Using the Arts to Bridge the Divide Between Israel and Palestine
BY GILAD LOTAN
It'southward difficult to shake abroad the utterly depressing feeling that comes with news coverage these days. IDF and Hamas are at it again, a vicious cycle of violence, but this time it feels much more intense. While war rages on the ground in Gaza and across Israeli skies, at that place'due south an all-out information state of war unraveling in social networked spaces.
Not only is in that location much more than media produced, but it is coming at the states at a faster pace, from many more sources. Every bit we construct our online profiles based on what we already know, what we're interested in, and what we're recommended, social networks are perfectly designed to reinforce our existing beliefs. Personalized spaces, optimized for engagement, prioritize content that is likely to generate more traffic; the more nosotros click, share, similar, the college engagement tracked on the service. Content that makes us uncomfortable, is filtered out.
We're not seeing different viewpoints, but rather more than of the same.
A healthy commonwealth is contingent on having a good for you media ecosystem. As builders of these online networked spaces, how practice we make certain we optimizing non only for traffic and engagement, but also an informed public?
Instagram co-tag graph, highlighting three distinct topical communities: 1) pro-Israeli (Orange), two) pro-Palestinian (Yellow), and iii) Religious/Muslim (Regal)
Media constructs reality
As I'thousand writing this post, details of an Israeli Air Force missile assault near the entrance of a Un school in Rafah are emerging. The assail killed at least ten, injuring many more. The IDF claims it had targeted 3 members of the Islamic Jihad riding a motorcycle almost the school, not the schoolhouse itself.
Within the hr, top English-language news portals are leading with the story (see image gallery):
- The New York Times: "Airstrike Near U.N. School Kills ten″
- Google News: "U.South. 'Appalled' by 'Disgraceful' UN School Shelling"
- CNN: "U.N. Calls Strike near Gaza Shelter 'Moral Outrage'"
- Huffington Mail service: "State Dept: Israel Shelling 'Disgraceful'"
When we take a look at some of the top Israeli digital media portals, there'southward petty mention of the incident at all (headlines translated from Hebrew):
- Ynet: "IDF Redeploys Troops, Hamas Shoots 95 Rockets Today." In that location'south a pocket-size mention of the incident far beneath the fold.
- Mako (Channel 2 News): "IDF Full general: 'Nosotros will go in and destroy every tunnel that we discover.'" Not a unmarried mention of the U.Due north. school incident.)
- Nana: No mention of the incident.
- Ha'aretz: Leads with an article about the U.N. schoolhouse attack.
As you lot tin see, in that location'southward almost no mention of the incident across major Israeli media portals. Ha'aretz does cover the story, but Ha'aretz as well has less than 10 per centum readership, as it is considered to engender extreme liberal views. In the fallout of this state of war, the paper is also losing subscribers angered by published articles critiquing the IDF.
Israelis are convinced that media around the world is one-sided, anti-Israeli, and heavily biased towards the Palestinian cause. Notwithstanding few come out against their ain clearly biased, heavily concentrated and privately owned media (encounter: Mozes family, Sheldon Adelson).
The following analogy, created in 2012 in response to CNN's whitewashing of Bahrain dictatorship, has been popularly shared across Israeli Facebook pages over the by weeks. It depicts common Israeli sentiment towards western media, equally irrational and detached from reality.
Photo via Carlos Latuff/Wordpress
These very deliberate choices made by media outlets affect our reality, how well nosotros're informed as a public. Should Israelis evidence more sympathy towards the U.North. school attack? And if so, who is to blame?
Social Networks
On social network sites, the landscape is much more nuanced and highly personalized. We construct a representation of our interest by choosing to follow or "like" specific pages. The more than we engage with certain blazon of content, the more than similar content is made visible in our feeds. Recommendation and scoring functions larn from our social connections and our actions online, constructing a model that optimizes for engagement; the more date, the more than traffic, clicks, likes, shares, and and then forth, the higher the company'south supposed value. Our capitalistic markets appreciate a growing value.
Facebook plays a key office at disseminating information to the population at large. While some Israelis share news manufactures in their feeds, many use content sourced by a number of very pop Facebook pages. These are public pages that typically surface funny memes, or BuzzFeed-style attending-grabbing images, highly shareable content perfect for Facebook feed-style interactions.
