ICTs and Human Rights

A University of Cambridge CGHR Research Project. This page is meant to be a resource on the uses of ICTs for prevention of human right violations, as well as for fact-finding, accountability and advocacy practices. Posts are primarily guidance for research. Submissions are most welcome via Tumblr or via email at [email protected]

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The Whistle is Looking for a Full-Time Programmer

The Whistle is a dynamic team that brings a broad variety of perspectives and experience to work on the problems of inequality and inefficiency in the digital reporting of human rights violations – without losing sight of the values of solidarity, trust and care that are central to human rights work.

We are academics coming from the fields of sociology, development studies, psychology and business, with previous work experience at places like Bain & Company and Google, as well as developers with background in a number of related projects, including the Wikirate project for corporate supply chain transparency.

We are an academic start-up, which means that we both build tools in close collaboration with human rights partners and provide expert advice to projects and organizations interested in incorporating technology in their human rights work.  Our current NGO partner is Global Rights Nigeria, where we are working to support their ‘Rape is a Crime’ campaign, and we are in the process of developing two exciting use cases with new partners.

This is where we need your help. We are for the rest of 2018 who can both provide vision and support the execution of these two test cases.  This is your chance to work on a technology for good project that can enhance the number, variety and quality of reports documenting human rights violations.

As we are funded by with a Horizon 2020 grant from the European Commission and are based at the University of Cambridge, we are limited, by their rules, to offering a salary that is in line with academic pay-scales – which means it is not as much as salaries in the private sector.  We know you could find a more competitive salary elsewhere, and we wish we could offer more, but we hope that the exiting and hands-on nature of our work could provide you an experience that has its own rewards.

We are looking for someone who relishes problem-solving and has experience with and really enjoys working with a diverse team to turn their ideas into pragmatic solutions anchored in the real world.  Please take a look at our job description.  We look forward to any questions you might have and hope to see your application!

The Whistle is Looking for a Full-Time Programmer was originally published on The Whistle

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The Whistle's Impact: A Case Study by the University of Cambridge

The Whistle has been featured as a case study on the University of Cambridge’s Research Impact page.

A mobile app simplifies the process of reporting for the witness, whilst simultaneously prompting them to include the metadata information required for verification. Aside from providing more metadata for the fact-finder to corroborate, The Whistle also serves to educate witnesses about what data is most helpful and why. It can also signpost them to sources of information and support around security and human rights.

Looking forwards, the application plans to facilitate the reporting and verification of civilian witness accounts of human rights abuses in partnership with NGOs across the world.

Click here to read the full article.

The Whistle’s Impact: A Case Study by the University of Cambridge was originally published on The Whistle

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Penelope Sonder from The IPF spoke to Rebekah Larsen, a Research Assistant at The Whistle, about the necessity of digital human rights reporting and the challenges associated with verification, privacy, and communication.

Acting as a new kind of mediator, The Whistle aims to help organisations to correctly and quickly verify as many reports as possible so they can actually address the human rights violations. Social media has done wonders for citizen journalism, but it also means that human rights organisations are often short on time and resources because of the sheer volume of material to be verified and the diffusion and complexity of digital tools used in verification.

“The Whistle aims to help human rights organisations verify more reports and more quickly. This way, more voices are heard and more human rights violations can be addressed.”

Click here to read the article on The IPF’s website.

The IPF speaks to Rebekah Larsen about the importance of The Whistle was originally published on The Whistle

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In the Case of Africa’s Domestic Abuse Epidemic, Simply Implementing More Laws May Not Be the Answer [Guest Post]

By Claudia Kania, Oxford Human Rights Hub

Domestic violence remains a growing epidemic plaguing not only the rural communities of West Africa, but also the urbanized, more progressive cities in the southern part of the continent. Far from being a distant and obvious danger, sexual assault and physical abuse are now the greatest threats facing African women today, according to the International Rescue Committee. The statement released by the IRC illustrates domestic violence as the "most urgent, pervasive and significant protection issue” for the women of post-conflict Africa.

Of course, more official legislation and political initiatives might seem as the most obvious response to a rise in violence against women. However, legal directives do little in the region to stem the rampant  humanitarian crisis. After Sierra Leone’s passage of the 2007 Domestic Violence Act, only one person had been arrested in 2010. Amnesty International’s recent report on the region documented the lack of police cooperation in the enforcement of the Sexual Offences Act of 2012. Following the illegalization of rape in Liberia, the country established a special court to try cases of sexual violence. Since 2009, only 18 cases have been tried in the court, resulting in 10 total convictions. Years of conflict in the region weakened judicial infrastructure and limited its reach to the more isolated areas in the region.

