#KeepItOn
About the CSO
Access Now defends and extends the digital rights of users at risk around the world, with its work anchored around five core areas: privacy, freedom of expression, digital security, business and human rights, and net discrimination.
The team
Clockwise from top left: Kim (Team Leader, data, USA), Lucy (design/data journalism, UK/Kenya), Berhan (CSO representative, Ethiopia), Ashley (data journalism, UK), Anonymous (CSO representative), Torinmo (data journalism, Nigeria), Dickie (designer, Kenya), Genevieve (web developer/data, USA)
About the topic
Internet shutdowns are dramatically on the rise and they are a threat to human rights around the world. They harm everyone: human rights defenders, businesses, emergency services, and journalists. The reasons governments use to justify them are varies and often disproportionate. People don’t yet understand the severity and implications of internet shutdowns and that is what Access Now aim to change.
A look at the data
A spreadsheet with 82 crowdsourced stories submitted to the Access Now run Keep It On campaign by internet users that have experienced shutdowns. STOP (Shutdown Tracker Optimisation Project) data from AccessNow from 2016 - 2018, with details on 379 shutdowns across 44 countries.
At the sprint in Nairobi the team cleaned and concatenated three years of internet shutdown instance data and standardising the meta data. They also edited and compiled the shutdowns stories submitted by users and matched these with shutdown instances in the STOP dataset.
They also identified coding categories common across the datasets to find trends and common experiences across different geographic locations. And last but not least they ran a word frequency analysis using tf-idf to identify common narrative threads among the shutdown stories.
Results
