YouTube launches new Human Rights channel with Witness.org and Storyful

This week, YouTube announced the launch of a new Human Rights channel in partnership with advocacy nonprofit WITNESS, and social news-gathering service Storyful.

The new channel is "dedicated to curating hours of raw citizen-video documenting human rights stories that are uploaded daily and distributing that to audiences hungry to learn and take action," and "aims to shed light on and contextualize under-reported stories, to record otherwise undocumented abuses, and to amplify previously unheard voices."

Read the official launch announcement. And here's more at the NYT blog The Lede.

• [gATO]

  That’s a pretty ironic picture, given the subject ;)

  • [oldjove]

    Whatever could you mean? Is it the unfortunate positioning of the YouTube button covering her mouth? Or is it the shoulder pads and makeup she’s wearing? Deforming her appearance as signs of subordination to a patriarchal system?

    • [gATO]

      Just the position of the button. At this time of the morning, I’m not able to analyze much beyond that.

      (see? I can’t even make a witty reply!)

• [oldjove]

  Ah good. I was worried you were making a reference to the headscarf, symbol of female oppression and all that, and I was about to get all outraged. ;-)

  • [philllies]

    Me too. Woosh, don’t wan’t to get any more outraged today unless absolutely needed. Headscarf is a symbol of VOLUNTARY female subjugation. 

• [techtonix]

  That’s a great idea and a wonderful gesture.

  I’m just wondering if the formation of that channel would simply make it easier for corporations and other oppressive regimes to filter and block in mass?

  Also Time-Warner can specify that website to a lower bandwidth, but keep youtube fast. Isn’t it better to be able to mix all the witness videos in with clips of cats, instructional videos, and hot yoga vids?

  If everything is mixed up, there will be more of an outrage that all of youtube is blocked rather then some ‘pesky’ advocacy channel.

  Then again I’m in Beijing and youtube is blocked anyways…

  Also, as in China, anything with certain word tags are automatically blocked, for example recently any mention of Ferrari was blocked in China because of some incident where a high ranking Communist got in an accident from reckless driving in Beijing.

  It would be cool if all the videos on the Human Rights Channel were cloned into regular youtube, and so forth, just to maintain coverage if censorship were to occur.

  Awesome though, rock on!!!