Mark Malone

Social media portfolio

Social media campaigning

I have developed a keen understanding of the potential for social media use by progressive organisations for campaigning and organising. Social media is not a magic wand for campaigning, and poorly thought-out campaign strategies will continue to miss goals and aims, notwithstanding having a Facebook page or Twitter account. However, when campaign organisers understand the merits and workings of different social media platforms, and have a clear sense of how these interrelate with each other within a changing media ecosystem, these tools can be effectively used to complement and support traditional campaigning/organising practice. Each platform has specific strengths, and from the perspectives of engagement, they have different audiences. My practice across all forms of social media, combined with my activist and academic background placed me in an ideal position when I joined the Debt Justice Action Network and offered to devise and implement a social media strategy for the Anglo: Not Our Debt campaign. The network included the Unite trade union, UCD School of Justice, Action From Ireland (Afri), Canal Communities Campaign for Equality and Fairness, Claiming Our Future, Centre for Global Education, Migrant Rights Centre of Ireland, the Spectacle of Defiance and Hope, Waterford Womens Centre and many other community organisations. I worked on this until the campaign took a break following the IBRC liquidation. For the past six months I have been working with Debt and Development Coalition Ireland, where I have helped roll out a global #notourdebt campaign. As an experienced activist and campaigner, I know the importance of honest and clear communication between people. I have spent a great deal of time, in both formal and informal educational settings, working and researching on themes of media and mediation, the construction of common sense and the evolving discourse of social justice struggles within the context of entrenched neoliberalism. At its core there exists, across most recent manifestations of social discontent, a counter-narrative were people demand recognition in the imposition of injustice. Contained within this portfolio are specific aspects of my work that have contributed to the the practice and knowledge of how progressive organisations can utilise social media to challenge those injustices for a more egalitarian society.

For the past six months I have been working with DDCI, where I have helped roll out a global #notourdebt campaign

Social media management

I am responsible for the management and monitoring of multiple social media outreach projects for campaigning, education and awareness-raising. These include managing the Twitter and Facebook accounts of Debt and Development Coalition Ireland (DDCI) and the Debt Justice Action Networks campaign, Anglo: Not Our Debt, in line with the prior agreed positions and analysis. These are updated daily with relevant organisation and campaign news, sharing of new and emerging related research, relevant news story links and organisation/campaign critique to frame our messaging. These platforms are also used to mobilise supporters around specific actions. I also use these Twitter accounts for direct intervention in mainstream media conversation around relevant TV/radio current affairs shows. This has increased DDCI and Anglo: Not Our Debt visibility and legitimacy on their respective issues with a constituency online and shapes public narratives according to agreed aims. It also affords the capacity to correct and critique other public positions proffered by right wing economists/academics etc in real time as they happen. It encourages re-tweets, follows and favourites to maximise the effectiveness of these interventions. I also manage multiple independent Facebook pages, including A Really Big Thank You, with 18,000+ followers. I set up this Facebook page in late 2010 while undertaking social media research, as an experiment in capturing particular public sentiment that could then be harnessed as a distribution network for social justice narratives. After an incident in which someone parked a cement truck outside Leinster House, I (correctly) suspected that this spectacle would have resonance with the wider public. I created the Facebook page that morning in response. It is currently the largest non-organisational, social-justice-focused Facebook page in Ireland. I also manage the online presence of The Live Register media collective. We use social media as tools of communication with participants and advocacy groups and other interested parties around the themes we cover, as well as shaping them as a growing network of distribution and sharing of our documentaries. I also run a Scribd account which I use as a depository for publications that can be embedded online by others, shared on social networks or downloaded for later reading. These include research and reports by NGOs, trade unions and progressive think-tanks along with articles, books and other useful publications. My aim is to build up a library of critical resources useful for social justice, community, and trade union campaigners. To date this material have been accessed and read more than 28,000 times.

To date this material has been accessed and read more than 28,000 times

Writing skills
I have been writing on the themes of social justice, the Irish political system, community and workers struggles and ecological issues for over 10 years. My work has been published in numerous online and print publications including Irish Left Review, The Village, Politico. ie, Broadsheet and Rabble. My research into aspects of social media in the Egyptian revolution was published in 2012 in Learning and Education for a Better World: The Role of Social Movements, Hall, Clover, Cother and Scandrett (Eds.). I also write content for Debt and Development Coalition and the Anglo: Not Our Debt campaign. Since late 2010 I have maintained a blog as an independent researcher and activist journalist. For the most part I cover issues that interest me personally, be that unaccountability within many areas of the State, the impacts of lobbying by high finance and grassroots responses to rising inequality, poverty and injustice. My written work makes use of emerging social media platforms, incorporating sources of images and video. In some instances this is direct citizen journalism in which I report on demonstration or events in which I am a participant. I also engage in more traditional journalism, but using social media technology to facilitate my reporting. In March 2011, I was the first Englishspeaking writer to collate a report using images, tweets and video posted by people on the ground in Alexandria, Egypt as they took over the state security HQ. The report was picked up by a number of blogs and was translat-

The specifics of Twitter demand an ability to be concise, coherent and immediately reflective
ed within hours into Arabic, Spanish, German and French. This experience of sourcing people on the ground in Egypt via Twitter to collate material from them, only to have the report translated back to an Egyptian population within the hour was one incident which provoked my curiousity and subsequent research into what these tools, spaces and practices can mean for egalitarian movements. My blog now regularly incorporates new social media, including tweets, images, hyperlinks and video. My writing experience also involves reframing narrow media narratives for campaign objectives. As part of the Anglo: Not Our Debt campaign I was responsible for using commenting functions on mainstream media websites within prior agreed analysis and media strategy. This required having the ability to use Twitter for media intervention. The specifics of Twitter demand an ability to be consise, coherent and immediately reflective when responding to public spaces of conversation on live TV or radio shows. I write in such a way that maximises engagement, gains followers and increases wider public legitimacy of the campaign as a main organised forced against the socialisation of private debt.

