Weaving a safe web of news

The rise of social media and data-capable mobile devices in recent years has transformed the face of global journalism, supplanting the broadcast news anchor with a new source for breaking news: the citizen reporter. Social media's decentralized networks and instant re-broadcasting mechanisms mean that the reach of a single tweet can easily trump that of the most powerful broadcast satellite. Brief, text-based and easy to translate, social messages allow news audiences to skip the middleman and get news "straight from the source."

Whether used by "citizen" or professional reporters, however, social media technologies can also pose risks that endanger these individuals and, by extension, the press as a whole. First, social media platforms are usually proprietary, leaving users' data and activities on the system open to scrutiny by collaborating companies and/or governments. Second, the networks upon which social media reporting relies are inherently fragile, consisting of easily targeted devices and relatively centralized message-routing systems that authorities may block or simply shut down. Finally, this same privileged access can be used to flood the network with inaccurate or discrediting messages, drowning the signal of real events in misleading noise.

A citizen journalist can be anyone who is simply in the right place at the right time. Typically untrained and unevenly tech-savvy, citizen reporters are unaccustomed to thinking of their social media activities as high-risk, and may not consider the need to defend themselves against potential threats. Though often part of a crowd, they may have no formal affiliations; if targeted for retaliation, they may have nowhere to turn for help. The dangers citizen journalists face are personal and physical. They may be targeted in the act of reporting, and/or online through the tracking of their digital communications. Addressing their needs for protection, resilience, and recognition requires a move away from the major assumptions of in vitro communication security. For citizen journalists using social networks, the adversary is already inside, as the network itself may be controlled or influenced by the threatening party, while "outside" nodes, such as public figures, protest organizers, and other journalists can be trusted to handle content appropriately. In these circumstances there can be no seamless, guaranteed solution. Yet the need remains for technologies that improve the security of these journalists who in many cases may constitute a region's only independent press.

In this paper, we argue that a comprehensive and collaborative effort is required to make publishing and interacting with news websites more secure. Journalists typically enjoy stronger legal protection at least in some countries, such as the United States. However, this protection may prove ineffective, as many online tools compromise source protection. In the remaining sections, we identify a set of discussion topics and challenges to encourage a broader research agenda aiming to address jointly the need for social features and security for citizens journalists and readers alike. We believe communication technologies should embrace the methods and possibilities of social news rather than treating this as a pure security problem. We briefly touch upon a related initiative, Dispatch, that focuses on providing security to citizen journalists for publisihing content.