According to a blog post from NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan, the paper’s new Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren — who has covered Washington and other beats, and moved to the Middle East to start coverage for the Times earlier this year — had a “rocky start” to her new job as a result of some comments she made on Twitter and Facebook. Among other things, she was criticized for praising a book about Zionism, for linking to an article in a pro-Hezbollah Lebanese newspaper (without comment) and “schmoozing” with a Palestinian activist, and for making what some felt were insensitive remarks on Facebook about the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Will every reporter now get a social-media editor?

In her post, Sullivan praises Rudoren for being “responsive to readers [and] spontaneous and impressionistic in her personal writing style.” But those positive qualities then quickly get turned into negatives, as the public editor goes on to say that the Jerusalem bureau chief is also “not especially attuned to how casual comments may be received in a highly politicized setting… in one of the most scrutinized and sensitive jobs in journalism.” Says Sullivan:

“Now add Facebook and Twitter, which allow reporters unfiltered, unedited publishing channels. Words go from nascent, half-formed thoughts to permanent pronouncements to the world at the touch of a key. The result is very likely to be problematic.”

The result of all this is that Rudoren gets what amounts to a social-media editor of her own: an editor from the newspaper’s foreign desk has been assigned to “work closely” with the Jerusalem bureau chief on what she posts to Twitter and Facebook. The idea, says Sullivan, is to capitalize on the promise of social media’s engagement with readers “while not exposing The Times to a reporter’s unfiltered and unedited thoughts.” According to the public editor, this is a necessary step because the alternative would be to ignore social media altogether, and this would be unwise.

But is that really the only alternative the NYT had in this case — to ban its Jerusalem bureau chief from social media completely? Perhaps we should be grateful that the newspaper didn’t fire her immediately, as CNN did its senior editor and veteran Middle East analyst Octavia Nasr in 2010, after a single tweet in which she expressed admiration for a deceased Hezbollah leader. At the time, I wrote about how this showed a complete lack of understanding of the benefits of social media for journalists, despite the potential risks of criticism like Rudoren has been experiencing.

When I criticized the NYT’s latest move on Twitter, a former newspaper editor I know asked me why it mattered so much that a reporter’s tweets might be reviewed and potentially edited (or censored, depending on your viewpoint) by someone at the Times. After all, he said, newspaper stories are edited — so why not tweets and Facebook posts?

The problem, as John Cook has pointed out at Gawker, is that social-media tools like Twitter and Facebook get the vast majority of their power from the fact that they are what Margaret Sullivan seems to want to protect us from: namely, the unedited and unfiltered thoughts and opinions of a journalist. The more you edit them and try to filter out or smooth over all the bumps and blemishes, the more you rob them of that power — the power to connect human beings to other human beings as directly as possible. At that point, you might as well not do it at all.

It’s okay for journalists to be human beings

I understand that the Middle East is a powder keg — even Sullivan herself has inadvertently proven this, by adding a description to her blog post about Rudoren that one Palestinian activist says defamed him and requires an apology. So what is the appropriate response to what Rudoren did in that kind of environment?

The Times seems to feel that it needs to homogenize and sterilize its correspondent’s views as much as possible, so as not to risk offending anyone unnecessarily. But it should be obvious to just about anyone that virtually any comment at all is going to offend someone in that kind of situation. Why not allow its bureau chief to discover those limits and danger zones herself, in real time, in the full view of the newspaper’s readers? Will this be uncomfortable, possibly even painful? Yes. Will it also be valuable and potentially positive in the long term? I believe that it will.

The reason why there is so much sound and fury about media transparency and allowing reporters to express opinions like normal human beings is that the idea of journalistic objectivity has become a fig leaf of epic proportions: readers arguably don’t believe in it (if they ever have), and therefore they assume that journalists have opinions they are simply hiding or pretending not to have. Could that be why public trust in the media continues to be so consistently abysmal?

