The first casualty in war is truth, but the first casualty in the Arab Spring is a reliable video feed. In places like Syria, as in Iran, independent media has been kicked out, shut down, or censored to the point that the only people documenting the protests, and the violent crackdown against them, are the protesters themselves. For the last two years, those of us who follow the opposition in Iran have struggled to pick through streams of Youtube videos to separate fact from from faked. A exiled Syrian activist, writing under the screen name “Revolt for Your Life,” has established a list of things that protesters can do to make life easier on the journalists trying to cover their stories.
1. “The person filming the demonstration gives the time, place and location of the protest.” We know it’s a tough job, trying to video a protest without getting caught, but some sort of marker, especially of the time/date, is crucial. There are a lot people out there, cheerleaders, manipulators, and regime agents who want to discredit the protesters and the media by faking videos. The easiest way to do this is to show an old video, claim it to be taken that day, and get some usually-reliable journalists or Twitter accounts to run with it.
“Revolt for Your Life” gives two examples, videos where the videographer narrates the time, date, location, and other relevant information. There are other ways of doing this. Holding a newspaper, or perhaps changing the name of the event (every Friday’s protest has a different name, so mentioning that name can pinpoint time and date). If the video is a series, even adding information to the first video would help corroborate the rest. The more information, the better. This is your revolution, and it is your neck on the line, so it would be a shame to take a risk, video a protest, and have the footage get ignored by the journalists because they can’t trust it.
“2. The video shows signs or highly-recognisable landmarks to confirm the location of the demonstration.” As an EA correspondent remarked one day, he couldn’t tell if some of these protest videos were taken in Khamenei’s palace or in Los Angeles.
“3. The demonstrator films the identity cards of the people whom he interviews as a way to identify witnesses’ accounts.” I’m weary of recommending this one. Protesters are taking their lives in their hands by letting their identity be known. On the other hand, nothing adds more credibility to an eyewitness account than a video, taken in country, and on the record.
One thing that “Revolt For Your Life” does not mention is that adding titles, or a description on Youtube, is helpful, but those who fake videos will do this as well. It is, then, up to the videographer to provide context for the video at the time it is taken. A translation in the comments, or adding information in the title of the video, then becomes very useful as it corroborates the information already displayed in the video.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a Youtube video could be worth 15,000 words a second, or more. That said, taking video is risky business in a place where protesters are paying with their lives. If you’re reading this, and you’re planning on taking protest videos, I’d encourage you to do it right, heed some of this advice, because it would be a shame to waste your efforts.
Read the blog post and see the video examples here:
One Million Voices for Iran