Certainly, African legislators should continue to make political strides in criminalizing any type of gender violence. Progressive policies and judicial dynamism are essential components in decreasing the threat of domestic abuse. Be that as it may, activists must be able to anticipate the availability of new paths that lead to such a goal. In the face of political and legal shortcomings, technological ingenuity stands at the forefront of progressive change.

Activism motivated tech startups possess qualities which make them dynamic tools for humanitarians and victims of gender violence. Their accessibility is an attribute that is diluted in the case of formal legislation. While the enforcement of laws varies from urbanized to rural areas, the responsive nature of ICTs decreases the gap between the regions. Additionally, they are catalysts for social change. Although political initiatives may be considered as the guiding backbone of society’s moral principles, these effects are extremely gradual. The following serves as an informative list meant to describe the recent strides made by entrepreneurs  to promote an effective end to domestic violence in African nations.

1. Vimba

The app, developed by South Africa’s Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism, provides free services for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. Founded as a measure to stem the increase of child sexual abuse in the region of Diepsloot, the application allows users to access various information, such as HIV prevention tactics, legal assistance, and any accessible shelters within the surrounding villages, by texting *134*403#. The user then provides a numerical location designator, as well as the reason for accessing the service. In developing regions, financial dependency is a major obstacle that prevents victims of abuse from accessing the services of various helplines. Utilizing unstructured supplementary service data, the app circumvents this problem by not requiring users to pay for internet data. Instead, the program reverse-charges phone calls made to authorities. The data collected allows other nonprofits, including Lawyers Against Abuse, to formulate and implement time sensitive harm reduction measures.

2. Bonga

Bonga, an app created through a collaboration between Egerton University’s Computer Science and Women’s and Gender Studies departments in Kenya, utilizes encryption and GPS to act as a responsive intermediary between users and trusted allies. Available in offline mode, the application gathers the location of the user and sends it along with an SOS message to a chosen circle of friends. In Kenya, where 38 percent of women have experienced gender violence, technology plays an essential role in the safety of individuals. Along with preventative features, Bonga connects users with 24 hour emergency hotlines and sends them extensive information regarding reproductive health.

3. MyPlan

The mobile app, released by the One Love Foundation, serves as a virtual decision aid for victims of domestic violence. Through asking the user a series of relationship based questions, MyPlan gathers information to formulate a customized plan based on individual circumstances. By carefully taking into account the varying environments of gender based violence victims, the app helps users decide whether current relationships are unsafe and how to safely remove themselves from differing abusive environments. Although originally developed through the John Hopkins School of Nursing, MyPlan has recently partnered with The International Committee for the Development of Peoples to incorporate the app’s features in Somalia’s psychosocial treatment facilities.

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The Whistle featured on the University of Cambridge website

The article provides context as to why digital verification is needed in the realm of human rights fact-finding.

“In our digitally enabled world, a legion of ‘civilian witnesses’ has sprung up: individuals “in the wrong place at the wrong time” who capture an event and then publish the scrap of footage or the incriminating photograph on social media. But amid the fog of propaganda, hoaxes and digital manipulation, how can we tell what’s real and what’s fake?”

It goes on to detail The Whistle’s initiative to provide NGO’s with a tool to help make the verification process more efficient and effective.

“Cambridge researchers are developing an automated tool, ‘the Whistle’, to help verify the authenticity of digital evidence.”

Click here to read the full article on the University of Cambridge website.

The Whistle featured on the University of Cambridge website was originally published on The Whistle

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Why new smartphone apps aren't the answer to refugee justice

Smartphones are critical for refugees, not only to communicate with family and friends but to serve as a potential reporting mechanism for human rights abuses.

Whatsapp, a free app which enables users to make calls, send texts, and share photos and videos globally, provides refugees with a way of communicating with family or friends. Facebook Messenger allows messages and calls between Facebook users and is accessible to anyone with a Facebook account. Maps.me enables user to find their geographical location anywhere in the world, including at sea, wirelessly. Dropbox enables users to store and access and submit critical information, such as immigration forms, using a third-party digital space instead of the individual’s device’s storage.

