By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, March 27 -- Social media and the UN was the topic on Wednesday, when a representative of Mashable and an Internet activist from Egypt took Press questions along with ECOSOC President Nestor Osorio and the UN's Youth Envoy, Ahmad Alhendawi.
Inner City Press asked the two mostly non-UN guests to assess the UN's social media, including Herve Ladsous' UN Peacekeeping which does not answer tweets on Haiti cholera or rapes in the Congo, and the @SecGen Twitter account that Alhendawi that day cited. Video here from Minute 27.
Mashable's Stacy Martinet acknowledged that the UN could do better. She advised letting other, “lower” levels of the UN do the tweeting.
Wael Ghonim said that in Egypt, after the revolution, the military (SCAF) started a Facebook page and put its releases there first, bypassing the old media.
Ahmad Alhendawi, who'd tweeted about @SecGen, said things should be a two-way street.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's spokesman Martin Nesirky replied that @SecGen “is not official, run by well meaning individual, I believe based in UK.” Nesirky said that his office, “without blowing our own trumpet,” has 36,000 followers.
It is understood that the UN did not ask to shut down the unofficial @SecGen. But would they try to close, say, @RogueBanKiMoon, for example?
These days in the UN press corps, the old media “leaders” of the UN Correspondents Association have started no fewer than six anonymous social media accounts to try to undermine the new Free UN Coalition for Access, which thanked the panelists on Wednesday, and Inner City Press which co-founded FUNCA.
In their anonymous accounts, targeted at countries' mission to the UN, the UNCA “leaders” have falsely alleged Inner City Press receives terrorist funding, or -- somehow worse? -- funding from Rwanda.
But who are these leaders of UNCA, now known alternatively as the UN's Censorship Alliance or, due to anonymity, the UN Cowardice Alliance?
There is UNCA President Pamela Falk, who send out corporate tweets from CBS, does not respond to questions or critiques, and deleted without explanation tweets that were inaccurate and came into question.
Falk has not tweeted since March 24, the day after she sent a legal threat to Inner City Press not to even ask why she was taking photographs of the UN's March 18 raid on the Press office.
There's UNCA Second Vice President Masood Haider of the Dawn of Pakistan, with 87 followers and seven tweets in the 27 days of March including one that simple reads, @nypost.
There's UNCA Third Vice President Sylviane Zehil ofL'Orient Le Jour with 92 followers and tweets, a recent sample of which is “Citigroup to Improve Anti-Money Laundering Controls,” without any link much less critique or analysis.
There's UNCA First Vice President and Concerned UN Reporter candidate Louis Charbonneau, most of whose tweets are just corporate pass-throughs from Reuters, as if on auto-pilot. He also religiously re-tweets his Reuters underling Michelle Nichols, who filed a false complaint echoinghis, along with AFP.
There's UNCA Executive Committee member at large Tim Witcher of Agence France Presse, with 127 followers and seven tweets in March, the first of which was a re-tweet of the co-stolen Minova rape story of Reuters' Michelle Nichols, with whom Witcher went on to file a false complaint for being called, accurately, a lapdog.
We could go on, as they do. Watch this site.
