reason: How do you police the clips on The Hub for accuracy?
Gregory: We don't police heavily. We made a decision early on that we cannot guarantee the accuracy of every clip. But when we look at clips, we look for red flags, such as someone being exposed to a risk by being seen, or graphic sexual violence that's not in a human rights context. If it's something we're not sure about, we'll try to contact the user who uploaded it and ask more questions. If there's a big question mark in our minds we won't upload it.
We're trying to move to a more community-based model of assessing human rights footage. We've seen success in a number of instances. There was a case from the Ivory Coast where collective intelligence helped identify falsification of footage around a shooting of civilians there.
reason: But nothing goes up until you've approved it. It's not like YouTube.
Gregory: At the moment, nothing goes up until we've approved it. In the long run, I think we'd like to move to a situation where more material can go directly up. We'd like to trust more to the community to assess that material, but right now we've got to build that community.
reason: What are some of the other differences between what you do and YouTube?
Gregory: One key area is the issue of security. We are very aware that people may be uploading from situations where the government is watching the Internet and there may be potential repression. So when someone tries to upload to the site they're given an indication of the security risks. We provide ways to upload safely and securely. Once they upload, we don't hold onto their IP address, so if someone tries to obtain that information either legally or illegally we are unable to identify where users are based.
Another element is editorial control. We're trying to tap into a participatory community of human rights activists rather than leave it in the hands of a corporation. That's an important difference.
Another element is that the pages are designed to provide space to contextualize and act around the footage. We're building a number of advocacy options into the site, so people can find ways to generate online or offline action. If you look at the Shoot on Sight clip from Burma, for example, the video itself is quite self-contained, but the underlining material gives more information, gives the statistics, gives more background about what's been happening, and gives ways to act.
One of the functionalities that will launch shortly is an ability to download the clips, so people can use them in the kind of offline settings that are particularly common outside the global North. Perhaps there's only one connection to the Internet, so what you want to do is download it and take it into a communal setting.
We're definitely encouraging people to port the media out. We want them to share it, to embed it in their blogs, and to take it offline, in a community setting or on a mobile phone.
reason: Are there projects outside of Witness that have influenced what you're doing?
Gregory: I think the Amnesty International Unsubscribe Me campaign, which shows six minutes of someone going through a stress position, is an interesting one to look at, in terms of how you use the vaudevillian characteristics of something like YouTube and turn it around for human rights purposes.
reason: The definition of human rights activism gets kind of hazy around the edges sometimes, and you'll often see groups with very broad political agendas. There are also times when people in different parts of the community have had very different ideas about, say, whether to call for military intervention. Do you accept clips from groups with different analyses? How do you deal with those tensions?
Gregory: We don't have any particular focus in terms of human rights issues. We define human rights very inclusively, so we include economic, social, cultural, political, and civil rights. We wouldn't typically take two core partners that have dueling perspectives, but we're open to groups that are on the edge and leading. We worked, for example, with the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan under the Taliban when they were definitely not the mainstream of human rights activism there. We don't necessarily go for the middle-of-the-road groups.
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