Cross-posted with Lemming Cliff By way of minor prologue: 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 […]

Editor’s Note: As of December 2019, one of the below linked YouTube-posted videos has been removed from the platform for “violating YouTube’s policy on violent or graphic content.” A shocking video emerged at the end of last week, showing members of the Egyptian military...

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...

Cross-posted with Lemming Cliff Amid the grey dust and twisted metal, the young girl discovered beneath the rubble of a destroyed building in Kafr Deryan, a small town 40km west of Aleppo, is barely visible. If you look closely enough, for a split second you can see her ponytail and hair tie before...

Here at the Citizen Evidence Lab we’re pleased to announce the launch of Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps. This initiative is being launched with Human Rights Centers at three universities. The University of California, Berkeley in the USA; the University of Essex in...

From online videos of war crimes, to satellite images of rights violations in areas as reclusive as North Korea, to eyewitness accounts disseminated on social media, we have access to more relevant data today than ever before. These new data streams open up new opportunities for human rights...

New data streams have revolutionized every industry.  It’s no different for human rights.  No different, also, is learning to understand how these work to leverage them for the greater good.  That’s what Amnesty’s Alt-Click project is about.  How do we take the great...

Big shout out to our colleagues from WITNESS, who just released an important new resource  on using eyewitness videos in human rights reporting and advocacy in an ethical way. I consider this a highly relevant resource for everyone working with citizen media. This posting by Madeleine...

By Sam Dubberley – First posted by Eyewitness Media Hub Eyewitness Media Hub is embarking on a cross-industry study into the impact of traumatic footage — and we need your help Eyewitness Media Hub, with the support of the Open Society Foundations, is conducting a cross-industry study into...

Editor’s note: As of December 2019, the below article was edited to address dead links. Previously published in New African Magazine . Also available in Spanish and French.  In March 2014 a grainy cell phone video came across my desk that seemed to show a Nigerian soldier murdering...

Good news for investigators: The European Journalism Center today published a handbook on how to use and verify user-generated content in in-depth investigations. It is a companion handbook to the original Verification Handbook, which focused on breaking news, and includes my chapter on using...