Trial by Timeline — What are you guilty of?

Amnesty International New Zealand’s office has unveiled today a new Facebook application that illustrates the disparity in human rights protection around the world through a highly personal experience based on your social activities in Facebook.

Trial by Timeline examines your Facebook profile, timeline and friends and creates summary of the crimes you may be guilty of in countries around the world where human rights are not fully protected in law and practice.

Evidence that can be used against you includes:

  • association with groups or individuals who are critical of the government (for example, Amnesty International)
  • religious beliefs (if you declare this publicly in your profile)
  • evidence of sexual misconduct (homosexuality is illegal in far too many countries)
  • evidence of alcohol/marijuana consumption
  • even having a Facebook account itself is illegal (in Myanmar) so everyone using the app will be guilty of that

Punishments are also meted out for the crime ‘convictions’ and include: death, torture, life imprisonment, beatings, and other human rights abuses.

It’s an inventive and informative campaign, similar to the “Human Rights if Facebook were the World” application created by Amnesty’s Venezuela office earlier this year.  Both seek to bring the reality of human rights abuses into your personal/social world, illustrating how you and your friends could be affected if you didn’t have the same rights protections that most first-world citizens have.

The application is designed to be emotionally engaging, and during the evidence gathering phase it lists a number of your Facebook friends being “interrogated”.  I found that to be most disturbing moment, bringing home the idea that harmless social connections could be so risky, and used for terrible abuses.

Overall this is a high quality campaign, with impactful visual and audio design and solid functionality. The viral element is also well considered — here is the Facebook message I was asked to share:

Thinking about your next vacation? Maybe worth checking this site out first ..

Contact Amnesty International New Zealand

 

Posted in Amnesty International, Facebook, Social Media |

Sell-out or legit move to openness? Change.org to Work With Corporate, Anti-Abortion, GOP Campaigns huff.to/QCpZZi

follow @shakethepillars

Posted on by irishg |

Do you Know these Countries? Amnesty International, Pinterest and the Death Penalty

October 10th was World Day against the Death Penalty – marked by human rights groups around the world to call attention to the countries who still impose the death penalty.

This year, a new campaign by Amnesty International’s Spanish office used the rising social network Pinterest to link interest in image-sharing with the global campaign work against the death penalty.

Amnesty Spain created a Pinterest board labelled ¿Conoces estos países? (Do you know these countries?) and uploaded a travel-magazine-style photo for each of the 58 countries who still apply the death penalty. Each image links to Amnesty’s online action against the death penalty, highlighting the conflict between the tourist-friendly images that many countries market to the world, and their darker human rights records.

Results from campaign are unclear, but this Pinterest board has tallied 1,500 facebook likes in just one week.

Posted in Amnesty International, Pinterest, Social Media |

RomneyTaxPlan.com – less is more

Here’s a s a reminder that often less is more.

Coming from the Democrat campaign, Romneytaxplan.com packs its punch with the precision of a laser beam, trimming away all the usual overhead to deliver a simple message about  Romney’s evasiveness on details of his tax plan.

This campaign is about scoring a hit, not winning the war. It doesn’t burden itself with presenting the pro-Obama rhetoric – it just makes the point quickly and obviously and then shuts up. It’s not even very instructive on asking the viewer to take next steps (react, share, etc.)  Still, the key to making this campaign work is generating buzz on social media, and it’s configured to share with a pre-set teaser:

“I found a site with all the details on Mitt Romney’s $5 trillion tax plan. It’s as simple as clicking a button.”

With 52,000 tweets and more than 600,000 facebook likes, it does seem to be working.

Posted in Politics |

VIDEO: The Dictator Returns – excellent case study of direct action engagement in Tunisia. A must watch. http://t.co/Hh9a24l4

Posted on by irishg |

BlackoutSpeakout – watershed moment for a re-invigorated progressive left in Canada?

