One of the greatest obstacles to understanding authoritarian societies is that the dissidents within them have few outlets through which to describe their lives, argue their opinions, and refute official propaganda. The people behind the website Movements.org hope to help change that status quo, using the principles of crowdsourcing to help activists connect with journalists and editors who can tell or publish their stories, or with anyone else who can help.
Movements.org was originally founded in 2008 by Google Ideas Director Jared Cohen, who then worked for the State Department. In 2012, Movements merged with Advancing Human Rights, which is how it came under the purview of Keyes, AHR’s executive director. At the time, according to Keyes, Movements was a traditional human rights organization with a technological outlook, holding conferences and publishing “how-to” guides to teach activists to circumvent censorship and raise awareness for their causes.
The site still offers instructions on how to browse the internet without being tracked, but the difference, Keyes said, is that “we’re blowing it open to the world.” Launched three months ago, Keyes sees the new iteration of Movements as something unprecedented: a Yelp or AirBnB for human rights activism.
“The human rights community is stuck in an old mindset,” he argues. “A lot of other sectors have utilized the power of crowdsourcing when people want something.”
The website works as follows: People who need help make requests. People who can help make offers, whether in response to a specific request or to users in general. The website staff screens users, both those requesting assistance and those providing it, and assigns them a rating of zero to five stars based on the degree of certainty with which the staff can attest to the user’s credibility. (Having spoken to and emailed with several staff members, I, for one, boast a five-star rating.) Those not known personally are rated based on the extent to which the staff can confirm their identities from social media accounts, published writing, and other online activity.
Though Movements ultimately aspires to be a platform where, as Keyes says, “thousands of journalists connect with dissidents” without mediation, all the published pieces the group has facilitated since the site was revamped have gone through the staff in some way. On Saturday, the Daily Beast published a story by a native of Kobani, a Syrian city near the Turkish border besieged by ISIS. Keyes, himself a contributor to the Daily Beast, found the author, Mustafa Abdi, on Movements and pitched his story to the editors, who accepted it.
“We’re super-interested in giving a platform to folks whose voices might not ordinarily be heard in the West,” said Noah Shachtman, the Daily Beast’s executive editor. Shachtman said that, while he and his fellow editors at the Beast are not currently browsing the platform themselves, he can imagine using it as a “lead-generation tool.”
This is how one Al Jazeera journalist viewed the story of Suleiman Bakhit, the son of a former Jordanian Prime Minister, after finding it on Movements. Bakhit draws superhero comics, which, as he told Forbes in 2011, he thinks can fill a void of childhood inspiration in the Middle East that he sees as too often exploited by Islamic extremists. Al Jazeera hopes to air a segment on Bakhit and his comic books.
Movements.org is not the only human rights group to have identified the possible benefits of facilitating direct online contact between activists. The US Institute of Peace, which is partly funded by the US government, is currently developing a platform that will allow data-sharing between activists who might be short on information because of censorship rules or bad internet access. Though this is not quite a crowdsourcing project, it is founded on the same basic insight that activists in “conflict zones are interested in finding easy-to-use, low-cost technologies and applying them to their particular organizational problem or societal problem,” as Nancy Payne of USIP’s newly formed PeaceTeach Lab put it.
But while Movements’ crowdsourcing component is still getting off the ground, the stories that have been published through the organization are nonetheless rare first-person accounts of places where authoritarian groups–government and vigilante–persecute free-thinkers. The story about Kobani informs us that, prior to the ISIS siege, people there were voicing their “political views without fear of the regime” for the first time in “decades.” An October 8 Huffington Post story published through Movements, written by another Syrian, describes how the schools of his childhood were decorated with “huge posters of Assad family members, and strident slogans about how Syria was perfect under Assad and we hate the ‘Zionists’ and ‘imperialists.'”
The primary flaw of these stories is that they brush too quickly over these arresting details, moving on to blanket condemnations of Assad’s tyranny or the religious fundamentalists attempting to usurp him. Full essays dedicated to describing the life of a Syrian schoolchild under Assad or the life of a Kobani resident between the recession of Assad’s power and the ISIS siege could be both enlightening and moving.
But the wish to write in broad terms–giving the general, rather than the personal, picture–is understandable, considering how rarely opportunities to address western audiences arise. For instance, despite her relatively high profile, Manal al-Sharif, a leader of the widely publicized movement of Saudi Arabian female drivers, who has written for The New York Times, said that she had been struggling to get published before requesting help on Movements. She had met David Keyes at a conference in 2011 and, with his help, her story about how she and other Saudi women are pressured to veil their faces was published in the Daily Beast soon after she posted on the site on the few weeks ago.
Another advantage Al-Sharif has is her audacity: She allows her name to be printed alongside her heretical ideas, making her identity easy to verify but also risking arrest, not to mention social ostracization. (She has been arrested before, in 2011, during the government’s crackdown on the right-to-drive campaign.) She says that every time she returns to Saudi Arabia, where she still lives part-time, she feels “the same fear of being arrested again for my writings and critiques of the lack of human rights there.”
As this fear is a prohibitive obstacle for many, Movements staff member Faisal Al-Mutar, who helped connect the wife of imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi to the Daily Beast, says that the site encourages people to remain anonymous if they wish. Whether the dissidents are anonymous or not, the most important goal of their organization, Keyes and Al-Mutar agree, is to help the writers tell the truth about their societies. “Without free speech, nothing can be achieved,” Keyes said.
Christopher Massie is a CJR contributing editor.