StandWithUs (413k likes), an international non-profit organization dedicated to "informing the public almost State of israel and combating extremism and anti-Semitism" had no mention of the U.N. incident. The aforementioned goes for Kikar Hashabat (117k likes) and Tweeting Statuses (605k likes), a heavily followed humour and media curation page.
Instead, the following map of the Gaza Strip equally a minesweeper grid was posted, with the post-obit comment: "currently spreading on WhatsApp."
Photo via StatusHunter/Facebook
The grouping'south moderator conspicuously received the prototype from a WhatsApp group, and posted to this public Facebook page, which received over xi,000 likes, hundreds of shares and then far, 133 comments, ranging from critiques to justifications, a highly polarized stream of comments.
Again, the Israeli sources had not even a unmarried mention of the U.N. incident. It wasn't covered by Israeli media, nor was it surfaced through popular Facebook pages.
The graph below represents Twitter accounts responding to a different incident at the UNWRA school in Beit Hanoun between July 25th and 30th. Information technology is still unclear who is to blame for firing at the school, although someone clearly learned their Google SEO tricks (click hither to see who comes up offset on Google search).
Nodes are Twitter handles, and their connections represent who follow relationships. The larger a node, the higher its centrality, the more than followed that account is inside this grouping. The closer together two nodes, the more connections they share. Different colors correspond communities, effectively regions that display significant levels of connectivity; nodes of the aforementioned colour are much more inter-connected compared to the residue of the graph.
This network graph details the landscape of Twitter handles responding to the UNWRA schoolhouse bombing.
Network graphs are mathematical tools used to model relations betwixt objects and are incredibly helpful when working with social data. Analyzing their structure helps united states gain insight into our culture and society. In this example, we see a articulate separation between the two sides. On the correct, a conspicuously "pro-Palestinian" group of activists (in dark-green) also every bit a variety of media outlets and journalists (in greyness). The gray cluster of bloggers, journalists and international media entities is closely connected with the group of pro-Palestinian activists, which means that information is much more likely to spread amongst the 2. This structural characteristic of the graph reinforces general Israeli sentiment regarding international media bias.
The "pro-Palestinian" side.
Two of the most popularly forwarded posts from within this side of the graph are:
I've just been to the UNWRA school that was shelled terminal dark 13 dead. 4 shells bracketed schoolhouse. Targeted or non, area is noncombatant.
— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) July xxx, 2014
Our correspondent @paulmasonnews holds upwards shrapnel collected at UNWRA school in Gaza https://t.co/hQ8jNFwV1h #c4news film.twitter.com/uS726ISRU8
— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) July 30, 2014
Alternatively, on the other side nosotros run across the "pro-Israeli" groups, including media outlets, Israeli public personas, and various American zionists (light blue), besides as American conservatives and Tea Party members (dark blue).
The "pro-Israeli" side.
Popularly shared posts inside this grouping include:
How many times can UNWRA claim to be "shocked" by rockets in their schools before people stop buying it? Third fourth dimension: https://t.co/qwhB9HiBDl
— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) July 29, 2014
What is UNWRA ? $i billion annual upkeep to teach this to the Gaza kids: #hate #war #Nakba Twenty-four hours https://t.co/7FEY9TgMYL pic.twitter.com/OYTdME4FHm
— TB. (@tom_bench) July 30, 2014
There'south a clear difference in frame when we compare one side of the graph to the other. None of the information shared is simulated per se, yet users brand deliberate choices about what they choose to amplify. This is a representation of their values, and the values of their connections. Messages passed along in 1 side of the graph will never reach the other.
Certain nodes are more strategic when trying to bridge betwixt the two sides. In this case, Haaretz accommodates the nigh connections on both the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli sides of the graph, having the highestbetweenness centrality. Compared to all other nodes in the graph, Haaretz is near likely to spread throughout the wider network. It has the well-nigh potential for bridging across biases and political barriers.
On Instagram, nosotros see similar dynamics play out. The language used to describe pro-Israeli content includes tags such equally: #IsraelUnderFire#IStandWithIsrael #PrayForIsrael and #Peace. On the other side of the conflict, nosotros see: #FreeGaza, #PrayForGaza, #Genocide and #BoycottIsrael.
