Comipidigest1 2015

FOREWORD

International, Public & Corporate Communication Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News Issue # 1 - 2015

This newsletter is aimed at providing Public Affairs practitioners with a short selection of recently published stories, papers, etc. which may be useful to remain abreast of new trends or to stimulate a debate. External sources are linked and any copyright remains with the authors.

Je Suis Charlie The main, tragic communication event of the past quarter was certainly the terrorist attacks in France. Three posts at our Facebook page attracted particular interest.

They focused on the debate about publishing or not information that may be ‘inflamatory’ and on the reasons why the event dominated the news even if a even more orrible massacre had occurred in Africa.

Our second favorite subject has been Russian propaganda. And particularly the instrumental role played by Western media.

Another important study case was #TheDress, a creative approach to advertising that demonstrated how to make best use of Social Media for commercial purposes.

The fourth subject, in terms of our viewers’ interest, was Social Media, and the use made as source of news.

In this issue:

Je Suis Charlie (Until Je Get Scared)

p. 2

Charlie Hebdo: To Publish, Or Not To Publish? p. 3 Media coverage of Charlie Hebdo and the Baga massacre p. 4 Cranks, Trolls, and Useful Idiots p. 7 The Guardian view on Russian propaganda p. 9 The news business should refuse Facebook’s deal p. 10 Marketing Lessons From '#TheDress' That Went Viral p. 12 Blue or Gold? How the brand behind #TheDress monetised viral success p. 13 Many, many Facebook users still don’t know that their news feeds are filtered by an algorithm p. 14 S SSocial Media tips: Integrating Social Media into Crisis Communications Is Essential p. 15 How to debate the big issues on social media p. 17 The optimal length for every social media post p. 18

The editor

Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 1-2015

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don’t blame him and nor should you. As he further put it, he doesn’t feel entitled to take the Why do self-declared liberals cower in front of lives of his staff into his own hands to “make a point.”

Muslim fundamentalists?

Je Suis Charlie (Until Je Get Scared)

by Michael Weiss, 7 January 2015

Media organizations throughout the world are now dealing with much the same problem, albeit without like-minded candor. (Britain’s Daily Telegraph, for instance, which has no problem pursuing Islamist politicians at home or exhibiting the war crimes of jihadis in Syria and Iraq, today blurred one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.)

But now contrast Pollard’s justification with how Bruce Crumley, Time magazine’s then-Paris bureau chief, characterized the work of satirists after Charlie Hebdo’s offices were firebombed in 2011 for the ostensible “offense” of putting Mohammed in the editor’s chair for a single issue: “[N]ot only are such Islamophobic antics futile and childish, but they also openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy in the name of common good.

The New York Times tweeted today that the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, which found itself the victim of a gruesome massacre, “long tested the limits of satire.”

I did not know that there were limits to satire or that the Gray Lady, which often unintentionally engages in the art form, had managed to uncover them. The implication here is one that will surely become as tediously explicit in the hours and days ahead as it is familiar: If you “provoke” Muslims by What common good is served by creating more division and anger, and by tempting belligerent mocking their religion, then you’ve only yourself reaction?” to blame for what happens next.

As the British left-wing columnist Nick Cohen points out in You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom, his brilliant book on free speech and the lengths to which liberal democracies will go to nullify or diminish this right, those who fancy themselves the most progressive when it comes to, say, mocking Jesus Christ or George W. Bush or Tony Blair will suffer no crisis of intellect or conscience in deferring to reactionary lunatics on what are the acceptable bounds of humor and good taste for dealing with the Prophet Mohammed.

Some in the media are admirably honest about why they go mum in this regard. Stephen Pollard, the editor of London’s Jewish Chronicle, today explained that his newspaper will not run any of Charlie Hebdo’s notorious cartoons in its coverage of the terrorist attack on the French weekly: “Get real, folks.

Openly beg. I wonder if Crumley will write that the 10 Charlie Hebdo employees gunned down today by men claiming (evidently in perfect French) to have “avenged the Prophet Muhammad” got what they deserved or were perhaps laïcité’s answer to suicide bombers. The Financial Times’ Tony Barber calls the satirical newspaper a “bastion of the French tradition of hard-hitting satire” in a sentence right before one in which he calls it a bastion of “baiting and needling Muslims.” Well, which is it? Hard-hitting satire or rank bigotry?

This is by no means the only logical pretzel Barbers wanders into in essentially blaming the magazine for its own misfortune. He of course doesn’t “condone” murder or the curtailment of free speech, only “common sense” in editorial standards — because without curtailing free speech, one may invite murder. Got that?

All of Charlie Hebdo’s staff, I think it’s safe to A Jewish newspaper like mine that published such assume, knew what they were doing in deriding fanaticism. And they were proud of it. This cartoons would be at the front of the queue for deserves our respect. Indeed, if the tragedy in Islamists to murder,” Pollard wrote on Twitter. I Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 1-2015

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Paris right now can be at all leavened by black comedy, then the privilege belongs to none other than the paper’s full-time editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, or “Charb,” the cartoon signature by which he was more commonly known. His last graphic installment featured a moroniclooking muhajid saying, “No attacks in France yet; wait! There’s until the end of January to wish Happy New Year.”

I suppose commentators will blame Charb posthumously for predicting his own death.

Though he does nicely sow “division” between secularism and the worldview espoused by al Qaeda or the Islamic State, an organization which has done its part for the common good by raping Yazidi women, executing Kurds, murdering Sunni tribesmen, and calling for the extermination of all Shiites. But at least the Islamic State’s victims never drew a naughty picture.

of proportion and priority in what they choose to condemn on any given day? Are they somehow deficiently or inauthentically pious for not being “baited” into writing nonsense like Crumley or Barber?

All of Charlie Hebdo’s staff, I think it’s safe to assume, knew what they were doing in deriding fanaticism. And they were proud of it.

