Citizen Media Research and Verification: An Analytical Framework for Human Rights Practitioners

This paper examines the role of open source research in human rights fact-finding and seeks to address a gap in the current literature, which lacks a human rights perspective, is dominated by journalistic approaches, or focuses on specific tools. It focuses on citizen media, the visual subset of open source information, and provides a practitioner’s perspective that is based on several years of analyzing open source materials for a global human rights group. The paper includes case studies on video and image verification, and identifies best and worst practices