What the foreign editor of the NYT should say to his new Jerusalem bureau chief is exactly what Katie Rosman has said she was told by a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal about using social media: namely, don’t be stupid. And more than that, he should tell Rudoren that she has his full support in trying to find a balancing act between being open about her opinions and taking heat for them — and that the paper believes it is an important battle worth fighting, regardless of the public flak that ensues.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Hoggarazi and Rosaura Ochoa

One concrete example of this emerged within days of the Israel Defense Forces launching what they called Operation Pillar of Defense (which came complete with its own Twitter hashtag). According to several reports, the Israeli army asked citizens not to post the details of attacks or troop movements on social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram because they might inadvertently reveal the location of specific targets. One political blog that was briefed by the IDF as part of its media strategy wrote:

“Bloggers, tweeters, and Facebook friends of Israel were reminded by our IDF contacts not to say exactly where rockets have landed or even when/where alert sirens have blared… The siren and landing reports are helping the terrorists hone their aim, making it a bit easier to target/kill civilians.

It’s one thing to say the troops are building outside of Gaza, and its something totally different reporting that you saw a tank moving down main street at 3pm… that information can tell Hamas where (and when) a land action may be coming.”

Information flow has been democratized

Anyone over a certain age or with a knowledge of military history will no doubt see the similarities between this and the “Loose Lips Sink Ships” propaganda campaigns of World War II, which warned citizens of the U.S. and other Allied countries that spreading specific information about military attacks could threaten the war effort. But that was aimed at a much smaller phenomenon — namely, people talking to others who might have connections to the military. Now, anyone with a smartphone is capable of publishing not just a few sparse details about an attack but specific longitude and latitude co-ordinates, images, video and more.

Think about what happened when the U.S. Navy Seals targeted Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his compound in Pakistan: a computer programmer named Sohaib Athar spent a couple of hours live-tweeting details of that attack without even knowing what he was doing. If the Navy had been involved in a more prolonged attack, those details could have easily helped Al-Qaeda determine how many troops were involved, what types of aircraft, what kinds of weapons, and much more. That kind of data can change the nature of a military campaign, especially when combined with “big data”-style algorithms and mapping technology that is now commonplace.

Every war is now a social-media war

And while the Israeli military may think that it is somehow controlling the flow of information with its live-blog or its Twitter account or its Tumblr propaganda campaign, it is just one stream in a giant ocean of data flowing from individuals who are both observing and participating in the attacks — including soldiers who are posting photos of themselves to Instagram and Facebook, pictures of drone missions that are being aggregated through a site called Dronestagram, and many other similar examples. Everything that is geo-tagged becomes a potential source of crucial information about the Israeli action and the response by Hamas.

Part of my interest in this phenomenon is just the way that the media we use helps shape the world around us, but I’m also fascinated because my father was a Canadian Air Force officer who worked with NATO on designing what are called “command-and-control systems,” including the military version of modern information theory — in other words, figuring out how information flows can affect military strategy.

In the not-so-distant past, crucial information flowed primarily from the top down, and battlefield data was hard to accumulate or distribute efficiently, apart from the usual word of mouth and rumor-mongering engaged in by soldiers. The internet and social tools have altered that structure significantly, however, despite the military’s best efforts to regulate them. And during a real-time campaign, social media may be a great way of distributing the government’s marketing message about the conflict, but it’s also a great way for anyone involved to publish what could be critical details of an attack — and that is difficult, if not impossible, to defend against.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

One of the most obvious examples of this occurred very early in the attack, when the Israel Defence Forces’ official Twitter account posted a tweet that warned Hamas leaders not to “show their faces above ground” because the army was about to launch missiles into their area of the Gaza Strip. This arguably qualifies as a direct and specific threat of violence, which is against Twitter’s terms of service — but so far the tweet remains, and the IDF account has not been sanctioned (there were some reports that it had been suspended, but those appeared to involve another unrelated account). In fact, the IDF account is marked as officially “verified” by Twitter.

We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead.

—
IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012

When does Twitter decide to block content?