These apps, stemming from existing web-based services designed to allow free and, essentially, limitless communication and sharing, have empowered refugees by enabling them to access and disseminate critical information.

New apps that have been designed to help refugees, however, are costly as they require individuals to learn how to navigate a new interface, perhaps use more data, and are less trustworthy (due to unfamiliarity) than those that they already use. Indeed, the mere act of downloading an app in the first place requires users to break with existing behavioural patterns on their devices, reducing the probability of successful adoption of any other app, beyond popular social media and communication apps.

One solution to this problem is incorporating a reporting mechanism within a familiar app such as Facebook messenger, using bots. Since many refugees already utilise Facebook messenger to communicate, there is not only a higher level of trust in the app, but they already possess the knowledge of how to use the app. By including a bot in Facebook messenger, a refugee would be able to submit information about a human rights abuse by simply sending a message and responding to questions. These questions would be designed to prompt users for verifiable information, and would also record their geo-location and other important metadata needed to verify their report.

Nevertheless, another more pressing barrier to these new initiatives is the lack of Internet access. Although refugees have data plans from their home countries, they lose connectivity at sea and in rural areas, often only establishing connection through an international carrier once they have reached their destination. The places refugees live, such as camps or rural areas, often lack digital networks and infrastructure or have expensive connectivity available. This short clip created by BBC Media Action and their research with DAHLIA simulates the reality of a refugees access to internet as well as their use of social media and communication apps.  Due to the scarcity of Internet that refugees face on a daily basis, many mobile apps created in response to the refugee crisis will have little, if any, impact on the real situations of refugees.

Technology designed to aid refugees must therefore aim to fit into the daily lives, which often includes limited or no access to Internet and the afore-mentioned communication apps. It is however possible to produce scripts, which when combined with platforms and tools such as Twilio and Google Sheets, are able to act as SMS bots capable of surveying phones and collecting data, without the need for a data plan. Such an endeavour would nevertheless still leave open-ended questions in terms of security, dissemination and trust.

Any form of technology which aims to aid refugees must be directly related to problems they encounter on the ground while also be adaptable to other circumstances. Overall, it’s important that the design of such technologies result from a sustained relationship between local NGOs on the ground, refugees, and technologists.

For more information about refugee connectivity, see the UNHRC’s Introduction to Refugees and Connectivity.

Why new smartphone apps aren’t the answer to refugee justice was originally published on The Whistle

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The Art of Verification

While the use of video to record human rights violations is not new, the drastic impact of new technologies, stemming from the increased availability of mobile phones and the proliferation of digital social networks, have profound implications for human rights researchers, NGOs, and international organisation. For example, a large amount of videos on YouTube are in fact small scrapes that have been re-uploaded. These recycled clips lack the original meta-data necessary to verify time, location, or contextual information. Consequently, this common practice ha required researchers to develop and learn new tools and methodologies to identify the original source. Such new techniques often deviate from analysing traditional photographic video materials collected during field research.

In the age of ubiquitous camera usage, editing capabilities, and citizen media, the risks of getting digitally shared information wrong is high if the proper steps are not taken. While citizen media provides an extreme level of detail (including landmarks, signage, or vegetation), a permanent record of violation (if preserved correctly), as well as visual documentation of violations that would otherwise go undetected, it does not require a proper verification methodology.

PHEME, an organisation which focuses on the veracity of big data, relies solely on algorithms to verify social media content by analysing its information (lexical, semantic, and syntactic), criss referencing data sources with open-source data bases, and the information’s diffusion (how, when, and by who was this information transmitted and received). This algorithm based verification practice presents diffusion patterns in the form of “message types” (neutral, confirming, denying, or questioning rumour) in order to verify or dispute a digital source. PHEME’s emphasis on algorithms undoubtably has the potential to speed up the verification process, but should ultimately be coupled with a human element of verification.

Algorithmically, it is possible to identify both verifiable and non-verifiable traits belonging to a video by, for example, running a reverse image search to determine the videos originality, the geo-locations authenticity, and in what context it was captured. Thumbnails can also be matched to specific locations identified on Google street view, although this process often requires more human input.

