The Notre-Dame fire and digital vigilantism

On April 15, 2019, one of France’s most famous landmarks was the victim of a major fire. The Notre-Dame spire and most of its roof had been destroyed and its upper walls severely damaged. President Emmanuel Macron thought it as a “terrible tragedy”, and hopes that the cathedral would be restored by 2024. The fire was one of the major events of 2019 that shocked people all over the world. Many online live stream kept everyone up-to-date, and #NotreDameFire was trending all over Twitter. Donations were made and promised to restore the cathedral, but not everyone responded to this with gratitude. How did this global tragedy cause the callout of billionaires? And what did social media have to do with it? In this essay, I will analyze the response of the audience to the French tragedy, how they interacted, and the role that social media played in this.

How it happened

The Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral was originally built between 1163 and 1345. The cathedral’s spire has been rebuilt multiple times, most recently in the 19th century. But at the time of the fire in 2019, the spire was undergoing renovation. A lot of attention had been given to the risk of a fire at the cathedral. Fire drills were regular, and fire wardens checked conditions beneath the roof three times a day. But on April 15, a fire broke out in the attic beneath the cathedral’s roof. Before the guards had climbed all three hundred steps to the cathedral attic, the fire was already well advanced.

Most of the wood and metal roof and the spire of the cathedral were destroyed, as only one-third of the roof remained. The cathedral’s artworks, religious relics, and other treasures were mostly saved. Some had been removed in preparation for the renovations, while others were mostly held in the adjoining sacristy, which the fire did not reach.

Through the 24 hours that followed the fire, people gathered along the Seine to hold vigils, sing, and pray. It is a cherished place in Paris, and the grief is felt throughout the  country. The cathedral is not just the most popular tourist site in Western Europe Ever since its completion, it is still a place of worship. About 2,000 services are held in the Notre-Dame every year. Macron, the French president, has expressed the shock of a “whole nation” at the fire.

Citizen witnessing and digital vigilantism

The shocking event was followed by the whole world. Not only news broadcasts, but also social media platforms were all focused on the #NotreDameFire. Many online interactions started through videos and photos that people took of the event. More often than not  the first person to be at the scene of a crisis event with a camera has been an ordinary citizen. With our easy to handle digital devices and the ease with which we can upload and share imagery across social networking sites, the survivors, bystanders, first-responders and activists feel compelled to bear witness. As an average citizenphotojournalist, you can be on the spot to capture the moment and be able to publish it immediately. This type of first-person documentation gives audiences vivid and personalized insights into what happened.

In recent years, the term ‘media witnessing’ has emerged as a way to describe how digital technologies are transforming our capacity to bear witness. It refers to the witnessing performed in, by, and through the media. We are provided with more and more information about events that have no direct influence on our own lives, yet they have an emotional effect upon us because of their representation and our consequent witness of them.

Modern audiences want to understand what the people who witnessed the event experienced, they want to see what breaking news looks like through the eyes of those who saw it. Twitter is full of videos and images like the figure above. Audiences on Twitter are captivated by all the live footage from all different angles, as the eventit becomes real. By witnessing these live footage captured by others, millions of people can be shaken and disturbed, and this can lead to the point where they are prepared to donate money or to assist someone in danger.

The “French tragedy” of the Notre Dame burning, has definitely led to many donations. Four days after the fire, donors had already pledged €850 million to rebuild the 850-year-old monument. These include two of France’s top culture-minded billionaire families, the Pinaults and the Arnaults. But also Apple chief Tim Cook, Walt Disney Company, and video game maker Ubisoft. Indeed, in a country that has had many Saturdays of Yellow Vest protests partly because of income inequality, the backlash to such spontaneous largesse is logical.

Many people commented on the large sum of money that was to be donated to rebuild the Notre-Dame. American author Kristan Higgins tweeted: “…Donate to help Puerto Rico recover. Donate to get the people of Flint clean water. Donate to get kids out of cages. Jesus didn’t care about stained glass. He cared about humans.” The water crisis in Flint, Michigan has lasted over four years. According to the NRDC, a sum of $97 million is needed to pay for repairs to the water supply. This was proposed in 2017, and yet little had been done to reach that goal. Other criticism was aimed at the donors for not paying their fair share in taxes and thus not giving the French government the opportunity to repair Notre-Dame itself. Witnessing the tragedy of the Notre-Dame burning did not bring synergy, but people formed different views and divergent opinions on how money should be spent. This is because the live citizen footage brought so much visibility and emotion to the event, that it became a common ground for people to incorporate social discussions of different issues like income equality.

