Volunteers trying to preserve the social media record of DC riots

This Washington Post article notes that Wednesday's attempted insurrection was documented online in detail by the rioters themselves:

As they clambered up scaffolding and hopped through broken windows, they stopped to take selfies or photograph their friends giddily rampaging through the legislative seat of the United States. We know how the surge began not because of security footage or interviews with law enforcement but because the people who were rushing the Capitol filmed each other doing it.

For most people, taking a selfie and sharing it on Instagram still seems innocuous, even private. They don’t have many followers, so it seems like the functional equivalent of passing a photo around at work. It’s anonymous, in its own way, even though anyone in the world can see it. That’s a tricky combination: posting footage that can be seen anywhere with the expectation that it won’t be. It becomes particularly fraught when that footage is documenting criminal activity at a historic scale.

Some portion of the crowd at the Capitol on Wednesday was probably unaware of that scale...

And all of it was captured in photos, videos and streams that quickly made their way to the Internet...

As hours pass, more and more of it will vanish, in part because the people documenting what they saw will begin to realize that it might not be useful to have publicly recorded themselves violating federal law... Once that video or photo is removed, so is the piece of history that is documented. So, amateur archivists have already sprung into action to capture and store the scenes that unfolded during the Capitol takeover...

One group collecting those records is Bellingcat. The group of independent investigators already has a robust track record of using publicly available evidence to piece together historic events. They were instrumental in uncovering Russia’s role in shooting down Malaysian Air Flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014 and, last year, helped determine that Iranian antiaircraft fire brought down a plane in that country. Shortly after the Capitol was secured on Wednesday, Bellingcat announced that it was asking volunteers to contribute videos and photos documenting what had occurred.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/07/capitol-mob-recorded-its-own-history-now-volunteers-are-trying-preserve-record/?fbclid=IwAR0Ffcj8QC3qUzM2aqC0w1byZDQsW7g5y5HfhBWjbc3rRIoq7Du1Sk7dOZA

Join TechSoup

Volunteers trying to preserve the social media record of DC riots

Volunteers trying to preserve the social media record of DC riots

New here?