As it happens, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph, was one of the latest foils of Charb’s “Islamophobic” weekly, which may have actually taken a page out of the playbook of many practicing and committed Muslims who have mercilessly mocked and lampooned the “caliph” and what he claims to be his own purified version of the Islamic faith. And here I note a strange phenomenon on Facebook and Twitter for which Crumley and his ilk will have trouble accounting: Why are so many Muslims posting the “Je Suis Charlie” image that has become a token of solidarity with the slain?

Charlie Hebdo: To Publish, Or Not To Publish?

Some outlets have suggested a link between Charlie Hebdo’s latest cover art and today’s events. The cover shows a wizened caricature of the French author Michel Houellebecq, predicting an Islamic future for France, with the caption, “In 2022, I will do Ramadan.” This happens to be the subject of Houellebecq’s just-released novel Submission.

Marc Cooper, a journalist and associate professor of professional practice at University of Southern California, had called the Times’ decision not to run any of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons “absolute cowardice.” On his Facebook page he posted a polemical question to Baquet. “Exactly how many people have to be shot in cold blood before your paper rules that you can show us what provoked the killers? Apparently 23 shot including 11 dead is not enough.”

So even a derisory image of another French provocateur, one who has written and said unflattering things about Islam, might be enough to precipitate violence? No doubt critiques and furious denunciations of Houellebecq’s new book are forthcoming, too. But could it be that plenty of pious observers to today’s atrocity in Paris, on whose behalf Western commentators now claim to speak, have a sense Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 1-2015

By Thomas Schmidt, 13 January 2015 The New York Times and other media outlets in the United States were slammed by readers and bloggers after not reprinting controversial cartoons of Charlie Hebdo in the aftermath of the terrorist attack last week. One criticism so incensed the Times’ executive editor Dean Baquet that he called a journalism professor an “asshole” on Facebook.

“Dear Marc,” Baquet responded in a comment on Cooper’s Facebook page. “Appreciate the self righteous second guessing without even considering there might be another point of view.

Hope your students are more open minded.

Asshole.”

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When Politico asked Baquet about the comment, he responded by email: “Lots of people have disagreed with my decision. Some of them are in The Times. I get that. Mr. Cooper’s comment was nasty and arrogant. So I told him what I thought.”

controversial and therefore good for traffic? No one will admit this, of course, for obvious reasons — but I can’t help thinking that it may have played a partial role, even for those who felt a duty to support free speech.”

“Stand by Charlie Hebdo and inform your public, Run the cartoons.”

Similar to the Times, the Guardian, in the UK, also decided not to publish any of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, although many European media One of the people who had also criticized the did reproduce the images. An editorial in the decision was media scholar and blogger Jeff Jarvis. Guardian laid out the reasoning behind supporting He called the Times’ decision not to publish the Charlie Hebdo’s right to print whatever it wants cartoons “bullshit”: “[I]f you’re the paper of and refusing to show its cartoons. “The key point record, if you’re the highest exemplar of American is this: support for a magazine’s inalienable right journalism, if you expect others to stand by your to make its own editorial judgments does not journalists when they are threatened, if you commit you to echo or amplify those judgments. respect your audience to make up its own mind, Put another way, defending the right of someone then damnit stand by Charlie Hebdo and inform to say whatever they like does not oblige you to your public. Run the cartoons.” repeat their words.”

“There is a line between gratuitous insult and satire, most of these are gratuitous insult.”

This week, a new edition of the magazine will be published

In a blog post by the Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan Baquet defended his decision not to publish the cartoons: “We have a standard that is long held and that serves us well: that there is a line between gratuitous insult and satire. Most of these are gratuitous insult.”

This week, Charlie Hebdo’s surviving journalists will be putting out a new edition of the magazine, with a picture of Muhammed, weeping, and holding up a sign: ‘je suis Charlie’ and the headline, ‘Tout est pardonne’ on the cover. As newspapers debate whether to reproduce the image, last week’s row in the US could be replayed.

Other American media outlets like the Associated Press, CNN, Fox News, NBC and MSNBC also decided. While they uphold the freedom of speech, they don’t want to be seen as disseminating content that some readers or viewers might find insensitive or offensive. In contrast, online media like BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post and Gawker ran some of cartoons and pointed out how other outlets manipulated photos to avoid showing details.

While many newspapers plan to publish the image in some form. Newspapers around Europe, including Libération, Le Monde and Frankfurter Allgemeine, have used the image online, however most public broadcasters have either shown it briefly, or not at all.

The BBC showed it briefly during a newspaper review on Newsnight. In the US, the Washington As Bloomberg and Gawker reported, the New York Post, USA Today, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Times had printed offensive cartoons in the past, The Daily Beast and CBS News ran the cover but before Baquet’s tenure as executive editor. the New York Times did not. In Australia, the ABC Was generating traffic a motive for reproducing showed the image of the cartoon on its 24-hour the original cartoons? rolling news programme but with a warning to viewers. The Guardian also chose to reproduce Matthew Ingram talked to staffers at online the cover as, it said: “its news value warrants outlets and found a genuine interest in defending publication.” the freedom of speech. At the same time he wondered, if generating traffic was also one of the motives. “Did some outlets also run the images in part because they knew that they would be Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 1-2015

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Media coverage of Charlie Hebdo and the Baga massacre: a study in contrasts 1. by Ethan Zuckerman Director, Center for Civic Media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Attention to Charlie Hebdo (orange) and Baga (blue) in a set of 25 US mainstream sources Data from mediacloud.org, Author provided

Even in Nigeria, the violence in Paris received more media attention than the massacres in Baga and Maiduguri in the three days the story was unfolding. Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan has condemned the French attacks but hasn’t mentioned the slaughter in his own country.

The aftermath of a double suicide bombing in Kano, Nigeria Stringer/Reuters

Consider two tragic events that took place last week.