These days, citizen’s use of ubiquitous and domesticated technologies enables a parallel form of criminal justice. This is called digital vigilantism. Digital vigilantism is  process where citizens are collectively offended by other citizen activity and coordinate retaliation on mobile devices and social platforms. There are multiple practices of digital vigilantism. Hacking, calling out, trolling, calling out, doxing (publicly sharing personal and private information about an individual), and human flesh search (online participants find demographic and geographic information about deviant individuals). In the case of the Notre-Dame fire, the most visible form of digital vigilantism is the “callout”: identifying and confronting toxic or inappropriate behaviors. It is intended to highlight behaviors without necessarily bringing the focus on one individual. We can associate this with what happened with the backlash to the donations for rebuilding the Notre-Dame The donors were called out by celebrities and “ordinary” citizens on multiple social media platforms. The money that was pledged to rebuild the Notre-Dame could have been used for more urgent issues, according to many people online. Not only issues in French society but global issues as well.

But why do people actually mourn the loss of buildings like the Notre-Dame? Parisians have spoken about how the fire has made them think about identity, shared culture, and memory. The flood of personal statements of grief and loss and media coverage has been exceptional. Notre-Dame de Paris is one of the top three sites that attract visitors to Paris, so tourists with first-hand experience of the Cathedral mighthave memories with an emotional value connected to it. Images make us relive the feelings from times when they were felt. But also for people who do not have a direct personal experience of the place, he fire may bring up emotions. They might resonate with its symbolism, history, art, architecture, or the role it has had in Christian religions.

Therefore, this digital vigilantism also has its hazards. Vigilantes may have the same end goal in mind as governments, but private actors may lack the skills and training that government agencies require. Even though some vigilantes are highly skilled, they operate outside of the legal system. There is no “quality control” mechanism to assure a minimum level of preparedness. Another hazard is the true motives of vigilantes. The vigilantes, in this case, might just aim to insult and offend any of the donors or billionaire families of France.

The opinions on the large donations made to repair the Notre-Dame are therefore  from each other. One sees the donations as a sign of hope and healing, while the other sees it as a sign that something needs to change within our priorities.

How social media enables vigilante justice

It is through networking platforms and social media that the whole world was able to share their thoughts on the Notre-Dame fire. This vigilante justice, where ordinary people decide to take the law into their own hands, became a larger-scale activity since the founding of social media platforms. The World Wide Web has become an open nature, and this has led to the founding of platforms that focus on interactivity and participation. Kaplan & Haenlein (2010) define social media as “a group of internet-based applications enabling to create and share user-generated content.” This user-generated content includes uploading posts, sharing other people’s material, and commenting on other posts. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as user-generated content sites, including YouTube and Flickr, became “the core of a host of web-based applications that together formed an expansive ecosystem of connective media” (van Dijck & Poell, 2013).

Law enforcement has a public nature, and it can be an easy topic for discussion. “To the community, law enforcement can be fascinating and contentious. It involves drama, intrigue, and excitement that society finds captivating. The number of crime dramas on television and in theatres validates this. People tend to get involved.” (Waters, 2012). Even though the Notre-Dame fire was not a true crime, it is still a drama that everyone focused on. The development of social media has made it easier and safer for people to voice their opinion on networking platforms. They can stay anonymous and safe within their own homes, and it is eas. Anyone can post almost anything online, with little to no fear of repercussions.

Social media logics have contributed to the way that news about the Notre-Dame fire was shared. Social media logic refers to the processes, principles, and practices through which these platforms process information, news, and communication. José van Dijck and Thomas Poell (2013) described four main elements of this social media logic: programmability, popularity, connectivity, and datafication.

Programmability refers to “the ability of a central agency to manipulate content in order to define the audience’s watching experience as a continuous flow” (van Dijck & Poell, 2013). In social media logic, there is two-way traffic between the users and the programmers. On sites like Twitter or Reddit, users post content and steer information streams, while the sites’ owners may make a difference by tweaking their platforms’ algorithms and interfaces to influence the data traffic. The social media platform can trigger and steer users’ contributions, while users may in turn influence the flow of communication and information activated by such a platform. Due to this two-way nature of online traffic, programmability has serious consequences for both “platformed” society and social activities mitigated by social institutions. It influences the way that news gets shared, and therefore also the way that the news about the Notre-Dame fire gets shared.