This tag cloud represents co-occurence of hashtags on Insragram posts. The larger a tag, the more than times information technology appeared. The tighter-connected two tags are, the more than times they appeared together.
Content and conversations on Instagram are carve up into several camps, where once again, we're effectively all talking to people like the states.
Call it Homophily, telephone call it the Filter bubble, it is a prevalent phenomenon everywhere we turn.
Commercialism vs. commonwealth
Personalized online spaces are architected to keep us coming back for more than. Content that is likely to generate more than clicks, or traffic is prioritized in our feeds, while what makes us uncomfortable, fades into the ether.
We construct our social spaces?—?we may choose to follow a user, like a page or subscribe to updates from a given topic.
When we like a Facebook folio, we are recommended other similar pages (see: collaborative filtering) based on past deportment taken by other users on the site. For example, when I chose to follow Miri Regev, a conservative right-wing Israeli pol, the system recommends other right-wing Israeli politicians, many of which share her political agenda.
The underlying algorithmics powering this recommendation engine help reinforce our values and bake more of the same voices into our information streams.
An experiment
Facebook'southward trending pages amass content that are heavily shared ("trending") across the platform. If you're already logged into Facebook, you'll see a personalized view of the trend, highlighting your friends and their views on the trend. Give it a try.
Now open a separate browser window in incognito mode (Chrome: File->New Incognito Window) and navigate to the same page. Since the browser has no idea who you are on Facebook, y'all'll get the raw, unpersonalized feed.
How are the two different?
Personalizing Propaganda
If you're rooting for Israel, you might take seen videos of rocket launches past Hamas adjacent to Shifa Hospital. Alternatively, if you're pro-Palestinian, yous might have seen the following written report on an alleged IDF sniper who admitted (on Instagram) to murdering 13 Gazan children. Israelis and their proponents are likely to see IDF videos such every bit this one detailing arms and tunnels institute within mosques passed around in their social media feeds, while Palestinian groups are likely to pass around images displaying the sheer destruction acquired by IDF forces to Gazan mosques. I side sees videos of rockets intercepted in the Tel-Aviv skies, and other sees the lethal aftermath of a missile assail on a Gazan neighborhood.
The amend we go at modeling user preferences, the more accurately nosotros construct recommendation engines that fully capture user attention. In a fashion, nosotros are building personalized propaganda engines that feed users content which makes them feel good and throws away the uncomfortable bits.
We used to be able to hold media accountable for misinforming the public. Now we only have ourselves to blame.
In Search of Sanity
I was surprised to find a relatively sane discussion happening in i social network?—?Clandestine.ly, an app that lets you share anonymous letters with your friends. The service published a page with a list of posts about the disharmonize. I plant one of particular interest, non merely for the topic, only the actual discussion that unfolded. The combination of anonymity and some proxy for social ties seemed to calm down the typically polarized and extreme tone of conversations.
Photo via Secret
It as well helps that the service is withal quite small, relatively speaking.
In closing
We demand to be more thoughtful nearly adding and maintaining bridges beyond information silos online. In the Twitter case to a higher place, Ha'aretz is clearly positioned well in the network to make of import impact on both sides, nonetheless due to that, Ha'aretz also struggles to find its core audience, hence secure plenty budget to operate and abound. If yous made it this far down the article, you conspicuously intendance about the topic. At that place are two ways yous can help:
- Help make Ha'aretz financially stable past paying for an online subscription (less than $10 per calendar month).
- Donate to 972mag.com (and its Hebrew counterpart?—?Mekomit.co.il), both provide fresh, original, on-the-ground reporting on events in Israel and Palestine, with a stiff commitment to human rights and freedom of data.
Gilad Lotan is the main information scientist at betaworks, a technology company that operates as a studio, building new products, growing companies and seed investing. Previously, Gilad ran the information squad at SocialFlow and built information visualizations at Microsoft'due south FUSE Labs. Gilad is an advisor for media entities and startups. His work has been covered by the New York Times, the Guardian, Fast Visitor and the Atlantic Wire and published across a broad range of academic journals. This commodity was originally featured on Medium and republished with permission.
Photograph via Israeli Defense Forces/Flickr (CC BY two.0)
Source: https://www.dailydot.com/via/internet-divide-israel-and-gaza/
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