BEIRUT: Lebanon still lags behind in terms of digital activism, despite the fact that elsewhere in the region social media has gone from a convenient way to socialize to a powerful tool for organizing, promulgating and disseminating information, social media expert Andy Carvin said Monday.

Carvin has used his extensive contacts across the Middle East to aggregate and verify on-the-ground content – photos, videos and observations – of the popular uprisings on his Twitter feed. Currently a senior strategist at National Public Radio, based in Washington, D.C., Carvin is in Beirut for a conference on digital and media literacy at the American University of Beirut and sat down with The Daily Star to discuss his experiences covering the uprisings and Lebanon’s digital activism.

“Though there are reporting aspects of my work, my purpose was to see how the events of the Arab uprisings played out in social media,” said Carvin. “I had never before been in the position where people I knew were raising the barricades and looking to take a down a government.”

The personal stake Carvin felt in the uprisings through the contacts he maintained in the region motivated him to document the events through an original kind of digital and oral history.

Information from social media tends to face a level of scrutiny and wariness not given to traditional forms of media, but Carvin said he found ways of vetting information and sources.

“The information is solid – Twitter seems to be naturally self-correcting, with other users keeping you in line,” said Carvin. “You also learn which accounts are consistently supplying reliably trustworthy content.”

The issue, he said, is more often with sources who are deeply invested in one side of current events and propagate false information that they wish were true.

While Lebanon is regarded in the region as having a relatively vibrant civil society and a strong press, it has one of the region’s weakest digitally aware activist communities, according to Carvin.

“Lebanon seems to have a Casablanca quality, where political refugees come to settle, but there’s a lack of an equivalent native class of activists,” said Carvin. “My connections within Lebanon are mostly political refugees: Syrians or Yemenis.”

Explaining this absence, Carvin proffered observations on how a country’s digital, citizen-created content can develop into something substantive.

“An example of this would be Tunisia,” began Carvin. “When I first visited a few years ago for a conference, there were a number of blogs centered around technology, but a lack of political blogs.”

According to Carvin, political blogs by Tunisians were all run by political refugees living abroad. However, “by the time the revolution came around, the blogosphere had matured, and there were a number of political blogs whose authors resided in the country.”

Carvin expects that a formidable Lebanese digital activist presence will be born of a similar process.