Audio and visual production

I has extensive experience in producing and editing audio and visual/video formats. In the past I have produced Radio Solidarity podcasts and radio shows broadcast on Near FM and distributed online. Most recently I have been co-producer with The Live Register, making documentaries around issues of inequality and injustice in Irish society. The project has received two awards of funding from the Mary Raftery Journalism Fund for work on migrant and childrens issues in Ireland. We have covered issues as diverse as social housing, tax evasion and the IFSC, and experiences of people living in the direct provision system. I also regularly produce video, audio and photo reportage from demonstrations, public talks and events and regularly update my YouTube channel which has more than 250,000 views in two years. I often use humour as a way of introducing and critiquing social issues. I am also skilled in scripting and framing as well as engaging interviewees in an empathic manner. I have experience in translating key messages into visual/video form and facilitating creative popular videos for campaigning aims. I am skilled in the use of Photoshop, and has used these skills in the creation of images that utilise internet meme culture. I was one of the first people in Ireland to podcast direct interviews from activists involved in the uprising in Egypt in early 2010, using a combination of social media tools and platforms. In 2012 I edited a documentary piece for Community Action Network as part of their submission to the European Council around social housing conditions in Ireland.

My YouTube channel has more than 250,000 views in two years. I often use humour as a way of introducing and critiquing social issues

Social media training

I have devised and facilitated social media literacy training workshop and lectures for campaigning and social justice struggles, based on critical reflection of my own activism and the activism of others. These have been in both formal university settings, including NUI Maynooth and UCD, as well as informal/popular education situations, such as community organisations/ networks and specific campaign groups. I have produced several video resources to help others learn how best to use these tools and I continue to develop my own understanding of the effective social media practice offers based on critical reflection. My educational practice is based in Freirean pedagogy and is tailored to specific participant needs with a focus on using existing participant experiences to ground learning. These include the practical use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube; simple how-to approaches in video, photography and blogging; radical media use of smartphones and the internet; andcritical thinking around engagement strategies for campaigns. I engage with theory to explore the relationship between emerging communication technologies and the creation of counter-narratives as part of struggles for social justice, as well as the implications that a changing media ecosystem has for challenging and shaping common sense in the public sphere. My educational research around social media has been published by Sense Publishers.

I engage with theory to explore the relationship between emerging communication technologies and the creation of counter-narratives as part of struggles for social justice

Social media activism

I have acted as spokeperson for many campaigns, projects and mobilisations over the past 10 years and have used this experience to provide training to fellow activists in the same. There are many ways in which I have encouraged social media activism. The following describes one prominent example. In 2011 I worked with other media activists in support of two women arrested in Rossport, Co Mayo, who had subsequently learnt that the arresting Gardai had mistakenly recorded themselves joking about using the threat of rape against them. Working sensitively with the women at their request, I was responsible for devising and implementing a supportive online media strategy to bring this behaviour to the wider public at large. Using my understanding of the specific attributes of Twitter, I helped shape the public awareness of these recordings in ways that would have been impossible had the women been using traditional mainstream media methods alone. It is quite likely it would have been ignored by most news organisations. I ensured that journalists from every mainstream media organisation in the country not only had a link to the recordings, but were seen by the Twitter-using public to have this link available to them. This strategy made it impossible for the recordings to be ignored by the mainstream media or An Garda Siochana or indeed the Minister for Justice. In subsequent weeks I used Twitter to enable the women to challenge and refute statements coming from the Garda Press Office and RTE around alleged tampering with the digital file. The outcome of this work led to increased public awareness of the policing style in Rossport and sustained public conversation around sexism within the police force. It also helped foster a critical public conversation around the role and independence of the Garda Ombudsman. The Garda Ombudsman was forced to carry out an extensive examination of the police behaviour. RTE were later forced to apologise to one of the women after the stations crime correspondent falsely claimed on air that we had tampered with the recording. In this instance I demonstrated how strategic use of social media tools has the capacity to proactively shape the mainstream news agenda, as well as demanding accountability from public bodies. Various versions of the audio recording were listened to more than 100,000 times.

This strategy made it impossible for the recordings to be ignored by the mainstream media or An Garda Siochana or indeed the Minister for Justice

Website design and development

I was responsible for facilitating the web design of the Debt Justice Networks Anglo: Not Our Debt campaign website. The brief for this website was for the design to be visually clean in order to encourage visitors to engage with the content. The website has prominent positioning for visitors to add their contact details well as links to the campaigns social media platforms. The nature of the campaign required that we make extensive use of video and images as tools to explain the fairly complex Anglo promissory notes. The website had a specific resources section which contained presentation and articles generated by the campaign. I am currently facilitating the redesign of Debt and Development Coalition Irelands website. The aim of this redesign, following an examination of current site architecture and aesthetic, is to improve useability and engagement, improve and simplify the process of news updates, and increase the publics engagement with the organisations resources and reports when embedded online.

The nature of the campaign required that we make extensive use of video and images as tools to explain the fairly complex Anglo promissory notes