A small cell of Islamic terrorists attacked cartoonists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and shoppers in a Paris supermarket, killing 17 Attention to Charlie Hebdo (orange) and Baga (blue) in a set people and sparking international outcry, of Nigerian newspapers, magazines and blogs. Attention to solidarity and support. events in Paris outpaces attention to those in Baga for the The hashtag #JeSuisCharlie trended globally, and world leaders took to the streets to march in support of Parisian resilience.

day of the shooting and two days afterwards. Data from Mediacloud.org, Author provided

Five weeks away from a presidential election, Jonathan may be afraid of reminding his In northern Nigeria, meanwhile, an army of Islamic constituents that he has led Nigeria through a year in which Boko Haram has killed at least 4,000 extremists razed the village of Baga, killing as civilians. many as 2,000 people – mostly women and children who were unable to flee the attacks.

Later in the week, the same army – Boko Haram – Reasons behind uneven media attention introduced a horrific new weapon of war in the There are many reasons why the attacks on nearby city of Maiduguri. They strapped targets in Paris have received vastly more media explosives to the body of a ten year old girl and attention than the attacks in Baga. sent her into the city’s main poultry market. The girl was stopped by guards and a metal detector at Paris is a highly connected global city with thousands of working journalists, while Baga is the market’s entrance, but the bomb detonated isolated, difficult and dangerous to reach. The and killed at least 19. attacks on Charlie Hebdo targeted journalists, and it’s understandable that journalists would cover There has been no global hashtag campaign or the death of their comrades. The attacks in Paris march for the victims of these most recent Boko were a shock and a surprise, while deaths at the Haram massacres. hands of Boko Haram have become distressingly Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 1-2015

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common in an insurgency that has claimed over 10,000 lives since 2009.

The details of the Baga attacks, where civilians fled a marauding army into the swamps of Lake Chad, where they faced attacks from hippos, are almost impossible for audiences in developed nations to empathize with.

By contrast it’s tragically easy for most North Americans and Europeans to imagine terrorists striking in their cities.

The net effect: the attacks in Baga and Maiduguri seem impossibly distant, while the attacks in Paris seem local, relevant and pressing even to people equidistant from the two situations.

In part, it’s hard to imagine events in Nigeria because we encounter so little African news in general.

Dearth of African news impacts public debate

precise).

We tend to read about countries like Nigeria only when they are in crisis, from terrorist attack or epidemics like Ebola. Despite the shocking magnitude of the attacks in Baga, the story can feel predictable, as the news we get from Nigeria is generally bad news.

If the attacks in Nigeria feel like they are happening somewhere incomprehensibly far away, those in Paris feel close to home, and many commentators have reflected on the tragedy in Paris as a result.

For David Brooks in the New York Times, the attacks are a reminder of the importance of dissenting and controversial views, while Teju Cole in The New Yorker argues that we can condemn the attack on free speech without supporting Charlie Hebdo’s provocative, often offensive speech.

Media Cloud, a tool developed at MIT’s Center for Civic Media and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society measures comparative attention to topics and locations in different segments of the news media.

For some, the attacks suggest that Islam is inherently violent. Others remind us of Ahmed Merabet, the Muslim policeman who died protecting the magazine or Lasana Bathily, the Muslim grocery clerk who hid Jewish customers in the freezer of the kosher grocery store to protect A study we conducted in April 2014 suggests that them, and note that the vast majority of Muslims media outlets publish three to ten times as many condemn terrorism. stories about France than about Nigeria. This Whether #JeSuisCharlie or #JeSuisAhmed, millions disparity is striking as Nigeria’s population of us apparently see ourselves as part of the (estimated at 173 million) is almost three times tragedy in Paris. the size of France’s population (66 million).

Not so for the deaths in Baga.

We don’t know the names of parents who sacrificed themselves to save their children, or villagers who sheltered fleeing families.

Beyond Abubakar Shekau, Boko Haram’s leader, we know little about the men who’ve become this brutal army or their grievances with the Nigerian government.

And we are largely free from speculation about Global attention distribution in top 20 US online news media, what the attacks on Baga mean for the April 2014. Data from focus.mediameter.org, a Media Cloud relationship between secular and religious groups, project Author provided between Islam and other faiths, for the stability of Nigeria and its survival as a single state.

There’s bad news for those hoping online media With so little discussion of African issues in will change existing patterns of media attention: American media, it’s not surprising that most while broadcast news outlets ran 3.2 times as many stories about France as about Nigeria, online American pundits are ill-qualified to comment on the massacre in Baga. The inability of American media outlets published more than ten times as commentators to opine meaningfully on Nigerian many French as Nigerian stories (10.4 to be affairs has been the subject of one of The Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 1-2015

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Onion’s most memorable parodies.

No easy answers doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pay attention But the conflict with Boko Haram leaves few easy answers even for those following the situation closely. The most obvious course of action supporting Nigerian armed forces - is an unpalatable recipe, as the Nigerian military has committed grave human rights abuses in pursuing Boko Haram.

between 82 and 97%, according to a study from the US National Counter Terrorism Center.

Attacks like the one on Paris are shocking, visible and rare, while attacks on Baga are common (though the scale of the Baga attack is unprecedented.)

When we understand extremist violence as attacks on urban, developed, symbolic targets, we’re missing a much broader, messier picture, where religious extremism blends with political struggles and where the victims are usually anonymous, uncelebrated and forgotten.

In 2013, Baga suffered another massacre, this time We miss the point that Islamic extremists are at from the Nigerian army, who burned thousands of war with other Muslims, that the source of terror houses and killed as many as 200 civilians, is not a religion of 1.6 billion people, but a punishing the town for sheltering Boko Haram. perverse, political interpretation held by a disenchanted few.

