Twittering, free speech and sports

I apologize for defying blogging etiquette by not posting for a while, and then jumping in with a self plug, but I thought many of you might be interested in this issue because it touches on aspects of free speech, social media, and regulation as they relate to sports.

I am sure you are aware of last month's NFL incident with Chargers' cornerback Antonio Cromartie, where the team charged him a fine of $2,500 simply for castigating training-camp food on his Twitter page. In fact, coach Norv Turner specifically told Cromartie that he wasn't to say anything critical about the organization on Twitter.

Several other incidents with players saying so-called sensitive or offensive things on the microblog have happened recently. Notable ones were Vikings' Bernard Berrian's tweet, overblowing the consequences of quarterback Tarvaris Jackson's knew injury, and Houston Dynamo star Brian Ching's tweet about a cheating referee. Ching was charged $500 for this.

After several teams tried to disallow Twitter use by players altogether, the NFL finally decided to simply ban tweeting by players within 90 minutes of the start of an NFL game, and until after media interviews following the game. This seems like a more reasonable form of regulation since it involves merely restricting it on the field and during media interactions.

Other than the fact that this sort of content regulation infringes on free speech, however, there is also an opportunistic nature to these rules, considering NFL teams use Twitter to announce updates on events and policies (draft picks were revealed through Twitter, for instance, and ironically, the Chargers scooped their first-round draft pick on the microblogging service). This gives the impression that teams and the organization simply want to cover up anything that might be harmful to the reputation of the organization.

The US Open jumped on the Twitter-regulation bandwagon last week, when it sent an email to all players with a list of dos and don'ts about the kinds of messages that cannot be tweeted. Apparently, the Tennis Integrity Unit is concerned that players might reveal sensitive information that could be potentially used for match fixing and sports betting - information like player injuries, weather conditions, etc.

Again, the US Open itself uses Twitter to promote matches, polls, contests, and even US Open gear. But it has no qualms about regulating what players tweet about. Like NFL players, many tennis stars--most notably, Andy Roddick, the Williams sisters, and Britain's Andy Murray--have taken to tweeting extensively. Both Roddick and Murray were outraged and outspoken about it.

Now, here's my shameless self plug: I wrote about this topic in some detail at the Huffington Post yesterday: do check it out if you can.

Twitter, WAM, and covering the story

So I wrote about my WAM experience over at Bust, but the thing that I've really been thinking about since the weekend was the Twitter coverage.

Not everyone has the finances or the ability to go to conferences, but the Web allows for the experience to be shared more widely. In addition to video coverage that will apparently be available on the web soon, the running Twitter stream managed to pull people who could not attend the event into the conversation.

The conversation started with a basic hashtag: #wam09. Conference attendees tagged their Twitter updates with #wam09 and a Twitter search for the hashtag allowed attendees and anyone else to see all public updates with the hashtag. As soon as I started tweeting with the hashtag, I got new Twitter followers.

From there, though, the conversation multiplied. At the first panel I attended, on Gender Non-Conformity and the Media, Jack from Feministe wrote a panel-specific hashtag on the board: #wam09gnc. We used that tag for our tweets from this panel, and I had the main search page, which automatically updates, open while I was listening and tweeting comments from the panel I was in.

This might sound like it requires an intense attention span, but I'm used to running three programs at once on a normal day.

On top of that, other WAMmers would retweet comments from others at other panels, spreading the discussion out further.

I met people through Twitter during panels, reading their Twitter feeds and then stopping to introduce myself at the end of the panel, and added new people to follow while picking up new followers and joining discussions on varying topics. In the final panel I attended, Women and the Economic Crisis: Getting Beyond the Corporate Media Narrative, (#wam09ec) we seemed to have perfected the process, googling and instantly tweeting links to organizations, books, and other sites referenced during the discussion in real time.

Twitter is ideally suited to events like WAM, where a large number of people are covering a specific event with several different parts happening simultaneously. Information was spread through Twitter--one attendee was stranded and needed donations, and the request for cash spread quickly across the Net, getting her home. Livetweeting one single event--like the presidential press conference or the debates--is fun, but often many people comment on the same things. The inauguration tweets were more useful because directions, warnings, and other information could be exchanged in real time.

But for an event like WAM--or many other conferences--this technology is perfectly suited. I'm sort of thinking on screen here, but I wonder what other events/issues could be covered this way?

Ask The President

So Obama promised us open government, right?

Well, The Nation and other media outlets (but really, The Nation is the only one that matters, right?) have teamed up to bring us a site that will, we hope, generate citizen questions to be asked of President Obama at his press conferences.

Ari Melber at the Nation writes:

We are calling on Obama to start a new tradition to open up the White House: invite new and independent voices into the East Room by pledging to take a citizen-generated question at every prime-time press conference.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the way people were using the Internet to organize and push for their own priorities in the wake of Obama's election. The Obama campaign trained a whole bunch of people in skills they'd never had before--not just old-fashioned boots-on-the-ground organizing, but using the Web and social networking tools to find like-minded folks and pull together networks.

