- The Growing Role of Image Verification in Venezuela’s Protests A new mobile app addresses the challenge of verifying citizen footage. Plus, a politician brings citizen video of abuse to the Organization of American States.
- Human Rights Video Weekly: Venezuela & The Verification Challenge Just as citizen reporting and social media can illuminate human rights abuse, they can also facilitate the spread of misinformation, as we're seeing in videos circulated from Venezuela's protests recently.
- Four Ways InformaCam Powers Mobile Media Verification Our partners at the Guardian Project posted today about how our joint project InformaCam provides mobile media (photos/video) verification. We share the overview here.
- Citizen Video for Journalists: Verification Citizen video is becoming a powerful new reporting tool. But faked footage threatens to break the trust that's so critical to newsrooms and audiences. Storyful reporter Della Kilroy demystifies the verification process, sharing important lessons for reporters and human rights researchers alike.
- Is This For Real? How InformaCam Improves Verification of Mobile Media Files There is currently a deluge of media coming from the world’s mobile devices for potential use as evidence or trusted sources for journalists. WITNESS and the Guardian Project are working to provide a mechanism, InformaCam, to verify and authenticate this footage.
- Sudan in the Dark: Lessons from the Frontlines It has been more than a year since the Sudanese armed forces arrested a number of civilian officials in the government and the Transitional Council, including Prime Minister Abdullah Hamdok and his wife in September 2021 before realizing him after a month. Demonstrations erupted soon after, demanding a return to the democratic path and the […]
- How Gendered Disinformation in Nigeria Precludes Justice for Survivors of SGBV This blogpost is part two of a two part series. Part one here. Co-authored by Oluwaseun Ayodeji Osowobi The rise of technology, currently in its fourth revolution, has precipitated image-based abuse and online violence against women and girls. When misinformation and disinformation infiltrate the digital space, it spreads with horrifying speed in the absence of […]
- WITNESS and the C2PA Harms and Misuse Assessment Process Lee el artículo en español aquí. Co-authored by Sam Gregory. TLDR: Building on WITNESS’ focus on developing an authenticity infrastructure that works globally and supports civic journalism and human rights uses and values, we have been part of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity specifications development effort. Right now we’re focused on identifying and […]
- Prioritize Non-Technological Methods for Combating Misinformation and Disinformation Detecting mis/disinfo Technology platforms are facing their biggest hurdle yet as they race to beat the fast-evolving forms of misinformation and disinformation perpetuated online. More pressing is the sophisticated technology deployed by mis/disinformation actors that make it increasingly difficult to detect and counter. To address this, tech platforms have introduced a number of technological solutions […]
- How Biases Fuel Misinformation and Disinformation Misinformation and disinformation are arguably as old as humanity. The popular myth that bats are blind is scientifically inaccurate, and thus a misinformation. Research has proven that bats are anything but blind. They see in black and white and at night they have the potential to see even better than humans. The introduction of information […]
- WITNESS at RightsCon 2021 Online For the last decade, RightsCon has served as a forum for activists, civil society, and international stakeholders to gather around critical issues, questions, and possibilities that lay at the intersection of technology and human rights. As a global organization committed to supporting communities to use video and technology for justice, WITNESS aligns with the central […]
- Ugandan Elections: ‘We Made Sure the Cameras Kept Rolling for Safety’ Preceding the widely discredited Ugandan presidential elections of January 14 2021, the main opposition candidate Mr Robert Kyagulanyi “(popularly known as “Bobi Wine”)” urged his supporters to use their smartphones to record cases of poll fraud and violence. “They fear the camera. Use your camera as much as possible, go live wherever you can, expose, […]
- فهم “المصدر” في التحقيقات مفتوحة المصدر نشرت لأول مرة في Open Global Rights بالإنجليزية، والإسبانية، والعربية في ٢١ يناير ٢٠٢١ كتبت : Libby McAvoy عندما يظهر مقطع فيديو به درجة صادمة من العنف وينتشر على نطاق واسع على الإنترنت، مثل مقاطع فيديو قوات الأمن في العراق وهي تطلق “عبوات غاز مسيل للدموع تصيب رؤوس” المتظاهرين، فإن المحققين مفتوحي المصدر يمشطون المقطع باستخدام تقنيات مثل بحوث السوشيال ميديا […]
- Centering the “source” in open source investigation Author: Libby McAvoy This article first appeared on Open Global Rights in English, Spanish, and Arabic on January 21, 2021. When a viral video of shocking violence crops up online—such as videos of security forces in Iraq firing “head-splitting tear gas grenades” at protestors—open source investigators comb through the footage with techniques like sophisticated social media research and geolocation to verify […]
- How Can U.S. Activists Confront Deepfakes and Disinformation? –December 2020 In the US, the 2020 presidential campaign has been called the “misinformation election.” But however significant the results may be, the problem of misinformation is much larger and more persistent than a single event. Recently WITNESS hosted a workshop on deepfakes and visual misinformation for activists and researchers based in the US, where […]