American military advisors have also grown frustrated with the systemic corruption of the It’s right to mourn those killed in Paris, to Nigerian military and the difficulty of directing celebrate the city’s resilience and to honor the resources towards combatting Boko Haram. US heroes. But if we fail to mourn and to understand forces came to Nigeria to help search for the more Baga as well, we see a picture of terrorism that’s than 200 girls abducted from a school in Chibok in simple, clear and deeply inaccurate.

April, 2014, but by July, those forces had been redeployed.

The likely answer to combatting Boko Haram is increasing international military cooperation.

Unfortunately, Cameroon, Chad and Niger – the countries most directly threatened by Boko Haram Cranks, Trolls, and Useful Idiots – have recently withdrawn troops from the Russia's information warriors set their region. Chad, for example, has already seen more sights on Central Europe. than 7,000 refugees from Baga seek shelter across By Dalibor Rohac; 12 March 2015 the border.

Without an easy answer to the conflict or an ideological point to tie to the tragedy, the response to those who’ve heard of the massacre in Baga is a mournful silence.

That’s not enough.

The hundreds or thousands dead in Baga demand our grief as fellow human beings. They demand our scrutiny so that Nigeria’s leadership cannot escape the consequences of their failure to end this conflict, or the abuses the Nigerian military has committed. And they demand our attention, so we understand the shape of religious extremism in the world.

Most victims of Islamic terrorism are Muslim: Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 1-2015

Photo credit: ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP/Getty Images

Following the Feb. 27 murder of liberal Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, a number of Central European websites were quick to provide an explanation. “Whoever gains control of the Russian opposition will be on the receiving end of all the finances and subsidies given to the Russian opposition by the West,” wrote an anonymous author on the Czech site Aeronet. Several other Edited by ComIPI – www.comipi.it 7

sites published translations of a text blaming the murder on a Western conspiracy aiming to discredit Vladimir Putin. The article was written by the Russian commentator and politician Nikolai Starikov, a vocal Putin supporter.

Most of the websites that published Starikov’s writings in Czech and Slovak have existed for less than a year. Throughout the conflict in eastern Ukraine, these sites have systematically regurgitated Russian propaganda, spreading lies, half-truths, and conspiracy theories, often directly translated from Russian sources. In an effort to understand who runs these sites and why — and potentially to uncover financial connections to the Russian government — several Central European journalists and civil society activists recently decided to investigate them in greater detail.

The Czech weekly Respekt published a feature article about the mysterious “news” site Aeronet (also known as AENews). Started in 2001 by aviation fans, the domain has changed ownership several times. Since the summer of 2014 it has regularly published articles accusing the new Ukrainian government of fascism and claiming that American and British mercenaries were fighting in eastern Ukraine. It also accused unspecified proponents of a conspiratorial New World Order of exploiting the spread to Ebola to their own nefarious ends.

The company that owns Aeronet’s domain is incorporated in the Netherlands. According to Ondrej Kundra, author of the Respekt investigation, nobody from the company was at its address when he visited, nor did anyone in the building know anything about it. “The same situation is repeated in Bratislava, where the website’s IP address was registered,” he wrote.

“Nobody is here; there is no office nor employees.

Neither is it possible to reach anyone on either of the two phone numbers — one U.K.- and one U.S.based — that are listed on the website.”

The editor of Aeronet signs his articles “Chief of the Carousel” or simply “VK” (an abbreviation of the Czech version of his pseudonym). A handful of contributors to the site do write under their real names, such as a certain Petr Cvalin, a member of the Czech Communist Party who was attracted to the website because of its “alternative views.”

There is no direct evidence linking the Aeronet site to Russia, and its anonymous editor calls the site “a start-up project” funded by its own

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contributors, readers, and sympathizers. He does say that he sometimes travels to Moscow for business, adding that he has “friends in Russia.”

This is unsurprising — the politics of the site’s content, the secrecy surrounding it, and its relatively professional appearance suggest that it is run by an individual or organization whose motives are closely aligned with those of the Kremlin.

In Slovakia, activist Juraj Smatana keeps an updated list of Czech and Slovak websites that churn out Russian propaganda. Like Aeronet, these sites are typically anonymous and difficult to connect to real individuals or organizations. Many of them, such as Hlavne Spravy (“Headline News”) and Svobodne Noviny (“The Free Newspaper”), have the appearance of ordinary news sites, mixing real stories with fabrications and wild conspiracy theories. Several of them reported, for instance, that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) discovered bodies with missing internal organs in eastern Ukrainian mass graves. The stories claimed that this had been confirmed by OSCE observers, and that evidence suggested that Ukrainian security forces were running illegal organ transplant centers in the region. The story turned out to be an outright lie: Neither the OSCE nor its observers have ever made any such announcements.

These sites don’t always peddle views that are clearly pro-Russian. Sometimes, as Smatana noted in a recent interview, their goal is simply to muddy the waters, to confuse, to ensure that “people don’t trust anyone.” In Central European countries, this flurry of misinformation has profoundly affected the dynamic of public debates and placed Russia’s critics on the defensive, forcing them to waste time debunking baseless claims.

In November of last year, for example, Aeronet published a fabricated story claiming that a public protest against Czech President Milos Zeman had been organized by the U.S. Embassy in Prague, as part of an effort to instigate a Ukrainelike “Maidan” revolution. This story was quickly reposted by other, more reputable websites, prompting a number of foreign ministries to ask the Czech government whether it was true. The same sites also disseminated an alleged plan by

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the Russian central bank to back the ruble with gold in order to displace the U.S. dollar as the world’s dominant reserve currency. Despite its outlandish nature, the story went viral — even prompting a reporter from Czech public radio to treat it as a credible account.

Czech Republic], there is only a handful of such websites,” said Smatana. “And those that do promote an anti-gay agenda tend to do so from a traditional or Catholic perspective. They definitely don’t combine it with pro-Russian propaganda.”

