This new book, Human Rights and Information Communication Technologies: Trends and Consequences of Use, promises to be a valuable resource to both practitioners and academics interested in leveraging new information & communication technologies (ICTs) in the context of human rights work. I had the distinct pleasure of co-authoring a chapter for this book with my good colleague and friend Jessica Heinzelman. We focused specifically on the use of crowdsourcing and ICTs for information collection and verification. Below is the Abstract & Introduction for our chapter.
Abstract
Accurate information is a foundational element of human rights work. Collecting and presenting factual evidence of violations is critical to the success of advocacy activities and the reputation of organizations reporting on abuses. To ensure credibility, human rights monitoring has historically been conducted through highly controlled organizational structures that face mounting challenges in terms of capacity, cost and access. The proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) provide new opportunities to overcome some of these challenges through crowdsourcing. At the same time, however, crowdsourcing raises new challenges of verification and information overload that have made human rights professionals skeptical of their utility. This chapter explores whether the efficiencies gained through an open call for monitoring and reporting abuses provides a net gain for human rights monitoring and analyzes the opportunities and challenges that new and traditional methods pose for verifying crowdsourced human rights reporting.
Introduction
Accurate information is a foundational element of human rights work. Collecting and presenting factual evidence of violations is critical to the success of advocacy activities and the reputation of organizations reporting on abuses. To ensure credibility, human rights monitoring has historically been conducted through highly controlled organizational structures that face mounting challenges in terms of capacity, cost and access.
The proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) may provide new opportunities to overcome some of these challenges. For example, ICTs make it easier to engage large networks of unofficial volunteer monitors to crowdsource the monitoring of human rights abuses. Jeff Howe coined the term “crowdsourcing” in 2006, defining it as “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call” (Howe, 2009). Applying this concept to human rights monitoring, Molly Land (2009) asserts that, “given the limited resources available to fund human rights advocacy…amateur involvement in human rights activities has the potential to have a significant impact on the field” (p. 2). That said, she warns that professionalization in human rights monitoring “has arisen not because of an inherent desire to control the process, but rather as a practical response to the demands of reporting – namely, the need to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in the report” (Land, 2009, p. 3).
Because “accuracy is the human rights monitor’s ultimate weapon” and the advocate’s “ability to influence governments and public opinion is based on the accuracy of their information,” the risk of inaccurate information may trump any advantages gained through crowdsourcing (Codesria & Amnesty International, 2000, p. 32). To this end, the question facing human rights organizations that wish to leverage the power of the crowd is “whether [crowdsourced reports] can accomplish the same [accurate] result without a centralized hierarchy” (Land, 2009). The answer to this question depends on whether reliable verification techniques exist so organizations can use crowdsourced information in a way that does not jeopardize their credibility or compromise established standards. While many human rights practitioners (and indeed humanitarians) still seem to be allergic to the term crowdsourcing, further investigation reveals that established human rights organizations already use crowdsourcing and verification techniques to validate crowdsourced information and that there is great potential in the field for new methods of information collection and verification.
This chapter analyzes the opportunities and challenges that new and traditional methods pose for verifying crowdsourced human rights reporting. The first section reviews current methods for verification in human rights monitoring. The second section outlines existing methods used to collect and validate crowdsourced human rights information. Section three explores the practical opportunities that crowdsourcing offers relative to traditional methods. The fourth section outlines critiques and solutions for crowdsourcing reliable information. The final section proposes areas for future research.
The book is available for purchase here. Warning: you won’t like the price but at least they’re taking an iTunes approach, allowing readers to purchase single chapters if they prefer. Either way, Jess and I were not paid for our contribution.
For more information on how to verify crowdsourced information, please visit the following links:
- Information Forensics: Five Case Studies on How to Verify Crowdsourced Information from Social Media (Link)
- How to Verify and Counter Rumors in Social Media (Link)
- Social Media and Life Cycle of Rumors during Crises (Link)
- Truthiness as Probability: Moving Beyond the True or False Dichotomy when Verifying Social Media (Link)
- Crowdsourcing Versus Putin (Link)