While the Ask The President site isn't perfect (multiple duplicate questions could create problems for accurate voting tallies) its interface is extremely simple. All you have to do is click a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, you can search for questions on a topic you want (and I recommend you do so before submitting--there are hundreds of questions already). The site even has video questions, though this actually makes the process slower.

Still, if Obama would actually commit to taking citizen questions, this would not only be a major step forward for open government, but it would be a check on the gatekeepers at the mainstream media. Certain questions simply never make it through the gates to be asked, even though they may have significant popular support.

Obama's already shown himself willing to attend town hall meetings that at least appear less stage-managed than Bush's, but taking regular questions from citizens would be a great step, and this site has taken away one more excuse why not. It's being promoted on Twitter and elsewhere, and you can even follow @AskThePresident on Twitter.

The way the site is designed, it can privilege questions that have outside promotion, so I'll do my part on that level, too. Since they're embeddable, here's my recommendations for promotion:

Terrors, tweets, gunshots, pings, blazes, buzzes, and explosions, Mumbai

It seems almost callous to talk about cutting-edge Internet technology amidst the needless bloodbath (is there another kind?), scores killed, grieving families, children orphaned, and spiritual journeys of fathers and daughters abruptly ceased, sadly due to another's notion of a very different kind of spiritual journey. But someone has to do it, if only to see some light in the terror that has ravaged the financial capital of India these past couple of days: amid the heroic commando forces, relentless journalists, and fleeing hostages are vigilant, Internet-savvy citizens typing away about the horrors unfolding in front of their very eyes.

India – thankfully, gratefully, gratifyingly – does not have to deal with a big-brother overseer in the form of its government, or battle with blocked Internet sites and censored news Web sites. That, combined with the cyber-competence of its people, and fast-developing Internet technology allowed thousands to transmit live updates on sites such as Twitter and Flickr and YouTube. As the Wall Street Journal reports - and as I learned through a tweet from Matttbastard – tweeters were busy supplying phone numbers for hospitals and hotels under siege, making calls for donations of specific blood types, and offering prayers and well wishes. Many were relaying messages from relatives outside the city that were unable to get through due to jammed phone lines. Thanks to Indian ingenuity, even a Googlemap of the attacked sites was put up within hours. Twitter posts with the #Mumbai tag escalated as the attacks continued.

In addition to 140 character updates that disseminated the most crucial information, civilians were offering detailed reports on citizen journalism sites such as Ground Report and Mahalo. Blogs such as Metroblog turned into news services, reported CNN before turning around and asking readers for images and videos for its iReport Feature.

To me, living so far away from my home country, shooting out text messages to everyone I suspected might have been in the vicinity, and being immersed in a challenging comprehensive exam this week, Twitter offered the sort of passive information channel I so desperately needed. Thanks to some very avid tweeters, I received 20 second updates: gunmen opening fire, commandos storming in, hostages taken, operations against armed militants, hostages being released, speculation on who was behind it, and so on and so forth.

This is not the first time that technology – and people’s interest in using that technology to relay information – has helped keep up with an unfolding disaster. Local bloggers updated the world about the Russia-Georgia conflict earlier this year, as did civilians on scene at the Myanmar monk protests. One of the earliest, and perhaps most unfortunate catalysts of Internet-powered citizen journalism actually came seven years ago in the form of the September 11 attacks. Much of the information was relayed by New York residents who blogged about their personal experiences and related first-hand accounts from relatives and friends. Amateur photographers also captured many of the pictures that showed the crash of the United Airlines plane into the second World Trade tower.

When the SARS epidemic broke in China, SMS was used as a medium of communication when the government there suppressed release of information by medical authorities. In the wake of the London train bombings in the summer of 2005, some of the most powerful pictures came from citizens, owing to better and more improved cell phone cameras. No journalist could have been expected to get there fast enough to snap those telling first images.

The citizen journalism site, NOLA.com is credited with saving lives during Hurricane Katrina: people around the country received text messages from those afflicted, and readers relayed the messages to the Web site, which was monitored by rescue operations. Local people were also able to provide the kind of city-specific information that no out-of-town journalist would know of. Two years later, when social media sites were even more prevalent, residents kept each other informed through blogs, discussion forums, Twitter, and email lists during the Minneapolis bridge collapse.

This is not to say that social media is inculpable; there were doubts, false alarms, and erroneous alerts among the Mumbai tweets as cnet reports. Most notable among them was one calling for all updates to stop, so as not to hinder the security operations. Facts were distorted, including numbers killed and injured. But if a single twitterer managed to help save a life, inform someone of a loved one, or update thousands around the world, we could live with a couple of false alarms, I think.

In the face of sheer and utter incompetence by Indian intelligence and governmental authorities, it is indeed heartening to see ordinary civilians rise to the occasion.