War on Twitter — A seven year old girl reports
By now, we seem familiar with all the horrifying faces of the Syrian civil war, the refugees landing on Europe’s borders every day, the starving children in Aleppo, the bombs falling. We see blurry video footage on YouTube of gunfights between rebel forces and terrorists in the streets where once children used to play, and we leave our thoughts on the scenes we’ve just witnessed in the comments below from our comfortable homes in a seemingly peaceful world. Last week, however, I stumbled across an article in the Guardian, which offered a new view on the events in Syria: that of a seven year old girl.
Bana Alabed, who lives in Aleppo with her younger brothers and parents, has gained increasing international media attention with her Twitter account @AlabedBana since her first post in September 2016. On her account, she and her mother tweet about their daily life in the centre of a war zone, sometimes desperate statements such as “Last message — under heavy bombardments now, can’t be alive anymore. When we die, keep talking for 200,000 still inside. BYE”, sometimes pictures of bloody bodies after a bombing of Bana’s school, in between cries for help. Her uncensored and honest observations and statements have drawn more than 200,000 followers to her account, but I couldn’t help but notice that they are always highly emotional and never news content. And I started to wonder: Should this form of war documentation really be addressed by the mainstream media?
Bana allows us to see the war in Syria through the highly alert eyes of an innocent child who, on one hand, mourns the death of her dolls and then refers to the violence surrounding her with a rationality that makes it hard to believe that she is only seven years old. Her view of the war is rare and different from what we see on the “Tagesschau” or read in the “FAZ”. The pictures she posts are uncensored, taken in everyday situations, and without a propaganda motive behind their publication. Her opinion of the events is that of a young girl who doesn’t understand politics or the reasons why the bombs keep falling as well as her parents do. It’s a view no journalist could ever adopt.
And yet, the content on her account shouldn’t be referred to by the mass media. When it comes to war coverage, there are strict regulations for what to publish and what to hold back. But without going into the dry details of media law, the biggest issue remains: Bana Alabed is only a girl. She doesn’t know about the consequences of her actions, about how loud her voice has become in the Twitter sphere or the impact her actions might have. She publishes photos of blood drying on the face of dead children her age, about herself covered in dust after bombs attacked her house. It is one thing to refer to her as a source (and even that is highly debatable), but relying on her as some kind of foreign correspondent is unacceptable.
After all, she and her mother receive death threats, according to their own statement, because of their Twitter account. Professional journalists must protect their sources at all costs and they have the ability to do so, but in Bana’s case, there is no one to protect her. If something were to happen to her, it would be easy for e.g. Assad supporters to abuse her “voice” and use it for their own purposes. With her account, she made herself and her family dangerously vulnerable. And the mass media are encouraging her innocent actions in favour of new insights. But to what costs?
Emotionalising war in general is dangerous and a journalist’s job is to cover the events in a neutral light — as long as the country they’re reporting for isn’t involved in the fighting. Today, we know what the live coverage of the Vietnam and Iraq wars have done to the people consuming said news. The majority of the American population is still convinced that the US lost the war in Vietnam due to the horrifying pictures they saw on TV and in newspapers. While losing on the media battleground at home, the American soldiers in Vietnam actually won. And back then, social media networks and sharing platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube didn’t even exist. History taught us that emotionalised war pictures have the power to influence the opinion on war of an entire population.
It might be insufficient to compare Vietnam with Syria since the backgrounds of both wars are so very different, but it should be a wake-up call for all social media networks. One could argue that users should be aware of their actions on said sides before posting and that it’s a parent’s responsibility to protect their children from harm in cyberspace, but that statement is generalising societies in a centruy where it is impossible to generalise. War is an extreme situation, a delicate state for any society or population, and people have to be aware of that. There are strict rules for journalism when it comes to war coverage, so it is about time we introduce the same rules to the internet as well.