Given Poland’s historic experience, such brazen pro-Kremlin sloganeering is unlikely to get much Besides the “news” websites, there are a handful traction there. Instead, Putin’s regime seems to be of anonymous or semi-anonymous think tanks and using subtler means, such as supporting the foundations (such as the Institute for Slavic country’s environmental movement, which has Strategic Studies) and a number of public figures succeeded in bringing a temporary halt to plans who run their own sites spreading Russian for exploiting the country’s large reserves of propaganda. Perhaps the most prominent is unconventional gas. The reason: If former Slovak Prime Minister Jan Carnogursky, a Poland developed its own energy resources, it former Catholic dissident and current member of would be less dependent on imports from Russia. the Valdai Club, a group that is periodically invited to meet with Putin and other senior Russian The speed with which Russian propaganda is officials. Carnogursky’s Slovak-Russian taking root in Slovakia and the Czech Republic Society recently published a list of “the worst shows that civil society in the small countries of Russophobes in Slovakia.”

Central Europe faces a formidable enemy. Recently Slovaks were jolted Another is Sergei Chelemendik, a Slovak publisher by reports that several of their compatriots have of Russian descent and a former member of turned up fighting with the separatist “Donetsk parliament for (somewhat ironically) the People’s Republic” in eastern Ukraine — a story xenophobic Slovak National Party, whose own that, until recently, would have been website has been long churning out Russian unimaginable in a nation that sees itself as rather propaganda. Petr Hajek, longtime political advisor detached from the drama of world events. What to former Czech President Vaclav Klaus, is the precisely motivated the Slovak fighters to leave for editor of Protiproud (“Countercurrent”), and also Ukraine — and whether Russian propaganda in enjoys a public following. Unlike the pro-Kremlin Slovakia may have played a role — remains “news” sites, Protiproud, a self-styled unclear. But their example may herald bigger “counterrevolutionary magazine” that recently trouble to come. launched its Russian edition, does not hide the names of its contributors. Its content, including the flamboyant graphics and over-the-top headlines, appears even more fantastic than the The Guardian view on Russian seemingly serious content published by the fake “news” sites. It is replete with conspiracy theories propaganda: the truth is out there about Bilderberg and the New World Order, Editorial, 2 March 2015 stories claiming that the Ebola virus is a product of murdered in Putin’s Moscow the global pharmaceutical industry, and Hajek’s own diatribes against gays, alongside a steady stream of Russian propaganda. Asked by a journalist about Russian connections, Hajek decried the “witch hunt” against him and denied receiving “a penny” from Russia.

Opposition to same-sex marriage and other culturally conservative views commonly feature on most of these sites, which depict Russia as a bulwark against Western decadence. To be sure, Flowers left in memory of Russian opposition leader Boris the combination of pro-Russian views and social Nemtsov, murdered in Moscow on 27 February. Photograph: conservatism does not work everywhere. “In Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA Poland, which is much bigger [than Slovakia or the

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Nietzsche said it first: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” But Vladimir Putin has perfected it into a political strategy. Within hours of opposition’s murder on Friday, multiple explanations of what had gone on had been supplied to media organisations. It was because Nemtsov had forced his girlfriend to have an abortion. It was connected to Ukrainian nationalism. It was something to do with his business interests or his take on Charlie Hebdo.

the idea, familiar in the west, that any and every perspective can be legitimised as a matter of individual opinion. On the basis of this lazy philosophy, the idea that one view is right and another wrong can be made to sound like some unwarranted imposition of authority. You can already hear the objection to the assertion of truth: “Who is to say who is right?”

What Russian state spin demonstrates is that, by dispensing with what we used to be comfortable calling the truth, we are left with nothing but The idea that there are multiple sheer power. In other words, relativism leads interpretations of the truth has become the inevitably into nihilism. “What is truth?” said founding philosophy of state disinformation Pontius Pilate, trying to befuddle the issues of innocence and guilt with high-sounding Putin-like misdirection. No news organisation should be Like so much electronic chaff dropped out of the back of a Tupolev bomber to confuse an incoming sympathetic to this strategy. For while comment is free, the facts are sacred. missile, the idea that there are multiple interpretations of the truth has become the Amid the various narratives of “the truth” now founding philosophy of state disinformation in being rehearsed by the Russian state, it is Putin’s Russia, designed to confuse those who necessary to insist upon a reality; on Friday would seek out the truth with multiple expressions of distracting PR chaff. The tactic is to morning Mr Nemtsov was alive, but by the day’s create as many competing narratives as possible. end he was dead. Amid the mischievous And, amid all the resultant hermeneutic chaos, to misdirection of the Kremlin’s counter-measures, this is, quite simply, the truth. quietly slip away undetected.

It is a tactic straight out of Mr Putin’s KGB playbook from the 1970s. Generate a plurality of narratives, so the truth can be obscured. In such circumstances, the very idea that there is such a thing as “the truth” can itself be called into question.“There is no objectivity – only approximations of the truth by as many different voices as possible” is how Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of state-backed Russia Today, puts it. This is weaponised relativism.

One of the foremost ringmasters of this postmodern authoritarianism is Putin adviser and trendy former TV executive Vladislav Surkov; he is as comfortable talking about performance art and rap music as he is about contemporary politics.

For him, all news is comment, all truth little more than opinion. There is the BBC view. The Fox News view. The Russia Today view. All are expressions of special interests, not so much attempts at the truth as individual perspectives and localised narratives.

Mr Surkov grasps that all this chimes closely with

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The news business should refuse Facebook’s deal The lure of online ad revenue isn't worth surrendering news judgment to Zuckerberg's algorithm

By Ryan Chittum

Facebook wants publishers to become its junior partners, embedding their news and content into Facebook itself (at least on mobile) and sharing the ad revenue, The New York Times reported earlier this week.

New ad revenue always looks enticing in the digital space, where it’s hard to come by in meaningful chunks. But this is a deal that publishers, who are already too dependent on the social network, should turn down flat.