So far, Twitter hasn’t responded to a request for comment on how it is handling the Israeli conflict and the fact that it is playing out live on the network — complete with photos of rocket attacks, burned-out buildings and even dead bodies (I’ll update this post if and when Twitter responds). The company has often spoken of its responsibility as the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party,” but for the most part that has involved promoting the rights of individual users in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street protests, not the interests of governments and armies.

Arguably, Israel would be well within its rights to ask Twitter to remove or censor tweets by Hamas, which is defined by the Israeli government as a terrorist organization. If Twitter has selectively censored tweets by Nazi sympathizers after a request from the German government — using the new powers it introduced earlier this year — then how would it justify not giving Israel the same ability to block Hamas tweets, or filter them based on certain geographical limits?

And it’s not just Twitter, of course: the Israeli army has been uploading videos of rocket attacks to YouTube as the campaign has been unfolding, and some are fairly graphic — including one that blew up a car carrying the head of the Hamas military wing. That video was removed Thursday morning by YouTube, and it appeared that the site might have decided it breached their terms of service, but then the company said it had removed the video by mistake and it was reinstated.

Threats of violence and shocking images are also something that Facebook has been known to remove, but for now at least the network says it won’t be removing content posted by the Israel Defense Forces — which includes an app that curates photos from Instagram, many of which the army said were taken on the ground during its attack on the Gaza Strip.

Our new information gatekeepers are inscrutable

But according to Mike Isaac of All Things Digital, the Facebook spokesperson he heard from didn’t say why the content from the Israel Defense Forces was being left up, or under what circumstances it might be taken down — leaving the question open of what Facebook would see as offensive content in the context of a war. And that reinforces the same problem that has arisen before with Facebook and other similar social networks as a platform for speech: namely, they are effectively a series of black boxes when it comes to decision-making around what gets removed.

When YouTube removed the initial IDF video, it wasn’t clear whether that was an editorial decision or one made in error by an algorithm. When Facebook deletes accounts belonging to Arab women who are fighting for their rights, it isn’t surprising that this is seen by some as censorship, even when it might just be an errant algorithm. And while Google and Twitter both put up lists of the requests they get from officials, the reality is that they remove or filter out plenty of content and never mention it. And when Google selectively blocks a video like “The Innocence of Muslims,” there is no court of appeal that will hear arguments about that decision.

So while it’s a great thing to have all these sources of information — assuming that you believe more information is better, even if it is coming from the communications branch of the army — it is almost all being hosted by proprietary services (although the IDF also has an active blog where it has been posting live updates and even infographics). And while they have all expressed their commitment to free speech in some form or another, they have absolutely no obligation to uphold that, or to tell users when information has been removed, or why.

We may have disrupted our old information gatekeepers — newspapers, television, even governments — but in many ways we have just exchanged them for shiny new ones. And they are just as inscrutable, if not more so.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Hoggarazi

Social media, once thought of as a tool for bored nerds and marketing gurus, has taken on a whole new role it seems — one that could stand to change the face of modern warfare forever. As BuzzFeed notes in its round-up of Twitter posts from the Israeli army (a sentence I never would have imagined typing even a few years ago), the IDF actually warned Hamas guerillas not to show themselves on the Gaza strip or risk being killed in the attacks that began Wednesday morning, and the official Hamas account responded:

@idfspokesperson Our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are (You Opened Hell Gates on Yourselves)

—
Alqassam Brigades (@AlqassamBrigade) November 14, 2012

In the hours that followed, videos of rocket attacks on Hamas strongholds were uploaded to YouTube, and the IDF blog carried a minute-by-minute breakdown of what was happening — how many Hamas rockets it intercepted, a strike by the Israeli Navy, and so on. It looked very much like the New York Times live-blog The Lede, except that it was being published by a military force: the front of the website even looks like a traditional news blog or breaking news site, complete with the usual social-media buttons for sharing content on Twitter, Facebook and other networks.

Not that long ago, CNN was the archetype of war reporting with its real-time video of the war in Iraq. More recently it has become the province of breaking-news blogs like The Lede from the Times, with minute-by-minute updates — or of National Public Radio editor Andy Carvin, sifting through live reports from civilians in Tahrir Square in Egypt and using his Twitter stream like a crowdsourced newsroom. Now, we have to add to that the army as a media entity, as symbolized by the IDF’s official live blog, Twitter stream and YouTube videos. What more could a publisher want? There are even infographics and a hashtag.

