Citizen Journalism and Brigading

We need to understand the risks posed by fanatics before we scale citizen journalism

"Chuck on the scene - Citizen journalism" by Tony Webster is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X (formerly known as Twitter) and antisemitic conspiracy theorist, wants to encourage citizen journalism on the platform. As with many of his public pronouncements about the future of social media, the basic idea is pretty good, but there is a very strong risk of any benefits being overwhelmed by poor execution and sloppy thinking.

Unfortunately, Musk appears to have gone down a far-right rabbit hole. He has combined comments about the need for citizen journalism with disparaging remarks about the mainstream news media, which - although sometimes flawed - is an institution that is meant to keep elites in check. His algorithms appear to be designed to punish outside links, as well as downgrading text and analysis compared to videos, memes and right-wing hot takes.

If done well, the upsides of citizen journalism should be obvious. The tools that enabled social media, from everyone having powerful video cameras in their pockets to real-time video-streaming tech, could easily keep politicians and business executives on their toes. Unfortunately, Musk’s attempts to stop people using tools like this to track his private jet suggest that he might not be the best person to design a system to facilitate citizen journalism.

The downsides of citizen journalism are less obvious than the upside, but they are worth mentioning. As we saw in December 2022, small groups of well-organised activists can gain outsize influence in direct democracies, simply because most non-activists are much too busy earning money, having a social life and raising families to waste much bandwidth studying the issues before a vote. “Brigading” - coordinated votes on social media by special-interest groups - is an example of the same trend; and we will borrow the term for this essay.

Cognitive dissonance is one of the big themes of the Sharpen Your Axe project. We all hate being contradicted. There is always a risk of doubling down on our starting position when someone tells us we are wrong. People who are quick to do this often end up deploying conspiracy theories as the bodyguards of failing ideas. Getting into the habit of doing this removes the feedback loops that are meant to provide a link to the world outside our heads.

The risks posed by fanatics who find cognitive dissonance uncomfortable should be obvious. Well-organised groups of people with inflexible worldviews will be able to get organised and brigade the structures of citizen journalism. Any reality-based pushback will be ignored at best and smeared as complicit in an imaginary plot at worst. Imagine a future where conspiracy theorists, bleach drinkers and anti-globalists find it easy to run amok on X and other similar sites, while smearing the mainstream media and those of us that defend conventional journalism. The fanatics will take particular delight in spreading disinformation that tells them what they want to hear, instead of what they need to hear.

We can see what this might look like in practice by looking at how well-organised nationalists have subverted the Catalan language edition of Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia*. In most of the world, Wikipedia represents the best of the internet, with geeks trying to follow basic ground rules to make each entry on the free encyclopedia as reality-based as possible. There is a clear contrast with algorithmic social media sites, which all too often turn into a cesspool of misinformation and disinformation, full of rabbit holes.

During the Catalan separatist coup attempt, it was a truism that around three quarters of the region’s Catalan-speaking minority supported independence, while around three quarters of the Spanish-speaking majority opposed it. The Catalan nationalist regional government provided subsidies to newspapers that published editions in Catalan, as long as they refrained from criticising the movement too much.

Around the same time, nationalists started editing articles on the Catalan-language version of Wikipedia to make it supportive of the cause. We can see this clearly by looking at the entries for Catalonia / Cataluña / Catalunya on Wikipedia in English, Spanish and Catalan respectively. The English version describes Catalonia as “an autonomous community of Spain, designated as a nationality by its Statute of Autonomy.” This is entirely correct. The Spanish version says the territory is “a Spanish autonomous community, which is considered a historic nationality by its Statute of Autonomy” (my translation). This is also correct.

However, the Catalan version says that Catalonia is “a European country situated in the Western Mediterranean, constituted as an autonomous community of the Spanish state” (also my translation). This is much more problematic. English-language Wikipedia says that the word “country” is often used as a synonym for a state, although the definition can be fuzzy. The people who wrote and edited the Catalan article are using the word differently from its everyday sense.

The Catalan entry on the word “country” (“país”) lists regions like French Catalonia; regions with devolved powers like Wales and Catalonia itself; and aspirational regions like “the Catalan countries,” which include parts of Spain and France, along with an Italian city. At no point does it mention actually existing countries as most people would understand the term. The English entry is more comprehensive, including actually existing countries like Japan and Senegal; Wales (which is described as a component of a multi-part sovereign state); historical states like Korea before it split in two; and non-sovereign regions like the Basque Country.

The Catalan nationalists who wrote and edited these entries have accepted the improbable idea that nations exist in nature, predating modern states. In reality, it is the other way round: nations are created by the leaders of states who have national aspirations. Sovereignty is formally defined by constitutions rather than existing in the wild, waiting to be discovered.

As we have said before, ideas matter. Catalan nationalist writers and editors strongly believe that Catalonia should be a sovereign country and that Spain is a historical abnormality, which only came about because of the quirks of history. By presenting these aspirations as facts in an open-source encyclopedia, they have subverted the whole point of the project, which is to describe reality as it is, not as it should be.

What can we do to prevent fanatics overwhelming citizen journalism in the same way? I strongly believe that we can learn from time-tested journalistic practices. Research is a team sport. Reporters are meant to work closely with editors. Lawyers are on hand to advise on sensitive material. Compliance and the right to reply are taken seriously very seriously when a news business is run as it is meant to be.

It is interesting to think about how the media mishandled the recent failure of a Palestinian bomb in a hospital car park in Gaza. Hamas immediately claimed that 500 people had been killed by an Israeli bomb. Many major news outlets immediately published the claims. Although many parts of the media backtracked as new evidence came in and later apologised, the damage had already been done. It is very difficult to see how citizen journalists would have outperformed the professionals if they had followed the same basic model.

To their credit, though, open source intelligence (OSINT) analysts did do a great job of collating the evidence on social media. Their approach - taking time to gather as much evidence as possible while being slow to draw conclusions - proved much more fruitful than the conventional news media in this case.

For me, this suggests a way forward for citizen journalism to thrive. Training courses to prepare people on the techniques needed, as well as on developing a skeptical and non-partisan attitude based on OSINT methods and the Bayesian sliding scale for beliefs, will be very valuable. Associations of citizen journalists could work together to provide credentials for people doing good, honest work while marginalising partisans who distort material to support a cause. Access to media lawyers is another important element.

The emphasis at the beginning should be on quality rather than quantity, although of course any successes can be scaled more widely later on. Educators can help prepare the ground, by using generative artificial intelligence to train people on fact-checking skills, as we mentioned recently.

As always when we discuss Catalan nationalism, the comments are closed. Being attacked by a bot army for the awful crime of fact-checking the movement’s presentation of aspirations as reality was a horrible experience. I find the lack of reflection from Catalan nationalists about why the movement was so willing to accept support from Vladimir Putin’s disinformation machine to be particularly unforgivable. See you next week!

Further Reading

All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein

*All quotes from Wikipedia were correct at the time this essay was written.

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Opinions expressed on Substack and Substack Notes, as well as on Bluesky, Mastodon, Post and X (formerly Twitter), are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.