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Here’s David Carr explanation of Facebook’s pitch: Facebook’s gross profit margin was 76 percent in 2013.

The company has been on something of a listening tour with publishers, discussing better This might be a deal worth considering, though, if ways to collaborate. The social network has publishers had any formal say in how the newsbeen eager to help publishers do a better job of feed algorithm operates and how it will change in servicing readers in the News Feed, including the future. They don’t and they won’t. They would improving their approach to mobile in a variety be beholden to Facebook’s secret algorithm, of ways. One possibility it mentioned was for which is subject to the whims of Mark Zuckerberg publishers to simply send pages to Facebook & Co. alone. That’s extremely dangerous. that would live inside the social network’s Two-and-a-half years ago, for instance, The mobile app and be hosted by its servers; that Washington Post thought it had the social-media way, they would load quickly with ads that thing figured out. Its Facebook app, Social Reader, Facebook sells. The revenue would be shared. was sending millions of readers to washingtonpost.com by tricking Facebook users First, it’s hard to do a better job of servicing into spamming their friends’ news feeds with readers when you don’t know how to service WaPo links. This was unethical, first, but it also them, much less when your readers don’t have control over their experience, or even realize they was bad business, since it was entirely dependent on another company’s policies. When Facebook don’t have that control, as PressThink’s Jay Rosen points out. He notes that, “most users don’t tweaked its proprietary algorithm, Social Reader’s traffic collapsed, and the Post pulled the app from grasp the basic fact that the Facebook the site within months. algorithm is a filter. They think it’s just an ‘objective window into their social world.’”

The SEO wars came before that. Content farms like Demand Media (and to a lesser extent, the A reader who gets his news via Facebook is a former New York Times Company unit About.com) passive reader who at best is influencing the rose to power on their skill (and shamelessness) in algorithm that selects the news he sees by choosing what to “like,” what to comment on, and gaming Google’s search algorithm. Then Google tweaked its algorithm and sent the industry into who he’s friends with. News organizations need free-fall. Here’s Demand’s stock performance to, as best they can, cultivate active readers— since then: ones who seek them out on a regular basis.

What Facebook is proposing is that publishers outsource the publishing to Facebook and become mere suppliers of content, much like Facebook’s billion-plus users. As Carr puts it, publishers would be “serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns.”

That would just be cementing a partially existing arrangement. As I wrote earlier this year: The control of distribution that was so profitable IRL hasn’t ended online. It just moved, passing from newspapers, TV stations, and the post office to the companies in (Marc) Andreessen’s portfolio, which happen to have zero cost of content: Google, Facebook, and Twitter (plus the ISPs)… The new digital monopolies all have hundreds of millions of people creating free content for them. That’s where the big profits are.

There are other considerations, too. What tends to go big on Facebook is often at least in tension— if not at odds—with what qualifies as good journalism. A news industry formally intertwined with Facebook would be the news on Prozac.

Positive stories tend to get shared more while negative or controversial stories get shared less.

Nobody wants pictures of a jihadist wielding a knife next to photos of their daughter cutting her wedding cake.

The point is not that news organizations and other publishers can ignore Facebook and Google and

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the like. The point is that it’s intolerably risky to build their business models around them.

Internet.

The Times makes an apt analogy, comparing Facebook’s ambitions to Amazon’s stranglehold on the book industry. Book publishers became too dependent on revenue from a single source, and then put the future of their business on Jeff Bezos’ platform, which has given him monopsony power over the book industry.

The book business regretted this almost immediately, and went so far as to illegally collude with Apple to claw back some of their pricing power—but it was too late.

The news business, battered as it is, had better learn from these mistakes.

Marketing Lessons From '#TheDress' That Went Viral

By Ilya Pozin When Caitlin McNeill and her friends couldn’t agree upon the color of a dress, she posted the innocuous photo, seeking the opinions of her Tumblr-sphere, but she never imagined what would happen next.

BuzzFeed kindly decided to help out by asking the world to settle the debate, and by Friday morning, it seemed you could mention the dress to any stranger on the street to be instantly met with a firm opinion that the dress is, in fact, white and gold black and blue.

Though this debate has trusted remarkable truths scientists have known about our brains for decades into the spotlight, it has also shown us how even the most frivolous of topics could captivate billions of Internet users’ attention.

Now that the true color has been confirmed, here are some marketing lessons we can take away from #thedress that melted the Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 1-2015

1. Perception is reality. It’s hard to accept that not everyone sees things the way you do, and this dress became the ambassador of that truth in just a few short days. It’s the same with the audience of any brand — what each person perceives is their own reality. That decision of what a brand is, much like what color that dress is, is how they are going to choose to see it. It’s going to impact likeability, sales, business growth, and even other people’s opinions.

You likely heard about the data breach which cost Target TGT -0.26% the trust of more than 12 million loyal customers, in addition to $148 million last year. This is just one example where a once trendy and exciting place to shop is now struggling to regain the confidence of fans who’ve turned a cold shoulder, keeping a close watch on their bank statements.

2. We like mystery. Everyone likes a little mystery. Give your audience a seemingly simple riddle or puzzle and they will stop at nothing to solve it, if only for bragging rights.

We’re curious beings, and the dress proves

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that curiosity can affect consumer behavior.

Just look at the 850% sales increase Roman is experiencing on that particular dress design right now.

3. Competition motivates us to get involved. A study published in September 2014 evaluating runners proved rivalry can increase a runner’s speed by 4.92 seconds per kilometer. The presence of rivalry has a powerful impact on motivation and personal investment. In fact, we see this happen in sports when an audience takes sides and becomes so emotionally invested in their team, it’s all they talk about for days.

When it comes to marketing, you want a motivated audience. Much like fans, that audience will share your message with their own social circles due to sheer passion that comes from the belief that your brand is the right choice, just like the color they see is.

And they’ll look for feedback, hoping they can convince friends to be on their side, if they aren’t already.