A movement-building moment is taking shape today in Canada as a broad group of environmental, social justice and progressive voices are united for a single day of online protest against the right-wing government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

BlackoutSpeakout is a coordinated online action to raise awareness and speak out against new regulations for advocacy organizations being put forward by the ruling Conservative Party that #blackoutspeakout partners believe are a serious threat to Canadian environment and democratic values. Hundreds of websitesof of nonprofits, activist groups. alternative media and left-leaning voices have gone dark, and thousands of tweets and status updates are filling the social media channels today to support the campaign.

This sector-wide, coordinated action in defence of environmental and social justice values coincides with  a resurgence of the political left which has seen Canada’s traditionally 3rd place socialist party (NDP) on top of public opinion polls, and could be a watershed moment for a united and reinvigorated progressive left in Canada.   The path ahead, though, will have to be carefully navigated.

This action first emerged from a small group of leading green ngos with a narrow focus on threats to environmental protection legislation, but as the movement gathered momentum last week the scope has broadened to accommodate the expanding list of partners, each with their own demands (Amnesty International joined after negotiating the inclusion of a reference to human rights).  This has allowed the movement to grow quickly, but has also muddied the focus and risks turning the #blackoutspeakout tight manifesto for action into a shopping list.

There are echoes of Occupy here, and other recent social justice campaigns that achieved a wide public appeal but then ran into stumbling blocks around clarity of message. I read an interview recently with Glen Tarman, one of the original organizers of the Make Poverty History (MPH) movement in the mid 2000′s in the UK (and elsewhere) in which he identified one of the big mistakes they made with MPH was in making the campaign too broad, and not deep enough.

For #blackoutspeakout, today’s results will speak loudly — a powerful mobilization moment for opponents of the Harper government. The challenge for the organizers will be to maintain that broad appeal while deepening the engagement and moving toward specific campaign outcomes.

Posted in Networks, Politics |

@shakethepillars will be going dark June 4 2012, joining 1000s of other Canadians to protest Harper govt #blackoutspeakout http://t.co/dolCAvGh

Posted on by irishg |

If your Facebook were human rights in your country

ХудожникReality only hurts when it’s close.

Here’s a really unique idea developed by Amnesty International – a Facebook simulation that bridges the gap between global human rights data and your own personal world.  Amnesty International’s annual report on the state of human rights in 2011 has just recently been released, and this Facebook application aims to bring those numbers to life inside your own social world.

Login to this app, allowing for Facebook permissions to access your friends list and photos, and you are dropped onto a page where human rights statistics are applied to your Facebook friends list. What you see is a visual gallery of how many of your friends who would be affected by a variety of human rights challenges and abuses. The emotional hook comes from a row of faces selected from your friends list that bring those statistics to life.

Coming from Canada (generally ranked high on human rights), I see only a few faces on each screen, which is still jarring, but if I switch my country of origin to China or Pakistan, or any number of countries on Amnesty’s least-favored list, I get a powerful view of what human rights statistics mean to real people.

It’s a really unique and effective spin on the usual social media experience, and one of the best tools around for bringing global statistics to life in a meaningful and personal way.

One thing that could be improved is the invitation to explore and contrast the results from different countries — especially for vistors in the global north, whose ‘home country’ results may not be so shocking.

The application was developed by Amnesty’s office in Venezuela, and has been translated from Spanish into an English version, but it’s a bit rough. There’s great potential for this application to be picked up by the global Amnesty community and made into a flagship digital product – a powerful tool for communicating the real-life meaning of human rights statistics.

Posted in Facebook, Social Media |

A useful primer on video story-telling.  Witness.org Video for Change: Anatomy of a Good Advocacy Video – http://t.co/ToBS3Sls

Posted on by irishg |

A look at integrated teams (mobilisation, fundraising, comms) raising bar, power in Argentina: http://www.mobilisationlab.org/integrated-teams-in-action-stories-from-argentina-video/

Posted on by irishg |