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Advocacy Citizen Journalism in the Wild

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Advocacy Citizen Journalism in the Wild The “Courage For” Facebook Pages: Advocacy Citizen Journalism in the Wild Saiph Savage Andrés Monroy-Hernández Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico & Microsoft Research UC Santa Barbara [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT sions about the crimes that afflict their communities. For This paper presents a descriptive analysis of two popular instance, the about section of the `Courage for Tamaulipas" Facebook pages used to circumvent the information black- Facebook page says: \Information for prevention and follow out imposed by criminal organizations in the regions of Mi- up of security incidents in Tamaulipas." This page created choac´an and Tamaulipas. The pages go by the name\Courage in 2012, reached prominence after a drug cartel offered a for Michoacan" (CFMich) and \Courage for Tamaulipas" 600,000 pesos reward for the administrator's whereabouts (CFTam), and have more than 170,000 and 490,000 fans [7]. The page has developed a language for reporting secu- respectively. Here we analyze the pages' entire corpus of rity incidents and vetting of information. posts from their inception to the time we collected the data in the Spring of 2014, amounting to nine months with 6,901 We set off to investigate some of the posting dynamics of posts of activity for CFMich, and 25 months with 18,977 of these pages. We use data from two \Courage for" Facebook activity for CFTam. We then examined the pages' daily ac- pages: \Valor por Tamaulipas1, and \Valor por Michoac´an tivity patterns, and traits of their news reporting: length SDR" 2, which is Spanish for \Courage for Tamaulipas" (CF- of the report, locations and public figures they mention. Tam) and \Courage for Michoac´an", (CFMich). Of all the We found that the these pages engage in a form of citizen- \Courage for" pages, these two have the most number of driven advocacy journalism, with the CFMich page focusing posts and the highest number of Facebook fans. The pages on state and country-wide affairs, while the CFTam one on focus mainly on providing spaces where citizens can share neighborhood-level events. We conclude by discussing possi- reports and be informed of \situaciones de riesgo" (SDR) or ble implications of our findings for the design of future tools \security incidents" which is the label people use on social for citizen journalism. media to refer to events such as a robberies, car chases etc. 1. INTRODUCTION Note that the citizen reporters of CFTam and CFMich are In recent years, several journalists have been threaten for seemingly also acting as activists. In interviews [7] and inter- covering the Drug War [5, 2]. These attacks from organized net postings [14, 15, 10] some of these citizen reporters have crime, and even government officials [4], have forced many declared that they report crime out of the conviction that journalists to censor themselves [2]. Previous research has by raising awareness of the actual crime that is taking place shown how this information vacuum motivates people to use they will benefit and transform their country. For instance, social media to report, in real-time, the location and nature they think they can bring safety to other residents [7, 11]; or of drug related crimes and incidents [11]. This work has also help to fight corruption [14]. We use CFTam and CFMich as documented the emergence of citizen \news correspondents" a window to explore how advocacy citizen journalism looks who use their Twitter visibility to receive and curate news like in the wild. reports of what happens in their communities. We characterize the posts of these two pages using analyt- In addition to Twitter, citizens are using other platforms, ical techniques similar to those for examining online dis- such as Facebook or YouTube, to report crime. In this course [3]. In particular, we focus on the locations, and paper we focus on a genre of Facebook pages organically public figures that these posts cover. We explore organiza- named \Courage for X", where X is the name of a state or tions, and public figures because they give us a glimpse into region. The pages seek to provide online spaces for \coura- the interests of these citizen reporters, as well as the issues geous" citizens to report, comment, and engage in discus- they may want to make more prominent or de-emphasize. Additionally, geographical locations help us to further pro- file and contextualize their news reports. 2. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS We used Facebook's public API to collect the full set of posts from the two \Courage for" pages (6,901 for CFMich and 18,977 for CFTam.) For CFTam we collected posts from the 1https://www.facebook.com/ValorPorTamaulipas" 2https://www.facebook.com/ValorPorMichoacan Tamaulipas Michoac´an Posts 18,977 6,901 Page Fans 487,871 158,000 Median Words per Post 29 32 Table 1: Characteristics of CFMich's and CFTam' News Reports. page's start date on January 1st, 2012 until February 18th Birth of 300 Peace Protest in 2014. For CFMich it was between its creation in August CXTamaulipas Apatzingan, Army Army enters 300 disarms some Apatzingan to 19th, 2013 until May 7th 2014. Table 1 presents a summary Militias disarm Militias of the data we collected for each page. 200 200 Militias agree with Government to disarm We extracted the type of public figures and locations refer- themselves Number of Posts 100 enced in the CFTam and CFMich posts to obtain a descrip- 100 Number of Posts tive assessment of the type of content these citizen jour- nalists share online. For this purpose, we first familiarized 0 0 2012−07 2013−01 2013−07 2014−01 ourselves with these two \Courage For" page by frequently Oct Jan Apr reading their posts and exchanging notes and observations CXTamaulipas CXMichoacán among the researchers. Figure 1: Overview of the daily activity of the two 2.1 Types of Public Figures and Organizations "Courage for" pages. Our goal was to characterize the type of public figures and organizations that advocacy citizen journalists mentioned in their posts. For this purpose we manually created a list of organizations: government, militia, drug cartel, and jour- full, common, and nicknames from public figures relevant to nalists (news reporters from traditional media) and labeled these two regions, and then identified posts that mentioned each of the public figures in our list into one of these types. any of the names. We collected the names from Wikipedia and from Proceso Magazine 3. We considered that the pub- 2.2 Locations lic figures that were more likely to appear in the reports of We identified the posts that mentioned a city or town in these citizen journalists would be the figures involved in the Michoac´an or Tamaulipas. We used a list4 from the National drug war in Michoac´an or Tamaulipas. For Michoac´an we Institute of Statistics and Geography to identify comments collected the Wikipedia articles in both Spanish and English that referenced such locations. about the drug cartel in that state and civilians who oppose them, i.e., the Wikipedia articles titled \Caballeros Tem- 3. RESULTS plarios",\Grupos de Autodefensa Comunitaria" and \Knights Our goal is to explore the type of content that these advo- Templar Cartel." Similarly, for Tamaulipas, we collected the cacy citizen journalist share online. For this purpose, we Wikipedia articles of: \Cartel del Golfo," and \Los Zetas." examined: (1) CFTam's and CFMich's daily activity; (2) We used these articles to manually identify proper names the amount of coverage CFMich and CFTam give to certain (i.e., public figures.) We did the same with Proceso Maga- type of public figure and location. zine articles. We used Proceso's online search to find articles related to these drug cartels and the armed citizens who Daily Activity We plot the daily number of posts from oppose them, using the keywords autodefensas, caballeros CFTam (Figure 1a) and CFMich (1b). This initial analysis templarios, cartel del Golfo, and Los Zetas. For each key- provides an overview of the behavior of these activist citi- word, we went through each of the articles that appeared zen reporters. It lets us examine whether CFMich's citizen in the first page of the search results. We again collected reporters have similar posting patterns to CFTam's. all of the names that appeared in these articles. We then added or merged the alternate names for each public figure, Figure 1 shows that CFMich's citizen reporters have more both shorter and nicknames. For example, \Enrique Pena variation in their daily posting behavior than CFTam's. The Nieto" was also known as \EPN," or \Jose Manuel Mireles citizen reporters of CFMich appear to create more reports Valverde" was usually referred to as simply \Mireles." on days when there are major offline events in Michoac´an. What is particularly interesting is that the majority of the We then grouped all of the public figures and organizations peaks correspond to days when armed civilians had conflicts in our list based on their main affiliation (i.e., type.) For with the Government. Other major offline events transpiring instance, \Enrique Pena Nieto" and \Alfredo Castillo Cer- in Michoac´an appear to have gotten less attention by these vantes" were grouped together because both worked for the citizen reporters. For instance, on 14 January 2014, the government. We obtained the affiliations using data from day the Army entered the town of Apatzingan to disarm the Proceso and Wikipedia articles mentioned earlier. We considered that a public figure could have only one affilia- 4For Michoac´an we used :http://cuentame.inegi.org. tion (as these parties are usually segregated.) Through this mx/monografias/informacion/mich/territorio/div\ process, we identified four main types of public figures and _municipal.aspx?tema=me For Tamaulipas we used: http://cuentame.inegi.org.
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