ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how human rights collectives have become key visual experts in the new media ecology forming around the proliferation of eyewitness videos from conflict zones. In doing so, it contributes to this edited collection by shedding light on the actors and practices that help define the evidentiary roles of different images of conflict that circulate on social media. By developing evidentiary standards, verification protocols and information policies for eyewitness videos, human rights collectives like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, WITNESS and Syrian Archive have given rise to a proxy visual profession that mediates between civic voices and institutional spaces. These collectives train activists on the ground on how to record visual evidence from the complicated scenes of violence; they verify these videos in ways that can be useful to news stories, UN reports or legal investigations; and they work with social media platforms on information policies about content removal. Based on an institutional ethnography with these human rights collectives, the chapter argues that the proxy profession proposes practical solutions to pressing questions about evidence and verification in today’s digital environment. Yet funding priorities and calls for efficiency confine human rights collectives to the logic of neoliberalism, impairing their ability to propose more meaningful structural solutions to pressing challenges to human dignity around the world.