Even if an algorithm deems a video to be original and the geo-location to be authentic does not mean the video is purporting to be true (or vice versa). It is this no surprise that, traditionally, human rights reporters, NGOs, or international organisations deploy fact-finders on the ground to verify the situation, either by conducting interviews or field reports. For this reason, we believe that the proper approach to social media verification is still mainly human centred. The challenge for new tools with be to facilitate the circumvention of the inherent dangers and obstacles of hard-to-read places, by allowing a greater degree of overview of the context of reported media, via the provision of means for better cross-referencing. This enables fact-finders to make a more sound judgement.

Instead of relying solely on algorithmic verification techniques, albeit an important part of the verification process, we believe that analysing citizen media should by no means be considered a separate endeavour from traditional fact-finding, which is largely centred on witness testimony and fact-finder reports. The Whistle cross-checks social media reports by employing both top algorithmic indicators and human input. We are aware of the current field and how time consuming it is for fact-finders to verify information, so The Whistle does the work for you by facilitating human input and involvement in the verification process. The art of verification, for The Whistle, is a mix of both algorithmic and necessary human involvement.

The Whistle aims to speed up and simplify the verification process by prompting users to supplement their human rights reports with metadata and corroborating information form other witnesses. The Whistle app then engages the back-end cross-checks involving a variety of third party information sources and tools, such as weather and map databases. By doing so, The Whistle provides human rights researchers, NGOs, and international organisations with a wealth of cross-referenced information, reducing both the time and digital expertise necessary to verify digital reports of human rights violations.

The Art of Verification was originally published on The Whistle

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In March 2016, three members of The Whistle team traveled to San Francisco for the annual RightsCon conference, the largest get-together of those working on the intersection of technology and human rights, consisting of human rights advocates, researchers, lawyers, academics, tech company representatives and government officials. We gave a brief presentation on The Whistle’s initiatives in the conference Demo room, providing a quick overview of the aims of the project and potential collaboration efforts.

The Whistle, a digital human rights reporting platform, would enable fact-finders to get digital reports of human rights violations from hard to reach places, and allows civilian witnesses to document these events as they unfold. At the same time, however, the stakes are high in terms of getting this type of information wrong. This is in part because it is relatively manipulable. Some images or videos may be staged, used as propaganda, or for other misguiding purposes. Fortunately, there is a proliferating number of tools to support the cross-checking of digital information. We now have tools to cross-check location and time, extract metadata, unearth details of the source’s digital footprint, to trace back the provenance of the information, and so on. Yet despite these tools, civilian witness information is not being used as human rights evidence as much as one might expect. We’ve identified at least three causes we want to highlight – though we know there are more – which we refer to as the ‘bottleneck’.

1. Civilian witnesses’ lack of digital and information literacy We have heard from fact-finders that civilian witnesses do not necessarily know what metadata is or that they should include it with their information. This paucity of metadata in their information makes it much harder for fact-finders to verify it.

2. Human rights fact-finders’ lack of digital literacy with respect in particular to digital verification Though the fundamentals of verification remain the same, the tactics and tools for verifying digital information are new and changing rapidly. This complexity might be discouraging fact-finders from turning to digital information from civilian witnesses.

3. Human rights fact-finders’ lack of time Even for those who are up to speed on digital verification tools, this process takes time. Individually, each of those tools may only provide a limited indication – if anything – about the veracity of the reported information, and opening up each tool and entering the information to be cross-checked is not only time-consuming but a nuisance.

The question then, in the context of what one journalist called a ‘big data problem’ in Syria, and a limited number of hours in the day, is who gets heard by fact-finders? We are particularly worried – given the complexity of verification and the time pressures of fact-finding – that those who are easier to verify are more likely to be heard. Those harder to verify, due to a lack in digital literacy or footprint, may be less likely to be heard, and it is precisely these civilian witnesses who may be most likely to need human rights mechanisms.

The Whistle is currently in the research and design phase, funded by ESRC and by the EC’s Horizon 2020 programme, and is working with one collaborator, WikiRate, which aims to improve corporate accountability, including workers’ reports of abuses, which is where The Whistle plays an important role. We are actively looking for collaborators such as active fact-finding NGOs and tech companies.

Below are the slides which accompanied our presentation at RightsCon.

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  The Whistle at RightsCon: Calls for Collaboration was originally published on The Whistle

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The Whistle featured at the ‘Technology for the Bottom Billion’ Workshop

On Friday the 10th of June, The Whistle took part in a workshop organised by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge. The workshop brought together technological initiatives, which could potentially serve as alleviating responses to the plight of those who live on less than $2 a day.