4. People will create something out of nothing. Let’s be real, it’s just a dress.

Though an audience always has the ability to make something more out of the inherent product or service. An audience turned a photo of a $77 dress into a deep topic to be explored by anyone brave enough to question existential reality: “Is what we see what we actually see?” The popularity lies not within the dress itself, but within the deeper question it provokes.

5. You can have fun. Not everything has to be jaw-droppingly earth-shattering to make headlines. Videos of cats and a llama chase acquire more views than some newsworthy topics simply because they’re entertaining. They help break up the monotony of our daily routines and give us something lighthearted to share with one another. For once, we can debate something not so heavy and serious. We need a good laugh every once in a while.

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This dress has provoked a new way of looking at why we talk about and share the things we do. Marketers continuously study this, hoping to define the perfect formula to make something go viral. Whether you see the dress as white and gold or black and blue, I think we can all agree the viral value surrounding this controversy lies in the amusement we get from this mind-melting debate.

Blue or Gold? How the brand behind #TheDress monetised viral success

by Charlotte McEleny, 3 March 2015

Roman Originals created ads that helped get its brand into the social conversation Whether you thought it was blue and black or white and gold, one certainty was that #TheDress received a lot of global attention, so how does a brand capitalise on unexpected social media fame?

Roman Originals, the brand behind the dress, didn't know or expect that it would become the centre of a social media phenomenon that peaked at the end of last week.

The post that kicked it all off was by a Scottish singer/songwriter who posted an image to Tumblr on 25 February, asking people whether a dress was gold and white or blue and black (the dress is actually blue and black). Many experts have emerged with explanations as to why people see the

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different colours and celebrities including Kim Kardashian and Kanye West weighed in on the debate, helping propel the story into social media phenomena. Tumblr released figures after the weekend revealing the original post had been viewed 73million times.

With the original post not mentioning Roman Originals, the maker of the dress, it had to be quick off the mark, using social media and real-time data, according to Adrian Addison, head of ecommerce for Roman Originals.

"The original post came from a Scottish singer/songwriter on Tumblr and through the power of social media sharing it became viral.

We certainly weren’t expecting it and it’s almost impossible to create an advertising campaign that would spread that quickly, so the key for us was being to react in a timely and effective manner," said Addison.

Roman Originals took to its social media channels to put out reactive content and drafted in ad tech business Quantcast to help it create paid ads that adapted to the interest in real-time using data. The company also sent creative to its stores, so that window promotions could reflect what was happening online.

"Straight away we ran our own social media campaign off the back of it on both Twitter and Facebook. We made sure that we updated all of the creative to reflect this opportunity. Onsite we changed the homepage to promote the dress added ‘#TheDress’ to the product title and ran a competition to win #TheDress to increase subscribers," said Addison.

Core to its ability to react, Addison told Marketing, was the access it had to real-time data via Quantcast. This allowed it to understand more about how the conversation was happening and where, so that it could create ads that were better targeted and more relevant.

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Many, many Facebook users still don’t know that their news feeds are filtered by an algorithm

by Alexis C. Madrigal , 27 March 2015 For heavy Facebook users, let alone social media gurus, the idea that Facebook’s news feed is filtered by an algorithm is very, very old news.

But a majority of everyday Facebook users in a recent study had no idea that Facebook constructs their experience, pushing certain posts into their stream and leaving others out.

And worse, many participants blamed themselves, not Facebook’s software, when friends or family disappeared from their news feeds.

“In the extreme case, it may be that whenever a software developer in Menlo Park adjusts a parameter, someone somewhere wrongly starts to believe themselves to be unloved,” wrote a team of researchers led by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign doctoral student Motahhare Eslami, in a new paper on Facebook’s news feed algorithm.

The new qualitative research study sampled 40 Facebook users and ran them through an indepth examination of the ways that Facebook filters their experience. Twenty-five of the users—or more than 60 percent — had no idea that there even was a filtering algorithm, let alone one that looks at more than a thousand data signals to determine what to show a user.

The researchers termed these innocent users “the unaware.”

One of the unaware participants told the researchers, “It’s kind of intense, it’s kind of waking up in ‘the Matrix’ in a way. I mean you have what you think as your reality of like what they choose to show you.”

Without understanding Facebook’s algorithm, these participants resorted to developing other theories for why their social lives changed on the site. Some blamed themselves for being bad at Facebook. “These participants felt that they missed friends’ stories because they were scrolling too quickly or visiting Facebook too

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infrequently,” the researchers write.

Others figured that their friends had stopped sharing with them. “I have never seen her post anything!” one study participant said of a friend.

“And I always assumed that I wasn’t really that close to that person, so that’s fine. What the hell?!”

To continue The Matrix analogy, it’s as if you took the red pill and just realized that the unfiltered world is a lot like the normal one, but a little bit crappier and with more posts by your lame uncles.

I’d posit another theory for why understanding that Facebook’s algorithm exists would lead to To let users see what the red-pill world was like, higher satisfaction with the social network. It the researchers created a tool called FeedVis gives us a catch-all scapegoat to blame for that tapped into Facebook’s API to show people anything. Haven’t seen Susie’s posts for a while? an unfiltered feed. Using that data, they roughly It’s probably the algorithm. Haven’t heard from categorized people’s friends based on how often Tony? The algorithm probably didn’t show him Facebook was likely to surface that friend’s your posts. posts—”Rarely Shown,” “Sometimes Shown,” or “Mostly Shown.”

“Because I know now that not everything I post everyone else will see, I feel less snubbed when I make posts that get minimal or no response,” one participant concluded in a follow-up survey.

“It feels less personal.”

Many users were appalled to see how Facebook had judged their friendships. “Well, I’m super frustrated [pointing to a friend’s story], because I would actually like to see their posts,” one participant told the researchers. When presented with the opportunity to recategorize their friends, participants in the study moved 43 percent of their friends.

