Sam Gregory

Contemporary human rights activism and witnessing includes a range of new participants. Their practice operates at the intersection of established and emerging forms of documentation and advocacy. Questions about the roles of ‘citizen witnesses’ and ‘citizen investigators’ parallel concerns in the news-gathering world around ‘citizen journalists’....

Pessimism currently prevails around human rights globally, as well as about the impact of digital technology and social media in supporting rights. However, there have been key successes in the use of these tools for documentation and advocacy in the past decade, including greater participation, more documentation, and growth of new fields around c...

An increasing number of verified-at- capture tools and other tools for tracing authenticity provenance and edits/manipulations over time are being developed to counter misinformation, disinformation, deepfakes, shallowfakes and other 'fake news' and toprovide content validation in a time where challenges to trust are increasing. However, if these s...

Full text: https://necsus-ejms.org/live-streaming-for-frontline-and-distant-witnessing-a-case-study-exploring-mediated-human-rights-experience-immersive-witnessing-action-and-solidarity-in-the-mobil-eyes-us-project/ Rhetoric around live-streaming and immersive media and technologies often focus on their ability to mobilise solidarity. Mobil-Eyes U...

Frontline witnessing and civic journalism are impacted by the rhetoric and the reality of misinformation and disinformation. This essay highlights key insights from activities of the human rights and civic journalism network WITNESS, as they seek to prepare for new forms of media manipulation, such as deepfakes, and to ensure that an emergent “auth...

Audiovisual digital media and tools are critical elements in contemporary human rights documentation and advocacy. Generative AI, deepfakes and synthetic media compound questions of what to trust in an existing situation of government suppression, difficulty proving witness accounts and broader societal challenges to trust. There is a need to ‘fort...

A comprehensive study prepared for the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development (UNESCO and ITU). 'Balancing Act: Countering Digital Disinformation while respecting Freedom of Expression' surveys issues with a global scope, includes an action-oriented suite of sector-specific actionable recommendations, and presents a 23-point framework to...

On June 11, 2018, WITNESS in collaboration with First Draft, a project of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, brought together thirty leading independent and company-based technologists, machine learning specialists, academic researchers in synthetic media, human rights researchers, and journalists...

Contemporary human rights activism and witnessing include a range of new participants operating at the intersection of established and emerging forms of documentation and advocacy. Two current paradigms of citizen witnessing show how existing professional norms and activist practices are being disrupted. Citizens are first-hand responders on the sc...

Video for Change' refers to the practice of using video as a means to activate progressive social change. Ongoing work in this field seeks to define and establish ethical considerations that can inform and direct Video for Change as an emerging practice. This article reports on a research project carried out with a network of Video for Change organ...

This chapter explores the practical challenges and opportunities of the current moment in visual activism. Via a series of situated observations from Syria, Burma, the US and elsewhere, it focuses particularly on the ways in which videos, testimonies and imagery of human rights violations are shared from sites of crisis, remixed, and re-purposed by...

Kony 2012 is the most rapidly disseminated human rights video ever (Visible Measures Blog 2012), and has fuelled significant policy and practical momentum in the United States and internationally around the situation of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).1 In this review I consider Kony 2012 through the prism of video advocacy principles. How does it...

Online video platforms and social-media networking sites have become part of the fabric of communication for human rights issues—platforms for demonstrating injustice and calling for action and opportunities to share powerful testimony and images in ways that were never possible before. In this essay, I will focus on largely undiscussed issues of h...

Here, I initially focus on some of the lessons learned since its founding from WITNESS’s experience enabling advocates at a local level to use video to conduct campaigns, including the development of a strategy of audience-centered video advocacy. At the center of all the shifts in approach and focus, however, has been a commitment not just to deve...

This essay examines how remixes that combine human rights footage with popular songs complicate our understanding of the relationship between media production and civic participation. We argue that editing and compositing complicates establishing the authenticity of source material and that rapid dissemination of digital files through distributed n...

From the Arab Spring, with its use of social media, cell phones and the internet, to the release of confidential documents by Wikileaks, new technologies and new approaches are challenging long-held assumptions about how human rights documentation and advocacy functions, and who does it. Video has emerged as a key means through which human rights...

Peter Gabriel and other allies created WITNESS nearly 20 years ago – shortly after the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles. At the time, our founders asked: ‘What if every human rights worker had a camera in their hands? What would they be able to document? What would they be able to change?’ Since 1992 WITNESS has engaged with the risks, opportuni...

Video is increasingly utilized by human rights groups as a component in their advocacy strategies. This article looks at how video is used for a range of local, national, and transnational human rights audiences—both traditional and alternative. Drawing on a case study from the Philippines, it considers the challenges and issues faced by WITNESS (w...

A how-to guide on using video to change the world -- written by the world's leading video activists. Pictures from Abu Ghraib showed the power of the amateur image to grab the world's attention. The Asian tsunami, caught on camcorder, brought home the reality of what had happened more than any news report ever could. Around the world the increasin...