In their own words ‘Most of the benefits of cutting edge science are enjoyed by the world’s wealthiest 10%, while the bottom 50% bear the brunt of the externalities that new technologies so often generate’. The Whistle was one out of a host of other initiatives, including “DigiTally” (simplifying offline payments), and “Networking for Development” (developing drones that deliver network access to hard-to-reach areas).

Our team’s greatest hopes and aspirations are that anyone with access to a phone or computer is able to report human rights violations, whilst simultaneously rendering this data more readily useful and reliable in a shorter amount of time, via the provision of a verification “front-end”. We have no illusions as to the strong impact of inequality, particularly in terms of the required level of digital literacy, but through extensive interviews and analysis of a wide range of diverse organisations and their respective civilian groups of focus, we can make some strides in aiding the human rights fact-finding process. The workshop was an opportunity to gather feedback and comments on the way The Whistle works, as well as an occasion to extend an invitation for collaboration.

If you have any comments or would like to collaborate, or even provide a potential test-case, we can be contacted on our website (thewhistle.org), via twitter (@whistlereporter), or directly to Dr Ella McPherson ([email protected]).

The Whistle featured at the ‘Technology for the Bottom Billion’ Workshop was originally published on The Whistle

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10 Things to Know About Social Media Verification

To give you a brief overview over some of the most important aspects and challenges of verification and how The Whistle fits in to this picture, we have come up with the following list of ’10 Things to Know About Social Media Verification’.

  1. Collecting verifiable information

Much of the burden of the verification process can be taken off the reputation of the source at the input stage by prompting witnesses to submit as much corroborating information as possible. One of The Whistle’s main aims is the empowerment of civilians, or specifically, the uninformed witness, in regards to social media verification in a human rights violation context by providing them with a channel to submit verifiable data. Collecting proper documentation is key, especially in times of crisis when social media witness reports are often fuelled by emotions.

2. Metadata In order for social media verification to work, organisations must pay attention to the importance of metadata. Metadata comes in the form of descriptive titles, text, keywords, dates and timestamps, as well as location. Often times, when content is uploaded to popular media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, metadata is stripped or altered. In such cases, it may be unclear whether a certain image or video has been uploaded before or after a particular event, and therefore, whether or not it can be verified. For example, YouTube alters the date stamps of its videos to represent Pacific Standard Time. This process sometimes makes it appear as if a video is uploaded before the event it claims to show. Moreover, only a small percentage of content is automatically geolocated and the task of establishing the location of a specific image or video is more difficult when the metadata surrounding the original time and data has been stripped or altered. In order to verify an image or video, it’s common for human rights defenders to have to corroborate the location, time, and approximate date stamp in order to make sure that such image or video was taken in a specific context.

3. Source credibility The importance of distinguishing source credibility is a significant factor in the social media verification process.There are three kinds of people who upload human rights violations media: fact finders, witnesses, and perpetrators. Fact-finders are those who corroborate information in order to make a claim regarding an event. Witnesses are, of course, civilian witnesses to human rights violations who are able to report information through social media platforms. Perpetrators, however, are those who post false or misleading information online. It is therefore important to keep in mind that deliberate hoaxes do happen, and social media verification must include mechanisms designed to differentiate and identify specific sources.

4. Content credibility The actual content of what is being uploaded onto social media platforms or submitted to verification forms must be scrutinized in order to detect the veracity of the content. Today, is it easy to edit and adjust images and videos to make them look as if something has happened when in reality it hasn’t; just because it’s a video or an image doesn’t mean it’s depicting the truth. It is possible for people to stage a seemingly heinous event and, albeit rarely, manipulate, not only audience on the internet, but crucially, human rights defenders or organizations.

5. Pluralism By arming civilian witnesses with knowledge about digital information verification, for example, the kinds of metadata that can make a claim easier to verify and then disseminate, civilian witnesses of human rights violations are empowered in providing meaningful information. Social media verification requires citizens to be educated enough to provide information that can be verified.

6. Speed As with most processes, gathering and consuming information has a cost. Economically, the less time input and verification processes take, the greater the number of civilian witnesses heard. Increasing the amount of verifiable information during the input stage quickens the verification process; the human rights organization is not required to spend their resources on retrieving or corroborating information.

