Amnesty International's Digital Verification Corps

Verification, Collaboration and Community Engagement: Amnesty International’s lessons from using Open Source Intelligence to monitor global human rights violations and train the next generation of researchers.

Faced with the same problems as all newsrooms around the world - limited resources and limited access - Amnesty International decided to launch the Digital Verification Corps in 2016. This initiative combines the students of four global universities to use social media to monitor and verify claims of human rights abuses across the world, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Yemen to Mexico. This session will take a hands-on approach to show some of the project's successes and lessons learnt, and underline how it is possible for a small organisations to simultaneously collaborate, build capacity and engage with communities to further their goals.