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Contents
Welcome to the Global Voices Advocacy Guidelines!
If you’re wondering what to write or how to write for GVA, you’ve come to the right place.
What to write for GVA
Unlike Global Voices Online, GVA is a platform that focuses exclusively on digital rights. As we say on our About page, GVA is “dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online.” Breaking news about threats to free expression, privacy, digital activism, and access to information online comprise the majority of our coverage. We also regularly publish posts on Internet law and policy, the rules that govern our rights online, and campaigns promoting online rights.
In the What we cover section of these guidelines, you'll find more detailed information on what we aim to cover on our site. In the Best Practices section of these guidelines, you'll find a summary of the issues we cover and some ideas about how to approach writing on specific subject areas.
What the difference is between writing for GVA and GVO?
When writing for GVO, the primary goal is to introduce an issue or event by presenting a diverse range of online voices. The GVA approach is different: you don’t have to present a range of online voices, although you're certainly free to do so. Instead, the goal is to explain a threat to digital rights (or a positive development -- we like those) and to help the reader understand how a policy or a practice might threaten rights to free expression and privacy for Internet users. These posts typically use evidence from other sites, strong quotes that help explain the problem, and sharp analysis from the author.
How to write for GVA
When you set out to write a post, no matter what the subject, always consider three questions:
- Who is the reader?
- What happened?
- Why should the reader care about what happened?
Who is the reader? Anyone can visit our site, of course, but we have some ideas about who reads our site and who we’d like to read our site. These people include:
- Savvy Internet users who care about their rights, but may not know a whole lot
- People who know about Internet rights in their own country, but want to learn more about Internet rights in other countries
- Internet activists
- Human rights and political activists
- Journalists
- Our own community
What happened?
Remember to start by stating the basic facts of the case or event that your post focuses on. Do not assume that readers have heard about a case, or the people involved, even if we've written about it before.
Why should the reader care about what happened?
Remember our mission: GVA is “dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online.” These core issues, along with the related issue of privacy and surveillance, usually come into play in our stories. When you're writing a post for GVA, ask yourself: How does this event (a website being blocked, a citizen being surveilled, a social media account being deactivated) affect freedom of expression? How does it affect privacy or anonymity? How does it affect a person's physical safety? If you can answer these questions in a simple way, you will be helping readers to not only understand the particular event, but also to see how it relates to broader issues of online rights.
Best practices
Context
Always assume that you are writing for a global audience that does not know much about the issue you’re writing about. Be sure to mention the country that you're writing about. Unless you are certain that you're writing about people and entities that are universally known (a company like Google, for example) be sure to explain the relevant people, institutions, companies, and laws involved. For example, if you're writing about Rafael Correa, be sure to refer to him as "Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa" as opposed to simply "Correa". If you mention a specific law, be sure to include a phrase or sentence explaining what the law does.
Language
If you are writing about a complex issue, remember to use plain language -- jargon or specialized language (legal language, for example) can make it hard for readers to understand the basic facts of the story. You story may be translated in multiple languages, so try to use language and phrasing that will be easy for a translator to follow.
Sourcing for all GVA posts
Source your posts with information from multiple websites and multiple sources. It is vital to our mission, and to our credibility as a site, for all of our posts to cite multiple, reliable sources, particularly when facts are unclear or in dispute. Be skeptical of all sources -- while it is particularly important to fact-check information shared on social media, all media can make mistakes. Make an effort to verify the information you have before finishing a post.
Consider using "live" sources: If you have the ability to contact individuals who are directly involved with a story, or who have expert knowledge on the issue in question, please do so. Be sure to ask the person if they are comfortable being named as a source for a GVA post. If they are, note their contribution either in the body of the post or at its conclusion. If a person is willing to speak, but wants to do so anonymously, work with her to find a way to acknowledge contributions of first hand information.
Netizen Report
We have some additional style and editorial guidelines for the GVA Netizen Report. If you are contributing to NR, please check them out here: Advocacy Netizen Reports Guidelines
What we cover
Breaking news
Breaking news for GVA often hinges on an act of speech or communication online. Threats to online speech can come in digital and real-life forms. Here are a few questions geared towards that regularly come up in our coverage.
- Digital: Was a website or page censored? Was someone’s Facebook or Twitter account deactivated? Is a government using online surveillance?
- Real life: Was a person (could be a regular citizen, blogger, journalist, or activist) harassed, threatened, prosecuted, or jailed for their act of speech? Was a person punished because of private information that government (or other) actors obtained using surveillance tools?
