example, movements such as Black Lives Matter are completely dependent on their social media campaign. With organisation of protests in different states and providing evidence of a new case of police brutality on Facebook Live, social media is evidently becoming revolutionary in ways more than one. However, censorship of any kind can prove detrimental to the progression of such campaigns. And that is the downside of this advanced form of journalism, because that is also where politics comes in.

The relationship between journalism and politics is more intricate and twisted than one would think. For one, both are heavily reliant on the other. When the Turkish military coup happened in July 2016, I believe not a lot of people realised how President Recip Tayyip Erdogan tactfully used technology to preserve his government and suppress the coup altogether. Using something as accessible and mundane like Facebook Live to give his address and then consequently preventing the overthrow of his government is a remarkable notion. Take a look at past US elections where the presidential candidates relied heavily on the debates to elicit more support. Instead, today their tweets and online banter with each other seems to doing the job just as well, if not better. So much so that the election campaign is even simply dubbed the ‘Twitter campaign’.

But while politicians seem content with the advantages of technology that ‘bring us closer together’ there is a downside to it for them as well. They now have to be very careful, because media is quick to expose their wrongdoings and missteps. With scandal videos making it onto Twitter almost immediately, and controversial statements being dissected and analysed on every forum, they have become more sensitive about their image. And that means creating many obstacles for tech-journalism.

Banning Geo News multiple times is an ideal example of this. Fortunately, in this day and age imposing censorship has become very difficult. You will hear the story through one medium or the other, if not on TV then on some social media platform. In contrast, this reminds me of the time my mother told me that the Pakistani political party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, had the capability in the 1990s to completely censor any of its underhanded actions, long enough for the public to either forget or never hear about it in the first place. It is unlikely something like this can happen today.

But the problem is a two-sided one, with not only the government to blame. In countries like Pakistan, news channels and its reporters are often ruthless and daresay, insensitive, in their intensively hasty reporting. While being quick to cover, dissect and even exploit the story, they often completely sideline the core facts of the story itself. Because of the accessibility and convenient nature of tech-journalism, these characteristics are taken undue advantage of. In turn, politicians and politics as a whole are dragged through the mud because nothing remains under wraps anymore.

To counter this, governments have come up with a strategy that though not completely fair is still highly effective and allows them to exercise the power they have. Governments completely cut stories out and shape their journalism and news reporting according to their foreign policy. That way news is still being covered, just in a certain way, and arguments regarding limitation of freedom of speech can be completely trumped since the story is still indeed being covered. It is just the matter of another story being reported more aggressively. For example, CNN is very unlikely to report on Palestinian casualties and difficulties but will do so extensively on small Israeli setbacks.

Fortunately, tech-journalism today has done monumental work in disrupting and untangling this messy relationship. Regardless of what the local media reports to you, one can still access other unreported stories or read up on an alternate perspective on a specific issue. From the Arab Spring, we have come a long way, and I still believe history can be rewritten and revolutions can rise up; all we need is awareness about issues. Luckily for the present generation, we just need to go online to do that.