7. Collection and verification techniques Techniques for collection and verification of social media content have changed alongside advances in technology. The widespread use of smartphones has equip everyday citizen witnesses with the ability to report human rights violations, aiding in the collection of information. The most popular social media verification techniques include a mix of traditional human-led investigation techniques and technology based tools. However, the employment of technology-based tools alongside human-led verification techniques is currently limited due to the recent emergence of the field of digital media verification.

8. Common verification processes The least common type of verification processes are humanitarian; most are characterised by commercial and government aims and incentives. Additionally, out of those organisations who have attempted to include social media verification for humanitarian practices, not every organisation processing content makes a definitive claim as to its veracity.

9. Not all content will fulfill every verification check It is rare that any single piece of content will meet all the requirements posed by both human and technological verification techniques and processes. It may be the case that a piece of content will fail to fulfill a certain technological aspect of verification, but through further human information corroboration it could in fact be verifiable. Conversely, the opposite is frequently the case, and we must thus be careful not to create an over-reliance on technological methods.

10. Social media is not a universal solution While looking at the potential of social media verification in an ever globalising world characterized by increasing technological innovation, it is important to remember that social media verification is not a universal solution to human rights violation reporting. Disparities in infrastructure, access to technology, and state surveillance can easily lead to the underreporting of human rights violations.

For further reading see The Whistle’s report on The Digital Information Verification Field under the ‘Research’ tab on The Whistle’s website.

10 Things to Know About Social Media Verification was originally published on The Whistle

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Human Rights in the Digital Age: CGHR Practitioner Paper #1

The Centre of Governance and Human Rights* at the University of Cambridge recently launched the inaugural paper in the ‘Human Rights in the Digital Age’ series, which aims at facilitating the sharing of knowledge and practices of human rights in a digital age.

The paper by Christoph Koettl (Senior Analyst, Amnesty International), was launched on the 8th of March and provides a framework for best practices in the use of citizen media. Specifically, it builds on the increasing importance of documenting human rights violations and aids the review and assessment of open source content.

Koettl’s framework has served as an invaluable source in designing The Whistle, particularly in terms of streamlining and speeding the verification of digital information. Through following a methodological approach that is familiar and accessible to new and seasoned practitioners, The Whistle can improve access and overview of existing tools and processes to aid fact-finding.

Download the practitioner paper and watch the presentation here

* A multi-disciplinary research centre for advancing thought and practice, critical to global justice and human-well-being. Read more here

Human Rights in the Digital Age: CGHR Practitioner Paper #1 was originally published on The Whistle

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CrowData

© Image La Nacion - an interface created with CrowData-related code

CrowData provides the tools for crowdsourced document verification. As described on the official website, it is “a tool to collaborate on the verification and release of data that otherwise would be hard or impossible to get via automatic tools like OCRs. [The user] installs it in a web server and right away can start uploading documents and have a form for people to send information about the documents.” CrowData has been cited by citizen reporting coalitions such as Civicus’ DataShift as a tool for increasing accountability.

CrowData was born from the implementation of a collaborative platform called VozData in Argentina’s newspaper La Nación, supported by joint Knight/Mozilla project OpenNews. “In 2014, La Nacion in Argentina launched VozData, a website to crowdsource senate spendings by asking people to transcribe information from 6500 scanned PDF documents from the senate.” The resultant code was used in the creation of CrowData - it is all available for download and use from GitHub. 

Crowdata was inspired by other accountability projects that rely on crowdsourcing to analyze large amounts of data - specifically, those contained in documents.  Examples include ProPublica’s ‘Free the Files’ and The Guardian projects to crowdsource analysis of MP’s Expenses and Sarah Palin´s Emails.

More information on CrowData can be found on GitHub or the official website.

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Coal Scam

© Image by Amnesty

CoalScam.org is an initiative spearheaded by three groups (mines, minerals & PEOPLE, Greenpeace India, and Amnesty International India) to “to map the true impact of coal mining in India on people's lives and habitats”. For those in close proximity to coal mining, the process can have “devastating effects on land, water and air, affecting health and livelihoods and key human rights”; when officials and owners engage in corrupt practices, these effects are exacerbated. CoalScam.org is an issue-targeted effort to hold governments and companies to accountability in this arena.

