I am excited to share that my paper on citizen media research and verification has been translated into Arabic. The paper, originally published 2016, provides an analytic framework to review and verify citizen media such as YouTube videos. My goal was to develop a framework that can be used independently of the rapidly developing tools used for digital verification.
I specifically wrote this piece for human rights practitioners, as I feel there are insufficient resources available for our field. Thanks to this new translation by our friends from Meedan, I am hopeful to also reach geographically diverse audience.
The New York Times recently conducted a detailed investigation into the Khan Sheikhoun chemical weapons attack in Syria, and they presented their findings in the video below.
I knew Will Moore for just shy of 20 years. I knew him as a professor and mentor. I knew him as a Ph.D. dissertation adviser and a collaborator. And I knew him as a close friend. For much of the last 20 years, when writing anything — a blog post, an academic paper, a press release — Will would loom in my mind as an audience, often intrusively. In that place, he prompted thousands of keystrokes (disproportionately backspace), always to the benefit of clarity, precision, and efficiency.
But he will not read this, and I cannot manage — though I’ve tried — to pretend that he will. It is for that reason — more so than any sense of grief or lack of time and space — that it has taken me 2 weeks to formulate the simple and understated words below. He’d hate it.
Will Moore (right), September 2013
I write them on behalf of a grateful Amnesty International and, ultimately, a grateful human rights movement.
This month, the human rights community lost a friend and scholar with the passing of Professor Will Moore.
As a scholar, Will made immense contributions to the study of political violence and to that which was once treated as an epiphenomenon of politics and conflict: forced displacement and human rights. In the study of repression and human rights, Will and his growing cadre of students and colleagues made important methodological progress into the study of compliance and abuse, especially related to torture and ill-treatment. He contributed to the study of human rights actors, be they the state, dissenters, or even human rights organizations, with important implications for the work of securing dignity and protection for persons, everywhere.
His scholarly work was read in Amnesty International, and I suspect elsewhere in the human rights (practice) community. It informed thinking, strategy, and encouraged self-reflection. And in no small part as a result of his efforts, the important work of rigorous, scientific examination of human rights dynamics will continue. A new generation of political scientists, un-tethered from constraints of geo-political primacy in the academy, will produce knowledge that can make a better world — if we so choose it.
As a result of Amnesty International’s outsized role in producing human rights data, Will sought to know and understand the organization. And in the process — beyond the important work of creating generalized knowledge about repression — he became a friend of Amnesty International.
Will launched the Citizen Media Evidence Partnership (CMEP) while at Florida State University, a joint project with Amnesty. The Citizen Media Evidence Partnership ultimately became the Digital Verification Corp, a now-global network of colleges and universities that are uncovering and verifying human rights abuses as they unfold, ensuring that human rights struggles are not lost in a digital sea.
A shocking video emerged at the end of last week, showing members of the Egyptian military apparently extrajudicially executing unarmed men. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch analysed the YouTube video and other open source information.
Information gathered by Amnesty International confirms that members of Egyptian military are responsible for at least seven unlawful killings, including shooting dead at point blank range an unarmed man and a 17-year-old child. Continue reading Analysis of Sinai killing videos→
Storyful recently released a podcast on the risks that come with prolonged and frequent exposure to graphic content. I consider this a crucial—and unfortunately still underreported—challenge in crisis human rights research. Even more reason to also highlight this important podcast on this site.
Reflections from Digital Verification Corps (DVC) volunteer Adebayo Okeowo
The cure for fake stories is to simply counter it with the truth. But then what happens when individuals with questionable motives create false news based on inaccurate facts? This will require more than just a critical eye and a sharp mind. It will entail special skills, which is the solution being offered by Amnesty’s Digital Verification Corps (DVC), a team I am privileged to be a part of.
It was midday a couple of months ago in Pretoria as we gathered for the first time as a team. We sat in groups of three and silently observed a YouTube video on our laptops. We had one task: verify if the video showing an airstrike in Syria was authentic. We came to the conclusion that the video was authentic and had not been manipulated. However, there was a complication: the locals in the video had claimed that they recorded and uploaded the video the same day the strike took place. But the time stamp on YouTube showed a different date. Continue reading In Digital Research, Things aren’t always what they seem→