Censorship no answer to terrorism
Blocking reporting, social media no answer to attacks in Turkey
Allowing even for human error, bureaucratic inefficiencies and the confusion that naturally ensues when three gunmen saunter into an airport and hit their detonators, people may fairly expect their governments to refrain from doing two stupid things during a terrorist attack: making it harder to find and come to the aid of victims; and, making it harder to prevent similar attacks in the future. People may expect that, but not Turkish people.
Although the public’s immediate safety may depend on the ability of victims, witnesses and good Samaritans to spread information quickly, and although the public’s long-term safety may depend on collecting accurate information about previous attacks, Turkish officials took last week’s airport slaughter as an excuse to abuse both social media and traditional media, a habit that it indulges even when people aren’t being gunned down at arrivals terminals. It blocked Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and issued a reporting ban for journalists.
Many Turks didn’t appreciate repression being added to cold-blooded murder on the list of injustices they’d suffered in one night, and they said so. To which a deputy of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) replied, according to the translation of a TV interview provided by the independent Committee to Protect Journalists: “I wish those who criticize the news ban would die in a similar blast.”
If only he had also referred to foreign governments — they ought to be doing more criticizing. Turkey’s abuse of media is the business of any country whose citizens could land at Turkey’s international airport; which is to say, it’s the business of every country in the world. An attack on the free dissemination of information may not be just a civil rights issue, but a security issue; not just a local issue, but a global issue. To protect their own citizens, Western governments have a responsibility to confront insecure demagogues about sustained, multi-front attacks on media.
When terrorists set off a couple of pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line, one-quarter of Americans reportedly depended on social media for information. When terrorists shot up a concert hall and a café-lined street in Paris, the French opened their homes with a hashtag. When terrorists blew up nail bombs at an airport and a metro station in Brussels, Belgium’s deputy prime minister asked people to communicate over Twitter and Facebook so that they wouldn’t clog up the mobile networks. Social media can be annoying and shallow and narcissistic, but it’s also potentially life-saving, and blocking any communication channel during a crisis is potentially fatal.
That includes traditional communication channels. On the night of Istanbul’s airport attack, it wasn’t immediately clear whether the terrorists got past the first security area. Turkish officials said “no”; eyewitnesses said “yes.” But since Turkish officials have a history of impeding accurate reporting by throwing some reporters in prison and locking others out of their newsrooms and hurtling others up in the air with water canons, it can be difficult to trust their accounts. Their own account, officials eventually conceded, was false: The attackers did breach the first area after the panic. These small distinctions matter, because they shift the terms of debate. Should security checks be more thorough at airport entrances? Or, if such security checks create long waiting lines of bored, impatient and terribly easy targets, should they be abolished? Societies can’t prevent future attacks if they can’t at least understand the bare basics of old ones.
This isn’t to suggest that a society’s best defence against terrorism is sold at a newsstand near you. And in fact, some 2015 research from the Universidad EAFIT found that media reports on terrorist attacks serve as disturbingly effective propaganda for terrorists. But the answer isn’t to stop reporting on terrorism or to stop sharing information about an attack; it’s to cover attacks in a nonsensationalistic way.
If only they can be covered at all.