Blogging pioneer Dave Winer has written about how social media allows “the sources to go direct,” and we have seen the power that can have when a newsmaker adopts Twitter or a blog, the way News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch has or the Pakistani resident who live-tweeted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. But there is perhaps no better example of taking that principle to its logical — if unpleasant — conclusion than what the Israeli Defense Forces did on Wednesday. How does that change the way that wars are waged, or experienced, or covered by journalists? It is certain to do all three.

In print, this looks like extremists. On Twitter, this looks mainstream. Dangerous how diff platforms lead to diff conclusions.

—
Andrew Katz (@katz) November 14, 2012

Governments and armies have always tried to influence the way their battles are perceived, whether by “embedding” journalists or by creating their own mouthpieces — people like Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally, who broadcast favorable messages as a way of destabilizing the enemy or turning the tide of public opinion (or both). But now, commanders and their political chiefs have tools at their disposal that would have been almost unthinkable even a decade ago: all the same tools that a newspaper or a TV network has, and probably more. Their message now lives or dies by the same principles.

As more than one observer has pointed out, the main issue when armies become media entities is how to sort out the truth from the marketing spin — and how to ensure that the other side gets fair treatment, even though it may not have as powerful a marketing department. Just as NYT media reporter Brian Stelter has said that having Rupert Murdoch on Twitter makes his job a lot harder, the advent of military publishers will likely force traditional war correspondents to up their game as well — and it will put even more emphasis on crowdsourced efforts like Andy Carvin’s Twitter newsroom.

@mathewi Feels like a watershed moment.

—
Jim Roberts (@nytjim) November 14, 2012

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

TV and telco operators are busy considering the range of innovative options for mobile live and on-demand viewing, social sharing, remote controlling and other scenarios.

Tel Aviv-based Tvinci recently unveiled a new version of its “OTT” (over-the-top) white-label platform, which is used by clients like LibertyGlobal’s Cello and Finland’s Elisa.

Co-founder Ido Wiesenberg tells paidContent the firm signed seven clients in the last year, tripled its revenue and is due to announce a big Asian client win. Now it is taking money led by existing investors Kaedan Capital and Zohar Gilon plus newcomer investor Trellas Enterprises.

“One of the goals in raising this round was to open up new markets. So far, our main target was Europe,” Wiesenberg said. “We need to grow. In the countries we are targeting, the population is huge.”

“OTT 2.0“, as Tvinci’s new platform is called, lets broadcasters show live and on-demand video to users through apps but also includes social sharing functions, personalisation and discovery. Viewers can also sling video from apps to full-size TV and set top boxes.

The suite has come a long way since Tvinci began in 2007 and raised $1.6 million two years later. The company claims to have doubled revenue each year since 2008 and to double its staff by year’s end.

Several notable online video companies have come out of Israel. To Wiesenberg, that’s a welcome anomaly.

“We don’t have services like Hulu or Netflix so far,” he says. “It’s not like the US where everything is online. However, TV is very popular and there is a passion to innovate.

“The Israeli market is not as advanced as the UK or Europe, but you have very innovative companies like Boxee coming from Israel.”

Despite the rush amongst operators to be on new mobile and tablet devices, Tvinci does not yet have business in the States – another of the reasons it has raised money.

“This is the goal of the new funding, to explore new markets,” Wiesenberg said. “We are experimenting to partner with companies and have a local representatives. I expect to have some news within a year.”

Israel isn’t the first country to lay conditions on Google (NSDQ: GOOG) before allowing Street View to move forward. Germany insisted that residents be give the option of blurring their homes and businesses before the feature launched, and in Switzerland, a court has held that Street View violates that nation’s privacy laws.

The Israel launch suggests that expanding Street View-and other services like it-may be getting tougher as concerns about online privacy increase globally.

