Syrian War ( Download HD version of InfoGraphic)
PRE-ANALYSIS
Tone: The Strategy is to keep a formal tone due the seriousness of our topic, under the assumption that an overtly casual tone would discourage participation by diminishing the gravity of the issue we are trying o highlight.
Design: InformationGraphics. We are going to take inspiration from GraphicNews.com and use Pixelometer (Mac) a variant of adobe photoshop for this task. The graphics design is based on the most “relevant” statistics from credible sources (like the HumanRightsWatch and United Nations) , most profound “quotations” , “catchy” statistics, Hi Res photographs depicting the war torn country, and the lead “actors” of the war ( important largely due to the fact that the conflict is multi-faceted with multiple regional players (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq, Israel) and major powers like the US (Nato), Russia, the Syrian Regime, and rogue elements notably the Rebel Groups and ISIS.
Goals: Our primary goal is to raise awareness on the humanitarian front and secondary goal is to create space for a dialogue on the conflict itself, largely due the aforementioned issues, and if a credible policy can be shaped to better address as complex an issue as a multi-pronged international conflict.
Hashtag: The air raid of Monday September 26th conducted by the Russian airforce on Aleppo, is to be our focal point for this Social Media Strategy. From the early reports, there has been significant human death toll reported from by the western media outlets as well as Aljazeera. The hashtag we will employ is #WakeupAleppo. There current trending Hashtag #SyrianLivesMatter is also extremely relevant to our cause, therefore we may interject our content on this hashtag on twitter as well.
Strategy across networks: Basically our infographic will stay the same across Facebook and Twitter, barring resolution; we will create both high and low resolution images of the same content. In our assessment a targeted and focused message should be delivered to the audience to stir a natural response. We will employ other tools like online polls to gage the response of Facebook, especially keeping in mind that social space could be an impersonal space and some people would likely feel comfortable contributing to a poll over voicing their opinion on a military conflict.GOING LIVE
Behind the Scenes:
Monday:
Twitter: Salman created the twitter hashtag #WakeupAleppo & introduced the infoGraphic on #SyrianLivesMatter Twitter activity cont … Twitter activity cont …
FACEBOOK:
Wednesday: Posing went live on AdilKhan’s Timeline
Thursday
Response: Comments & “dialogue”
FB comments … Online Poll # 1 : Online Poll #2 Comments on Online Poll #2 :
POST-ANALYSIS
Our topic of focus was on the current crisis in Aleppo, Syria, where a part of the city besieged by rebel forces had recently experienced aerial bombings resulting in high civilian casualties. To see how people responded to the crisis, Salman tweeted about Aleppo bombings with hashtags #WakeUpAleppo and #debatenight (trending worldwide on Sept26th ) to see if it would even be mentioned during the first US presidential debate between Clinton and Trump. It barely garnered any attention. There was little to no reaction after several more tweets on hashtag #AleppoisBurning (one of which was shared by Henry on his Facebook Timeline).
We figured that we may be able to gain more attention by creating polls on Facebook. since clicking on a poll option takes considerably less effort than replying to a tweet. We also posted our infographic on Adilkhan’s Facebook timeline that outlined the conflict in Syria. As expected, it generated much more reaction that the tweets made by Salman, possibly due to the fact that Salman’s twitter followers were inactive (or indifferent to the issue) while Adilkhan’s Facebook friends were active. Henry posted a poll in a Facebook group that specifically focused on discussions with regards to war crimes in Syria. asking “Who should be held responsible for the current crisis in Aleppo?” with the options: 1.Syrian Regime, 2.Rebels, 3.Pro-Regime countries that arm the government, 4.Pro-Rebel countries that arm the rebels, 5.The US for its inaction to regime war crimes, and 6.Other parties. Adilkhan posted a similar poll on his Facebook Timeline.
In Henry’s poll, there were barely any reaction emoticons to the poll, but it generated a conversation between the group’s admin (Arab speaking London resident) and one of the group’s members (from Lebanon) disagreeing about who should be accountable to the current Aleppo crisis. While the group admin agreed with most the poll voters that the Syrian regime should be held responsible, the other member thought that it was Russia’s fault, and also implied that if we directly asked the people in Syria that question, we would not be able to get an accurate response because the people there felt the reprisal for making political statements. The conversations were organic and required no prodding from the person who created the poll.
In Adilkhan’s poll, there were many more reaction emoticons, but we had to specifically ask people to not only vote in the poll, but comment on what they thought about the current crisis in Aleppo as well. Most of the votes in the poll pointed the finger at the Syrian regime. Only one person (a Russian friend of Adilkhan) took sides in the comment section after Salman responded to his question of why the Kurds were an option in the poll. He explicitly blamed Saudi and Qatar for sponsoring terrorism, and also called out the US for interfering with the political affairs of the Middle East. He also implied that if the lack of a dictator creates continuous political chaos in a country, then having a dictator in power is better than no dictator. In the case of Syria, he felt that without Assad in power, the minorities protected under him (like the Alawites) would be slaughtered by the rebels.
Although these posts generated a limited quantity of conversation, it did bring up different perspectives on the Syrian Civil War. Unsurprisingly, the Arab commentators outside of Syria attributed the current crisis in Aleppo to the Syrian regime, as most media focus on the fight between the mainstream rebels (ones who are neither Kurds or parts of the Islamic State) and Assad’s forces, has been on the Assad regime’s war crimes, while the Russian commentator placed responsibility on the US and outside Arab influence for fuelling the conflict.
Our social media experiment made us understand the need to use different platforms (in this case, Twitter and Facebook) as well as different methods of inducing the audience to react to an issue and/or comment about it. Simply using hashtags for Aleppo wasn’t enough because no one in our group were internet celebrities. We had to go to both a Facebook group and a person’s individual Timeline to collect opinion on the Aleppo crisis. The quality of the conversation was more in depth for Adilkhan’s poll than Henry’s poll, possibly because the person responding to Adilkhan’s poll is already Facebook friends with Adilkhan, which implied that he was more comfortable with offering a detailed and honest opinion. This highlights the importance of the strength of social networks in drawing attention to an issue. With people who share common interests with you, responding to your comments would be a natural reaction for them, over not responding to comments from a complete stranger.
The results from the two online polls as well as our collection and analysis of the metrics are below:Poll #1 Results : On AdilKhan’s FB Timeline Poll #2 Results : FB Group Documenting War Crimes in Syria
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