Do social media help make international intervention less likely?

The question may seem a bit counter-intuitive at first. The common, if not yet quite conventional, wisdom is that, the more social media buzz there is around an issue, the more people get engaged in it, and the more popular pressure can be brought to bear on decision makers to take action.

Indeed, that probably works with many topics, including national and international crises. If there’s been a flood or an earthquake, for example, social media can help get the word out, transmitting messages in all formats -- text, audio, stills, video -- through those networks of personal trust that make tools like Facebook and Twitter so effective.

If an aid organisation plays it right, it can no doubt link up with the inevitable outpouring of international sympathy via social media and bring in new individual donations to apply to its work helping the victims. Perhaps it can even corral public pressure and direct it toward governments to get them to announce fresh aid packages in response. That seems reasonably straightforward.

In a conflict, however, things are very different.

Darfur: Unhelpful Media Diversions

This appeared on my Reuters AlertNet blog and was crossposted on the Globe for Darfur group blog, on 7 June 2007.

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Over the past few months, some media attention on Darfur has shifted away from the issue itself and on to the activist movement and its cast of characters. At the risk of navel-gazing, it seems worth a quick summary, because it leads, hopefully, to some lessons for all of us in the NGO sector.

The problem first seemed to develop -- at least from my European perspective -- in France, where Darfur activists and intellectuals trying to capture public attention with their pet proposals in the midst of a heated presidential campaign spent weeks attacking each other in public meetings and on the pages of the major dailies.

Egeland and After

I posted this on my Reuters AlertNet blog on 23 November 2006.

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On 4 December, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland will give what will almost certainly be his final briefing to the Security Council before his departure at the end of Kofi Annan's term in office. With this "valedictory address" around the corner, it's a good time to recall -- given the theme of this blog -- the dramatic transformation in media response to humanitarian crises since Egeland was appointed to the post in 2003, and his role in that shift.

Darfur Disconnect

This appeared on my Reuters AlertNet blog on 26 September 2006. Apart from a throat-clearing introductory piece, it was my first post there.

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As I've been thinking about how to develop this blog, I've also been trying to get some notes together for a panel discussion on Darfur I am taking part in at the Frontline Club in London on Thursday.

Surely the whole underlying assumption of this blog -- if not the west's super-media-saturated society in general -- is that the media matter a great deal. The media are influential, and the assumption of many in the NGO and international aid community is traditionally, "if only people knew about this distant crisis, leaders would have to do something about it, and it would end".

Darfur is proving this idea wrong.