A major concern in Israel is that terrorists could use the Street View service to help plan attacks. Government ministers met with Google over the course of six months to hammer out a series of guidelines that would allow the service to launch without compromising security, according to a report by The Associated Press. a spokesman for the Israeli Intelligence Minister, Dan Meridor, The Associated Press. No details of the security arrangements were disclosed.

Other conditions that Google will have to abide by in Israel include:

»  Street View users in Israel will be offered “an efficient, reliable way to blur images of license plates, places of residence and other objects,” the Justice Ministry told Haaretz.

»  Google had to agree to hear any lawsuits over Street View issues in Israel, and not argue that the case must be moved to the U.S.

»  Google must inform the Israeli public of the routes its cars will take, and that the cars be clearly marked.

A Google Israel spokesman declined to say AFP whether or not the Street View service will cover the Palestinian territories or Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Founded in 2007, Modu had developed phones that included a model based on Qualcomm’s Brew platform as well as a WiFi-only, Android-based device (pictured). The concept behind Modu was to develop pared-down, small handsets whose functionality could change depending on the outer case being used for it — for example, a music player or a navigation device.

In October 2010, the company announced a partnership with Micromax — India’s third-largest handset company in terms of sales according to IDC figures from June 2010 — to launch its modu T phone in the country. The modu T featured a Brew OS and was designed to run on 3.5G networks. Earlier in the year the company had also announced plans to sell its devices in other emerging markets such as Nigeria and Romania.

But it appears that having these deals in the can was not enough for the company’s creditors.

In November, Modu was understood to have cancelled an IPO and instead started to lay off most of its staff. Israeli newspaper Ynet, which first reported the news, says that remaining staff are there only to sell off existing stock. The company is understood to owe $123 million to creditors and investors.

We are contacting Modu for further details.

Dov Moran, the founder and head of Modu, owned about 35 percent of the company. Before Modu, Moran had founded msystems, which was sold to SanDisk (NSDQ: SNDK) for $1.6 billion.

Israeli business news site Globes first reported the price for the deal, and added that it is being sold by VCs Maayan Ventures, which owns 39% of DroidSecurity. A group of private investors owns 20%, and DroidSecurity’s managers and employees own the rest. Maayan had invested only $100,000 in the company. (DroidSecurity had also received a $500,000 grant from the Office of the Chief Scientist’s Incubator Program, part of the country’s Ministry of Information and Trade.)

DroidSecurity, which sells a range of free and paid-for apps to secure Android smartphones, tablets and other devices, says it has had 4.5 million downloads of its apps to date; its free app ranks in the top-50 most popular apps in the Android Market (release).

AVG, meanwhile, has made most of its business up to now developing and selling desktop security software to consumers and small businesses. It says it has 110 million customers in 170 countries.

The blog Data Protection Center and Recovery points out that there has been increasing attention on breaching Android device security. Last week saw a vulnerability exposed on the Webkit platform, used to develop Android apps. Although Google (NSDQ: GOOG) fixed it in the latest Froyo release (2.2), only 36 percent of Android devices use Froyo, meaning that the remainder can still, in theory, be attacked.

No financial terms were disclosed but the acquisition fits a pattern Google has been running for months, mixing larger tuck-ins with developer pickups. This marks the thirteenth acquisition in nine months, if my count is right, and the third this month. The other two April purchases were UK Android app developer Plink and online video platform startup Episodic, which had raised at least $2.5 million.

The company plans to use the new funds to set up five new sales offices in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, London and Bombay. Todacell boasts that it only works with a small number of mobile publishers, including Fring, MobiLuck, Mocospace and TuneWiki, and that it allows them to better optimize the respective pubs’ ad inventory.

That said, Todacell is also looking beyond the smartphone. Its ad network extends to placement on non-phone devices, including hand-held gaming consoles by Nintendo, Playstation and Sega. Todacell is now planning to make ads available for the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) iPad and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Kindle. The Kindle’s broadband service is hardly used by the majority of its owners, though MediaMemo speculates that Amazon may be revamping its approach, making it more appealing to users, publishers and advertisers that Todacell caters to.