The second element of social media logic is popularity. Mass media can shape public opinion by filtering out influential voices and assigning other expressions more weight. In early developments of social media platforms, they held the promise of being more democratic than mass media in the sense that all users could equally contribute content and participate. (Van Dijck & Poell, 2013). throughout the years, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have developed great techniques for filtering out popular items and influential people. Twitter’s Trending Topics feature enables users to boost certain topics or news items, and Retweets are a tool to widely endorse a tweet. But Twitter also actively pushes Promoted Tweets: they are paid for by companies and personalized via algorithms to fit specific timelines. Influential Twitter users are slowly finding their way into the star-system of mass media alongside media celebrities. Nowadays, TV-shows increasingly define the “news of the day” through Twitter trends or by looking into Facebook discussions. Tweets are used as quotes, and therefore Twitter has a powerful function as a public relations tool. The Notre-Dame fire was not only discussed on TV or on news sites, but social media platforms played a big role in sharing information about the event. #NotreDameFire was trending all over Twitter, and therefore people were able to find out what happened. This is not only because of what people tend to tweet and post but also because of the algorithm of Twitter.

When social media platforms emerged in the early 2000s, their primary goal seemed to be connectedness. However, this human connectedness can more accurately be described as connectivity, originally a hardware term. As stated "connectivity... refers to to the socio-technical affordance of networked platforms to connect content to user activities and advertisers" Unlike mass media, social media platforms seldom deal with natural geographically or demographically formed audiences. Instead, they mediate connections between individuals. They partly allow the formation of communities through users’ initiative and partly forge target audiences through automated group formation or personalized recommendations (Van Dijck & Poell, 2013). The recommendation culture grounded in automated connectivity is appreciated by some: they enjoy the service offered by platforms to connect them to like-minded people. Others, however, hate networked customization as a signal of intruded privacy or exploitation of user information. This element can also influence the way that people receive news. If they create a bubble of connections that only includes one specific interest, they might miss general and global news.

Datafication is the last element of social media logic. If we look at social media logic, we may discern how platforms all have their own strategies for predicting and repurposing user needs, while also nursing their equivalent of “real-timeness”. Both are grounded in the principle of datafication. What makes datafication crucial is its ability to add a real-time data dimension to mass media’s notion of liveness. (Van Dijck & Poell, 2013). Social media data streams are increasingly used as real-time analytics to complement or replace traditional polls issued by news media. Police or law enforcement can also use this real-time data for surveillance purposes. Again, this principle has profound implications for the shaping of social traffic. Predictive analytics and real-time analytics are new tools in the struggle to prioritize certain values over others.

All these elements of social media logic contribute to the way we share news and what news gets shared. As social media users, we do not have complete power over what we see online, but the platforms themselves also steer our interactions and with who we get to interact. Our opinions might be influenced, also oneven for the Notre-Dame fire. Do we feel empathy for the people who feel the loss, and are we grateful for the donations made? Or do we call out the people who prioritize a building over other environmental and societal issues? Social media platforms give us a voice, but they also shape our voice.

In conclusion

The Notre-Dame fire was a shock not only for the French but for people all over the world. Videos, hashtags, and live streams on social media platforms were viewed globally. But not only the fire made an impact:the donations that were made were even more of a discussion point. Donors pledged over €850 million to repair the cathedral, but not everyone was full of gratitude. The great amount of money caused a backlash online, as some people believe that the donations were better . These interactions on social media were very essential for the discussion on the Notre-Dame fire. Social media is a space for people to share their opinion, but users are not the only people with power on these platforms. The owners of these platforms have almost just as much influence on the content that is generated and shown, and therefore they influence our opinions and views just as much. There is no general answer to what is right and what is wrong in this case. Even though people would like to call out others for their behavior, there is no actual crime committed. But if the priority of donations should be on a building instead of other people? It is a discussion that is still far away from reaching an actual answer.

References

Allan, S. (2016). Citizen witnesses. In Witschge, et al. (Eds), The SAGE Handbook of Digital Journalism, SAGE Publications.

Baker, V. (2019, 17 April). The grief that comes from lost buildings. BBC, 2019.

Kaplan, A., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons, 53, 59-68.

Kosseff, J. The hazards of cyber-vigilantism. Computer Law & Security Review 32,4 (2016): 642-649.

Martin, I. (2019, 18 April). French Billionaires Pledge $670 Million to Restore Notre Dame. Forbes, 2019.

Van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2-14.

Waters, G. (2012). Social media and law enforcement potential risks. Federal Bureau of Investigation.