In other words: the information that Facebook’s unaware users might find most useful is that, sometimes, it’s not that the world ignored you.

It’s that the algorithm did.

Integrating Social Media into Crisis Communications Is Essential

Interestingly, though—and here’s where the study starts to look better for Facebook—the

By Christine Gallagher Kearney, 16 March 2015 researchers let people reclassify the posts that actually ran in their news feeds. And in that case, the participants mostly agreed with the Facebook algorithm’s assessment of what they should be shown. They only chose to change 17 percent of the content in their feeds.

While some participants were upset by the idea that Facebook was changing their social experience, more than half of the study participants “came to appreciate the algorithm over the course of the study.” Most came to think that the filtering and ranking software was actually doing a decent job. “Honestly I have nothing to change which I’m surprised!” one said. “Because I came in like ‘Ah, they’re screwing it all!'”

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Integrating social media into crisis communications planning is essential. Teams need to be trained in advance to understand roles and responsibilities, and also need to comprehend the nuances of communicating across different social platforms.

At DePaul University, in the Office of Public Relations and Communications, we asked ourselves how we could improve our crisis communications readiness. With input from my colleagues, I developed a training curriculum dubbed “90 days to ready” that centered on getting to deeply know our crisis communications plan, social media and all.

We set out to achieve two goals:  all team members will be able to understand the elements of the crisis communication plan and their individual roles; and  all team members will be able to successfully execute plan elements during a tabletop exercise.

their smartphones and laptops to the exercise.)

I also incorporated simulated tweets and Facebook posts into the tabletop exercise scenario, so that when the exercise was under way, my colleagues would have to respond to, not only traditional media simulated calls and emails, but social media tweets and posts as well.

The tweets and posts ranged from students claiming they heard gun shots on campus to photos of a dorm engulfed in flames posted on Twitter. I created some tweets and posts that were deliberately misleading. My communication colleagues had to quickly but efficiently sort through the incoming messages and determine the correct response.

Adding the simulated social media tweets and posts created an intensity and pace reflective of a real crisis response situation. Everyone was thinking, acting and speaking in crisis mode by the end of the 90-minute exercise.

The post-tabletop evaluation results were positive Every Thursday morning during those 90 days, our and indicated that the participants had indeed team gathered for an hour to collectively work fulfilled the two goals we set out to achieve. toward the two goals. Each week we focused on a Responses included: different topic, including: emergency kits, protocol for emergency Web communications, crisis We have a good sense of our roles and related university policies and procedures, and the how to communicate with each other. social media incident command center.  I understand how a crisis might unfold and the first steps we would take as a team.

Early on in the training, a crisis communications  It was most valuable to see the whole flow diagram was shared with the group to help team's roles play out in real time with everyone understand how messages flow during a many distractions. crisis situation. As a way of keeping the experience engaging, I regularly used real-life examples of In the end, integrating social media into crisis what to do and what not to do during a crisis (e.g., communications response is non-negotiable in the Malaysia Airlines response to the disappearance 24-hour information cycle. Tabletop exercises are of flight 370). practical and effective tools to test and measure readiness.

The culmination of the training was a carefully planned and executed tabletop drill. The tabletop, based on a real-life scenario, provided our communicators with many challenges to respond to in real time.

In an effort to demonstrate how complex an actual crisis would be, colleagues assisted with the exercise facilitation by calling tabletop participants in the roles of parent, journalist, student or donor.

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How to debate the big issues on social media

your perspective, or gives you a better angle to argue against.

By Amy-Mae Elliottmar, 16 Mar 2015

Don't react to deliberately provocative statements.

Trolls gonna troll. Don't let yourself rise to obviously inflammatory comments that are only designed to provoke others. If you do, you're giving the trolls what they wanted.

IMAGE: MASHABLE COMPOSITE/FACEBOOK

If you've ever gotten into a heated discussion on Facebook or Twitter, you know it can be difficult to get your point across successfully.

Pick your battles — if you suspect someone is just trying to get a rise out of you, don't give him or her the satisfaction.

Do be polite.

We've put together a quick list of "do's and don'ts" for debating the big issues on social media platforms. Have a read of our suggestions and share your etiquette tips in the comments below.

Do stay calm.

Don't let yourself get carried away. While it's easy to let emotions get the best of you, especially on topics you feel passionately about, the key to making a good argument is staying calm.

The old adage that manners cost nothing still holds true on social media. Even if you just want to tell some to piss off in no uncertain terms, it pays to be polite.

Apart from keeping your dignity and upholding some basic principles of decency, your argument will have more authority if it's presented in a polite way.

Do know when to walk away.

Take a deep breath, step away from your computer if necessary, but don't reply in haste or you may end up typing something you'll regret.

Do ask questions.

It can be tough to make an important point on social media, especially if you're on a platform that limits the length of posts. Don't be afraid to ask someone to expand on a point before you respond. You may find more information changes Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 1-2015

Finally, know when to remove yourself from the situation. If you've made your point and someone insists on letting the discussion drag on, make a graceful exit. You don't always have to have the last word.

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THE OPTIMAL LENGTH FOR EVERY SOCIAL MEDIA POST

by Nicole Brown

How long should your tweet be? Or your blogpost? Or your headline?

Along with all the best tips on optimal lengths for tweets, blogposts, headlines, and more, Kevan Lee of Buffer shares a few additional lengths to the list, like SlideShare length, Pinterest length, and more.

Check it all out beside.

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ComIPI is a no-profit study center aimed at developing and implementing advanced techniques to communicate with the public while respecting ethical principles. ComIPI uses its communications talent, skills and expertise also to help organizations to educate and to inform their target audiences; to develop communication strategies; to train their staff in communication skills; to monitor and analyze results of communication efforts; and, to assess media perceptions on matters of interest. Communications activities are also assessed taking into specific consideration inter-cultural aspects.

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