Cameras Everywhere Revisited: How Digital Technologies and Social Media Aid and Inhibit Human Rights Documentation and Advocacy

Abstract

Abstract 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 citizen evidence and fact-finding. Governments and others antagonistic to human rights have caught up in terms of weaponizing the affordances of the internet and pushing back on rights actors. Key challenges to be grappled with are consistent with ones that have existed for a decade but are exacerbated now—how to protect and enhance safety of vulnerable people and provide agency over visibility and anonymity; how to ensure and improve trust and credibility of human rights documentation and advocacy campaigning; and how to identify and use new strategies that optimize for a climate of volume of media, declining trust in traditional sources, and active strategies of distraction and misinformation. All of these activities take place primarily within a set of platforms that are governed by commercial imperatives and attention-based algorithms, and that increasingly use unaccountable content moderation processes driven by artificial intelligence. The article argues for a pragmatic approach to harm reduction within the platforms and tools that are used by a diverse range of human rights defenders, and for a proactive engagement on ensuring that an inclusive human rights perspective is centred in responses to new challenges at a global level within a multipolar world as well as specific areas of challenge and opportunity such as fake news and authenticity, deepfakes, use of artificial intelligence to find and make sense of information, virtual reality, and how we ensure effective solidarity activism. Solutions and usages in these areas must avoid causing inadvertent as well as deliberate harms to already marginalized people.