By: Sameer Padania, Posted: Jun 28 09

Regions: Global

Issues: Corporations and human rights

Tags: citizen journalism, human rights, training, video advocacy, youtube

The past couple of weeks have seen YouTube (and Twitter) become the primary medium for those around the world watching events unfold in Iran.  So it's especially appropriate that in the last couple of hours, YouTube has launched the Reporters' Center, a resource centre that features succinct, practical advice from high-profile, experienced journalists - and WITNESS - on key aspects of their craft.  Here, for example, is the New York Times' Nicholas D Kristof on how to stay safe covering a global crisis:

So I was really delighted when Olivia Ma and Steve Grove, the YouTube editors whose brainchild this is, invited WITNESS to contribute human rights-specific videos to the Reporters' Center.  Here's one:

Many of us in the human rights, humanitarian and social justice sectors have criticised YouTube in the past for continuing to see itself as a content-neutral video portal, while increasing numbers of activist users have used it as a medium to get news out uncensored. Events in Iran, and before that, Tibet, Burma, Egypt and China, show the impact on viewers when citizen cameras find a powerful new outlet - but every new global convulsion yielding hundreds of citizen videos highlights new risks and vulnerabilities for users shooting this same video - risks that YouTube has hitherto had a hard time dealing with and has taken flak for.  I gave a Google Talk late last year about why independent, plural spaces like the Hub were needed.   Among the raft of reasons was that YouTube's review systems were failing, resulting in takedowns of important human rights content, even evidence, such as Wael Abbas' channel of Egyptian police torture videos.

Doesn't YouTube have the responsibility to help its users to make this kind of video more effectively (thereby getting better content for itself), and more safely (thereby contributing to its owner Google's "Do No Evil" tenet)?   I believe that the Reporters' Center is one sign that YouTube is actively taking this on board - and not before time.  So, at the same time as building independent spaces like the Hub, there's an excellent opportunity to help to grow the space for human rights and social justice content in mass spaces like YouTube too.