Background

The main purpose of CoalScam is to collect, verify, and disseminate information from the ground, in order to create a better understanding of the real cost of coal mining. The project includes collection of media stories, ground reports and first-hand testimonies. Then, “reports on the site are uploaded after they are verified and moderated for veracity.” The project members then attempt to contextualize each report, “seeking responses from companies and government officials as far as possible.”

The CoalScam website is a submission platform, repository, and eventual site of publication for these reports. Its maintains a simple webform for report submission, easily navigated by those without extensive technological expertise and allowing for collaboration and contextualization of reports via linked media.

Coalscam also provides resources for educating interested and submitting parties. It also maintains an interactive visualization of its data, a map of reported events.

More Information

More information on the project can be found at the official website. The project can be contacted via this webform.

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Academic Projects - CMU’s EPD Lab

© Image by CMU - EPD Lab

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have been designing new approaches to event and pattern detection in social media. This has significant implications for human rights in “increasing detection power, forecasting accuracy, and forecasting lead time while reducing time to detection”. 

For example, as described by the researchers, 

“...using Twitter data from Mexico, we were able to accurately detect relevant clusters of human rights-related tweets prior to international news sources, and in some cases, prior to local news reports. This could enhance the information-gathering missions of human rights organizations by pinpointing specific abuses, revealing events and details that may be blocked from traditional media sources, and providing evidence of emerging patterns of human rights violations. This could lead to more timely, targeted, and effective advocacy, as well as other potential interventions.”

Verification

This project - and other projects like it, using machine learning to approach social media analysis - not only provides for better, timely detection of abuses; it also provides a potential means for enhanced verification via corroboration. For example, factfinders will be able to more efficiently and comprehensively review social media evidence for a claim.

More information

Publications on the project can be found here and here; more information can be found on the CMU’s EPD Lab’s projects page.

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Privacy Badger - New Ways to Stop Sneaky Trackers

© Image by Electronic Frontier Foundation 

Privacy Badger is a browser plugin developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), designed to look at third-party domains loaded on websites to determine whether the visiting user is being tracked. It was developed to the address the issue of non-consensual tracking of browsing behaviour in users by advertising companies. 

The plugin is compatible with Chrome and firefox and works through blocking third-party domains who appear on more than three instances during a browsing session on any given website. 

Privacy Badger works in extension of the “Do Not Track” policy by EFF, which flags third-party trackers to notify the clear message that users do not wish for their privacy to be violated without consent. Privacy Badger 1.0 can be downloaded here.

By Matthew Mahmoudi 

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TweetCred

© Image by TweetCred

TweetCred is a "a real-time, web-based system to assess credibility of content on Twitter”. It currently exists as a Chrome extension and browser version. Tweetcred assigns a credibility score to individual tweets, based algorithmically on 45 different factors, including “content, properties of user who posted the tweet, external URLs or pictures shared in the tweet”.

TweetCred was developed via “insights that researchers have gained from studying massive databases of tweets surrounding major news events”, as profiled in the New Yorker. The algorithmically determined score is being improved by user feedback; since machine learning is at the core of the app’s functionality, it will only improve as use grows. 

The TweetCred score, as “an indicator of the trustworthiness of information...[and] credibility of resources (pictures, videos, URLs)”, can serve as a tool to help journalists and activists verify reports. Additionally, if widely used, it might act as a deterrent when individual users are considering retweeting potentially false information.

More information about TweetCred can be found on the official site.

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Veri.ly

© Image by Veri.ly

Veri.ly is “an experimental web application designed to rapidly crowdsource the verification of information during humanitarian disasters”. Inspired by the 2009 DARPA Network Challenge, which asked teams to locate 10 red weather balloon distributed across the United States, Veri.ly is built by members of the successful MIT team. Their winning strategy in the DARPA challenge was to harness the power of public participation via social media. 

As described by Victor Naroditskiy, one of the application’s creators, the subsequent “rationale for Verily is that the collective effort of people searching for the truth will be fruitful...[t]he lack of verifiability of content posted on social media is the main reason preventing humanitarian and news organisations from making a wider use of it.”

According to the Veril.y website, the platform has already been piloted at major news organizations, and it already offers means for humanitarian organizations to request a verification procedure. It also includes several educational resources for the average citizen who wishes to assist in the verification process, such as a list of suggested tools.

More information can be found on the official Veri.ly website; additionally, the service can be followed on Twitter @VeriDOTly.