WITNESS launched the Human Rights Channel in 2012 in partnership with Google and Storyful. The HRC works to verify citizen video so that viewers can trust what they are seeing is real; analyzes the challenges that citizens face when trying to use their videos to catalyze real change; and supports citizen witnesses to use video more safely and effectively when filming for human rights.

Congratulations to all the winners, including the BBC World Service and BBC China for their winning entry #Tiananmen89 in the ‘Best in News’ category.  Read more about Shorty Awards here. And as always, follow us @witnessorg for updates!

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.

In it, you’ll find thoughtful analysis by Madeleine Bair, the HRC’s Program Manager, a short video highlighting regions and issues we covered, information and contextualization around the source videos that have informed our thinking, and an interactive map highlighting many of the human rights violations we followed this year.

As Madeleine writes in her introduction:

What stands out this year is not only the sheer volume of citizen footage, but the growing audience for it. More investigators, researchers, journalists, and activists are getting their information from video recorded by average people documenting their own communities. More citizens are engaged with human rights issues because footage fills their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. Of course, not all human rights issues are captured on video, and not all online videos of human rights capture mass attention. But today, all of us come face to face with human rights abuse on our screens, and must confront what it exposes, what it means, and what we can do about it.

The Human Rights Channel 2014 Year in Review can be read, watched and interacted with here.

Images: Selected video stills from the HRC Year in Review video. Select to enlarge.

Here’s how she begins:

From documenting the war in Syria to capturing police killings in New York City, citizen videos are exposing important events and becoming part of the fabric of the media ecosystem around the world. Yet for newsrooms and journalists, traditional protocols and practices do not adequately address the editorial, ethical, and technological complications of using citizen videos. Issues of trust, consent, preservation, and safety must be reconsidered when videos are captured by amateurs, uploaded by anonymous individuals, and managed by the policies of technology companies.

In the article, Madeleine draws on lessons learned from a filmed sexual assault in Egypt’s Tahrir Square to outline a variety of issues legacy and new media newsrooms face as they increasingly leverage citizen reporting in their news coverage.

While the viral video put sexual violence at the top of newly inaugurated President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s agenda, it also exposed the potential of eyewitness video to re-victimize individuals on camera, disappear from YouTube, and lead to more questions than answers surrounding the issue it documents. Legacy and new media outlets reported on the video in a variety of ways, demonstrating the inconsistencies of reporting with citizen footage and highlighting the need for new tools and guidelines to facilitate its safe, effective, and ethical use. As citizen footage becomes an essential and ubiquitous medium for social documentation, the video offers one case study of the serious concerns that must be addressed, not only by the news industry, but also by technology companies, civil society, and the public at large.

Read on at Arab Media & Society: Navigating the Ethics of Citizen Video: The Case of a Sexual Assault in Egypt.

For more on issues and ideas surrounding citizen video, visit The Human Rights Channel.

About: Arab Media & Society explores media, technology and their “interaction with society-at-large” in the Arab world. It is supported by the American University in Cairo.

Happily, WITNESS was one of five nonprofits chosen, and the result, Eyes on the Ground, is now online. It begins like so:

With recent uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, and the ongoing fighting in the Middle East, citizen-captured footage has become a vital part of conflict coverage in the media. Videos filmed by ordinary people on the front lines flood social media and video sharing services, including YouTube, where 100 hours of new footage is uploaded every minute.

That, of course, is where WITNESS comes in. Take Ferguson, for instance.

In August, as protesters in Ferguson, Missouri met disproportionate police power, Jackie Zammuto, WITNESS’ Digital Engagement Coordinator, initiated what we call a Surge Response to get resources into the hands of citizen witnesses and organizations that were filming events.

This included direct outreach to specific community groups along with targeted messaging across online platforms to share WITNESS materials that range from guides and videos on filming protests and police misconduct to guides on how to film human rights violations. (For resources shared, see The WITNESS Blog.)

Coming at Ferguson from another angle was Madeleine Bair, WITNESS’ Human Rights Channel Curator, who pulled together citizen video from Ferguson and provided context regarding the specific challenges surrounding video documentation of the event. “Video reports from a range of witnesses, activists, and media reveal not only a pattern of hostility and abuse of power exercised by authorities, but targeted reprisals for documenting police activities,” wrote Madeleine in an article on The WITNESS Blog about the documented harassment and arrests of filmers and journalists.

Recently, New Yorker staff writer Susan Orleans posted on Twitter that she’s always surprised to see her own stories once they’re published. They seem strange to her.

So too, as an organization, reading a profile about the things we do. There’s always more you think could be said, or different aspects of your work you think could be emphasized.

Still though, the article gives a fairly comprehensive overview of many of the things we do, and we hope you give it a read. We also thank Medium for including WITNESS in Storytelling for Good and encourage you to view all five organizations they profiled. Each is doing exceptional work.

About Medium: Medium is a publishing community and platform founded by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone.

Image: Modified screenshot of Eyes on the Ground on Medium.

Next come some particulars such as WITNESS’ Human Rights Channel, which curates and contextualizes video from around the world; our work with YouTube to implement a blurring feature into its editing suite in order to protect the identity of victims and those coming forth with human rights abuse allegations; and, finally, our work with The Guardian Project on the creation of ObscuraCam and InformaCam, two mobile apps developed to improve human rights abuse documentation.

About: The RJI Futures Lab is a testing venue for innovative news and advertising methods and technologies. Housed in the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, the lab provides an environment where professionals, students, faculty and outside partners prototype and test innovations that move journalism forward.

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.

We follow dozens of community media outlets, activists, and human rights workers filming, sharing, and reporting news from their own communities, and we recommend you do too. On Human Rights Day, we wanted to share some of the best citizen reporting on human rights issues.

VIEW FULL ARTICLE

As Madeleine Bair, the Channel’s curator, wrote in a blog post accompanying the video’s release:

In 2013, the Human Rights Channel curated nearly 2300 videos from 100 countries. Collectively, they reveal not only what citizen journalists filmed this year, but how that video was seen and used. Never before have YouTube videos brought egregious abuse to such influential audiences. But as the importance of citizen video becomes clear, so too do the challenges it involves, including the need for verification and the potential of misuse.

We’re heartened to see that Fast Company, in its coverage of the video’s release, notes the importance of verification in the work we do.

For more, visit Fast Company: A Year Of Citizen Journalism Exposing Human Rights Abuses–In One Video.