Photo Credit: MSN

Social media is increasingly becoming implicated in moments of crisis and significant world events. The 2009 Iranian election is a great example.

Thanks to a variety of technical manoeuvres, the Iranian government could not throttle the protesters’ use of Twitter to report on those events. Where traditional media could not tread, the citizenry and Twitter stepped in.

This year’s catastrophic earthquake in Haiti was another example where Twitter reporting reigned supreme.

Depth of reporting was improved at this year’s G20 protests in Toronto by tweets from many, including TV Ontario’s Steve Paikin (@spaikin on Twitter).

The common thread in the above scenarios is people voluntarily reporting what they see. In other words, they choose to share the information or events unfolding in front of them, even as others attempt to deny them a voice. This is good.

A whole new genre of social reporting, if it can be called that, came to the fore this week as website Wikileaks.org dumped over 92,000 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan onto the web and into the hands of three newspapers. From Wikipedia:

“In July 2010, Wikileaks released to The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel over 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009. The logs detail individual incidents including friendly fire and civilian casualties. The scale of leak was described by (Wikileaks spokesperson) Julian Assange as comparable to that of the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s. On July 25, 2010, the logs were released to the public.”

The Pentagon Papers, you may recall, were brought to the attention of the American public in 1971 via the New York Times, essentially demonstrating that the Johnson administration had lied to the public about Vietnam. The 1970s had more excitement when the Watergate scandal broke, thanks to confidential informant “Deep Throat” and enterprising reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post.

In each case trained, professional journalists and their editors reviewed the leaked materials and, with the utmost of care and due diligence, weighed issues of national security and the public’s right to know.

Wikileaks has no such filter, no checks and balances, or none we can see, it’s just a raw data dump with spotty redaction for everyone to pore over and draw our own conclusions. Oh yes, and for the Taliban/Al Qaeda gang to pore over and target informants for retribution. This is not good.

Roy Greenslade, professor of journalism at City University in London, writes on CNN.com “The posting of 92,000 documents on WikiLeaks about the war in Afghanistan represents a triumph for what I like to call ‘data journalism.’ … However, the posting of the material on the internet is not in itself an act of journalism. It is merely the beginning of a journalistic process, requiring analysis, context and, in this particular instance, a form of necessary censorship in order to protect individuals identified in the documents.”

Necessary censorship. That’s what appears to be partially missing in this case – that Wikileaks didn’t quite get the hang of redacting names or identifying circumstances in their haste to let the public know.

A recent editorial in the Calgary Herald put it succinctly:

“ … those who are tempted to publish classified information in the name of press freedoms should be aware that their naivete and their blind devotion to ‘the public’s right to know’ could be rightly termed aiding and abetting the enemy by endangering the safety of Canadian soldiers abroad. A little forethought and a large dose of loyalty to our side of the war can literally mean the difference between life and death for our soldiers, and also Afghan civilians.”

If Wikileaks truly believed in the public’s right to know, they would become transparent themselves, in so doing earning our trust that their intentions are true and their methods sound.

Sadly Julian Assange, a convicted Australian computer hacker according to the LA Times, and his horde of info-dumpers seem to feel they are exempt from such inconveniences. As Raffi Khatchadourian wrote in the New Yorker: “Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.”

The self-righteous “we know what’s best” attitude that seems to characterize Assange’s various public responses concerns me. Isn’t that the very definition of a despot?

As usual, send me your feedback on Twitter at @dblacombe or via e-mail doug@communicatto.com.

Doug Lacombe is president of Calgary social media agency communicatto.

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