A New Human Rights Channel on YouTube

According to this The New York Times article, YouTube is launching a new human rights channel “to help raise awareness and provide context for the growing number of videos created by citizen journalists and activists all over the world.”  From the Times article:

The Human Rights Channel will be overseen by Witness, an international nonprofit organization that has been using video to help activists document human rights abuses for almost 20 years. They are working with Storyful, a news gathering and curation operation that will help provide verification of videos uploaded onto the platform.

 

Sam Gregory, program director for Witness, said the goal was to not only help surface videos produced about human rights violations that might not otherwise be seen, but also to provide context for users looking at a video by providing background information.

This is an absolutely incredible project, meant to empower citizen journalists all around the world, to educate them, and to create a forum for them to tell their stories in video format.

This is the video from the site:

The site also posts these amazing instructional videos about how to effectively and safely film protests:

Click here to visit Storyful, a site that “separate[s] actionable news from the noise of the real-time web, 24/7 … by providing a tool-kit for newsrooms who want to blend social media into their newsgathering operations.”  Click here to visit witness.org and to read more about the new human rights channel on YouTube.  From the witness.org site:

Witness uses video to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. WITNESS empowers people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change.