Both international non-governmental organizations and government actors have embraced the technological union of humans and software, known as crowdsourcing, to manage the flood of information produced during recent crises. However, unlike a business solution, the task of translation is unique during a crisis situation; the costs are human, and the impact is social and political. This paper follows four crises in which different crowdsourcing applications were developed by a range of actors. In each instance, the design approach failed to incorporate the unique circumstances of the conflict context, resulting in a translation application that removed authorship, dissolved intentionality, and shed contextual markers from original sources. This flawed application prevented the original contributors from interacting with the information directly related to their own life-threatening situation, and the information it amassed formed an unsound basis for decision-making by international actors. The associated consequences during: post-earthquake Haiti

Recent conflicts and revolutions have foregrounded a new battlefield where information and communication technology (ICT) will play a crucial role. The producers of ICT frequently use it as a tool for defining and implementing strategies aimed at achieving stability and democracy. While the traditional battlefields remain in upheaval, manoeuvres on the digital terrain do not progress in parallel. This paper will examine the foreign policy implications of the pervasive cultural bias of the ICTs connected to revolution and stabilization efforts describing how this bias shifts power away from the populations using the technology and toward the actors controlling the programs and codes. The ICTs deployed for conflict management and democratization are plagued by cultural bias which disenfranchises users, thereby diminishing the technology’s potential for use in participatory actions by removing authorship and contributing to information gatekeeping by the creators of the technology which tend to be European or American.