Risk and the Pluralism of Digital Human Rights Fact-Finding and Advocacy

Open-Source Justice

“…Worldwide, the speed of connectivity is getting much faster too, with fixed broadband services (those having speeds of 256 kbits/s and above) increasing by 183 percent between 2007(ITU 2017. This means that in less than a decade after the release of the first iPhone in 2007, together with other, more financially accessible smartphones, there has developed a global public with the technological capacity to engage in recording war crimes as they happen, constituting a revolution in "digital witnessing" or "participatory fact finding" (McPherson 2018).…”

“…For useful introductions to the origins and methods of open-source investigation, seeDubberley et al (2020),Higgins (2021),Karpf (2016),, Land (2016,Land and Aronson (2018),McPherson (2018), and Niezen (2020, ch. 3) Ball et al (2000).…”

Epistemic Transformation at the Margins: Resistance to Digitalisation and Datafication within Global Human Rights Advocacy

“…Practically, digital technologies increase the absolute volume of data available on various types of human rights violation. For instance, the spread of smartphones and the widespread use of social media and messaging applications enhances the quantity of information sourced from civilian witnesses (McPherson 2018). Ironically, despite concerns among human rights activists with potentially oppressive methods of state surveillance that digital infrastructures enable, these same infrastructures allow human rights activists to become quasi-surveillant actors in their own right (Lyon 2019, 69).…”