By Sam Gregory | November 22nd, 2010 The Ethical Engagements of Human Rights Social Media: Spreadable, Contagious, Viral, Malleable, Fluid, Ubiquitous, Dangerous?
The explosion of digital media on human rights pushes us all to rethink how documentary film ethics apply in a more networked, social media-driven era.
This summer at the Visible Evidence conference in Istanbul I had the opportunity to share ideas with leading documentary film academics on how WITNESS is thinking about ethical dilemmas with human rights social media. This is part of our efforts to contribute to a new consensus understanding on how we handle the growing ubiquity of human rights video, and accompanying concerns about safety, authenticity, contextualization and effectiveness (for more background on this see this recent ‘Cameras Everywhere‘ article).
I share below an excerpt of a paper that I co-wrote with Professor Patricia R. Zimmermann of Ithaca College, focused on some key principles underlying changing ethical norms in human rights social media. [...]
Continue reading The Ethical Engagements of Human Rights Social Media
By Matisse Bustos Hawkes | July 23rd, 2010 This week we’re sharing more ‘tweeted’ bits of news and resources including a guide to mobile phone video journalism, a discussion about the ethics of video in the “YouTube era,” an award given to our partners at HOPS in Macedonia, a new audio archive of the world’s language, and a new shareable video and education campaign about how cosmetics are made, packaged and sold:
from @PriscilaNeri: NPR: The Tricky Ethics Of Video In A YouTube Era: http://n.pr/crM6zA – see @witnessorg‘s take on #humanrights concerns: http://bit.ly/161bY ViKras HOPS wins HIV/AIDS & human rights award at the #aids2010 Vienna conference ! Their video co-production w/ WITNESS http://bit.ly/7ay3WC from @gracelile: RT @longnow Building an Audio Collection for All the World’s Languages: http://bit.ly/9q86nF and from WITNESSchris: Love it: @freerangestudio & @storyofstuff‘s new #storyofcosmetics is up: http://storyofstuff.org/cosmetics/ #video4change from former staffer @SameerPadania: RT @mobileactive: BBC guide for mobile journalists: “Pocket-size video journalism” http://ow.ly/2fhjt #mobilemedia (via [...]
Continue reading What We’re Reading + Watching, July 19-23, 2010
By Sameer Padania | June 21st, 2010 This is the second in an occasional blog series about human rights video. We are pleased to be collaborating with Steve Grove, Head of News & Politics at YouTube on the series. The original post, written by Sameer Padania (former Hub Manager at WITNESS) and Steve, appeared on YouTube’s blog. As always, we welcome your comments and feedback.
Last week we started a blog series with YouTube, highlighting the role that online video is playing in human rights advocacy. And though activists around the world have shown how powerful YouTube can be as a tool to raise awareness of human rights violations, this kind of work opens up new risks, online and offline. This post is designed to help you maximize the effect of your human rights videos while protecting those you’re trying to help — and ensuring your videos don’t get taken down from YouTube.
Before you even start [...]
Continue reading Protecting yourself, your subjects and your human rights videos on YouTube
By Yvonne Ng | May 23rd, 2010 The New York Times reports that earlier this month, a US District Court granted a petition by Chevron to subpoena 600 hours of footage from Crude: The Real Price of Oil. The film, by director Joe Berlinger, documents a landmark lawsuit filed by 30,000 Ecuadorean Amazon residents against the oil company for allegedly contaminating the jungle and creating a “death zone” the size of Rhode Island. The ruling on Chevron’s petition has generated quite a bit of online press and criticism from both journalist and documentary communities. Berlinger and his attorneys are appealing the decision, arguing that the footage is protected by journalist’s privilege.
Most of the commentary has been rightfully framed in journalistic terms and values. As an archivist, however, I couldn’t help but consider the questions and implications this case raises for archives with sensitive raw footage collections (like ours). If Berlinger’s footage was held by an archive [...]
Continue reading An Archivist’s Perspective on Access and Privacy
By Bryan Nunez | October 14th, 2009 In August a video showing what appeared to be the cold-blooded execution of Tamils by Sri Lankan soldiers was released by the group Democracy in Sri Lanka and aired on Channel 4 news in the UK. Dan Verderosa has an excellent blog post on the Hub (“Should You Believe Your Eyes? Allegations of Doctored Video from Sri Lanka”) discussing issues of authentication and different approaches to showing the video (or not), touching on technology, ethics and media literacy. One brief snippet:
“Maintaining the perceived reality of video will be paramount. But in a web-based world, it would be infeasible for experts to examine every bit of footage that finds its way online. Is it enough to caution, as Channel 4 News did, “We cannot verify the authenticity or veracity of this footage”? Absent concrete means of authentication, perhaps the best advocates and human rights groups can do is to use [...]
Continue reading User-generated video & authentication: Sri Lanka
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