Be sure to follow sourcing guidelines above. Include as many links as you can -- the more that readers can see where our information is coming from, the more they will trust our work.
Do not make assumptions about what is true. For example: Imagine that a group of citizens protest the arrest of the blogger. A week later, authorities decide to free the blogger.
- Do write: "Citizens protested the arrest of Bloggerama. A week later, Bloggerama was released from prison."
- Do not write: "In response to citizen protests, authorities released Bloggerama from prison." Unless authorities have explicitly stated that they are releasing the blogger due to protests (and we can link to a statement that proves this), we cannot assume that the protests were the cause of the authorities' decision to free the blogger.
If you suspect that citizen actions led to certain outcome, use subjective language to say so. It would be okay to write, "Bloggerama has been released from prison, perhaps due to protests by citizens."
Law and policy
In recent years, Internet users have become keenly aware of how national laws, trade agreements, and other regulatory mechanisms affect the online world. We've published posts on laws that allow governments to:
- block websites with certain kinds of content (political, religious, defamatory, etc)
- prosecute individuals for expressing their opinion
- conduct online and mobile phone surveillance
- require users to provide excessive identity information when using a website
When writing about a law, always link to the text of the law, unless you absolutely cannot find it. Do your best to summarize it objectively -- while we may express disagreement with a law's implications, it is important to introduce it as factually and accurately as possible.
Laws can be difficult to understand, but they're important to pay attention to -- many of the world's governments are just beginning to think about legal issues online, and some are using the Internet as a place where they exercise more control over citizens' rights than they do in real life.
If you're writing about a law and you have questions about it, ask the advox editor for ideas, or post them to the list -- we have many legal experts in our community who can help.
Companies
While the Internet often feels like a free, public place, most space online is owned by private companies. When you store information with Google or DropBox, express yourself using Twitter or Facebook, you are not only subject to your country's laws but also to the individual policies (often known as Terms of Service) of that company. If you are working on a post about a company, be sure to read their terms of service and other relevant policy documents. Google and Twitter also issue transparency reports that can be helpful too. If you have questions about a company policy and how it affects users, or how it interacts with the law, certain members of our community are experts on this subject. Ellery, Jillian and Rebecca can help answer questions. Here are some resources on company policies:
Bloggers, activists, and anyone who may be under threat
As a community, we must hold ourselves to high standards in our coverage of individual cases. While we must always strive for accuracy and reliable, demonstrable sourcing, this is especially important when we are writing about individuals who are under threat (from governments, organized crime groups, or others) for their activities online. We must be careful not to repeat any information about a person under threat that isn’t confirmed by a reliable source or represents the person in a way they personally disagree with or can cause them trouble (like “dissident” or “anti-government”). Misinformation can sometimes complicate a case or further endanger individuals.
Note on other powerful actors
Most of our posts report on efforts by technology companies or governments to repress speech or violate the privacy of users. But other powerful entities can threaten the rights of others online too. For example, drug cartels in Mexico have used the Internet to intimidate and identify people. While these groups function outside the law, they still present a clear threat to free expression online – and they too merit our attention.
Campaigns
Advocacy groups and experts around the world are working to fight against these efforts -- their websites can be helpful in explaining how these laws work and how they can affect regular users. GVA staff are working to create a page with links to different advocacy group websites -- this will be up for view very soon!
Anonymous reporting on GVA
If you or someone you know would like to contribute to GVA anonymously, there are ways to do so. GVA staff are working to create a guide on this for Advoxers. In the meantime, contact Advox Editor Ellery or Advox Director Hisham for advice.
Advocacy 2.0 Guide
The Advocacy 2.0 Guide (Tools for Digital Advocacy) describes some of the best techniques and tools that digital activists - and others who wish to learn from this subject - can use as part of their online advocacy campaigns. While our previous guide (Blog for a Cause!) focused on the effective use of blogs as an advocacy tool, this guide will explore creative uses of other web 2.0 applications.
Our goal is to:
- Aggregate web 2.0 tools for advocacy;
- Provide detailed instructions on how to use them;
- Highlight successful experiences of web 2.0 activism by local digital activists around the world;
- Inspire other activists to adopt these strategies in ways that serve their specific goals and needs.
From "Geo-bombing" to "multi-blogging" and Twitter to "mash-ups", we explore the field of digital advocacy, helping activists reach out to audiences they may never have reached before.
