The panelists’ discussion will include questions such as:

• How can citizen media to move beyond raising awareness of issues to using it for justice including, in some cases, legal evidence.
• What can be done to combat the trend of falsified or recycled video?
• How can today’s technology enable people to more thoroughly authenticate their video, making it more trustworthy?

The conversation will also address some of the ethical questions related to citizen media:

• Where and when should human rights abuse media be shown publicly and who decides?
• What measures can be taken to better prevent this and better protect victims’ identities before sharing media online?

Participants in the Google+ Hangout Discussion will include:

• Madeleine Bair – Program Manager of the Human Rights Channel at WITNESS. Follow her on Twitter @madbair and @ythumanrights
• Christoph Koettl – Advisor, Crisis Response at Amnesty International. Follow him on Twitter @ckoettl
• Irene Herrera – Venezuelan filmmaker, journalist, Assistant Professor at Temple University Japan, and co-founder of Video Venezuela. Follow her on Twitter @herrera_irene
• Moderated by: Dan Mahanty – Senior Advisor for Office of Security and Human Rights in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the U.S. Department of State. Follow him on Twitter @danmahanty

The discussion can be viewed live online via Google+ Hangout here. You can also join the conversation by tweeting @witnessorg or any of the participants using #stateofrights and #video4change.

** UPDATE: Here are some recap materials following the panel

Watch the discussion in its entirety here.

Check out the online discussion and questions from the event on Storify here.

The Russian activist group LGBT Guide asked WITNESS’ Human Rights Channel (HRC) to review the video, which revealed the victim’s identity. In response, WITNESS contacted the uploader—an LGBT activist who wanted to spread awareness about homophobic violence in Russia—and encouraged him to use YouTube’s Face Blur function to prevent further re-victimization. Our HRC Curator, Madeleine Bair, wrote a blog post about the importance of visual anonymity and reached out to media outlets that had embedded the original video on their site. After WITNESS staff contacted several media outlets, Gawker Media and the Huffington Post subsequently replaced the videos they had published with the newly anonymized version, which concealed the victim’s identity. Building off of this momentum, PBS’ MediaShift reposted the blog, and HuffPo Live aired a segment that included Madeleine as an on-air expert speaking about the importance of visual anonymity.

With video-enabled mobile phones now in the hands of billions, and online video exposing everything from chemical weapons use in Syria to LGBT abuse in Russia and police brutality in Illinois, the need for tools, strategies and policies to enable the effective and safe use of citizen video has never been greater. While our outreach was too late to make a difference for this teenage boy, his story illustrates the unprecedented opportunities and challenges that video technology presents—and WITNESS’ efforts to confront those challenges with proactive solutions. WITNESS and the HRC are internationally trusted leaders. We instigated and influenced the implementation of YouTube’s Face Blur function in 2012, highlighting the importance—and far-reaching impact—of working with technology companies to make products safer for human rights activists.

The issue comes on the heals of a recently uploaded video from Russia that went viral. In it, a 15-year-old boy is harassed for his alleged homosexuality. On the WITNESS blog, Madeleine wrote:

Where does a video like this fall in the spectrum of human rights video? It documents abuse, but simultaneously inflicts it. That leaves human rights activists in a tough place. The same video that was originally circulated by Russian neo-Nazi sites is now being circulated by LGBT activists and news outlets worldwide. It has been uploaded to a half dozen YouTube channels, and translated into various languages. BuzzFeed, Gawker, and the Huffington Post have embedded the video in articles discussing the alarming rise of homophobic violence in Russia, just weeks after a new law criminalizes homosexuality.

You can view the archived episode of Visual Anonymity and Viral Videos on HuffPost Live.

Giving activists the ability to maintain the anonymity is vital to the safety and security concerns of those speaking out against injustices around the world.

Via The New York Times:

Sam Gregory, program director for Witness.org, the leading human rights video advocacy and training organization, praised the move. Witness.org recently began collaborating with YouTube on a new human rights channel.

Mr. Gregory has been trying to raise awareness among dissidents and operators of social media sites about the importance of anonymity for activists when speaking out can put them at risk of retaliation.

In recent years, Mr. Gregory said, government officials in places like Myanmar, Iran and Syria have used videos of protests to identify dissidents. “There have been clear attempts to use citizen-shot footage to target people and punish them for speaking out against the regime,” Mr. Gregory said.

But Mr. Gregory said the tool would help more people than the activists involved in protests. He said that it would also protect the identity of people who want to use video to speak out about subjects like sexual assault and abuse.

For more on YouTube’s new faceblurring tool and what it means to the human rights community, visit The New York Times.