Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • How Open Source Experts Identified the US Capitol Rioters

    Digital sleuths preserved a trove of evidence from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by acting quickly to "scrape" and archive videos, images, and other data from social media. Investigative journalists from Bellingcat, the Toronto-based Citizen Lab, and Czech data archive Intelligence X were among those who responded before rioters, worried about criminal charges, began deleting posts. Crowdsourcing calls for assistance also produced a robust response from people anxious to aid law enforcement or debunk post-riot disinformation.

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  • On its 20th birthday, Wikipedia might be the safest place online

    Wikipedia’s large number of volunteer editors document history in real time, while making sure different viewpoints are considered and avoiding misinformation. While other social media sites are hesitant to label unreliable sources and misinformation, Wikipedia clearly labels controversial and unproven topics and deploys many tools to avoid false information. A single page per topic makes monitoring easier, pages can be locked from new edits, and people who frequently make false edits can be banned. While it doesn’t claim to be a reliable source, editors do follow policies meant to keep out anything untrue.

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  • The scramble to archive Capitol insurrection footage before it disappears

    Several groups are preserving digital content related to the capital insurrection to ensure it is archived in case it gets deleted. A subreddit thread collected thousands of Tweets, Snapchats, and other videos to upload to the cloud, while the Woke Collective ensured the survival of livestreams by publishing them on its own YouTube and Twitch accounts. Efforts to crowdsource the identification of members of the mob include the Instagram account, @homegrownterrorists, and the journalism site, Bellingcat, which invited contributions to a publicly editable Google spreadsheet of links.

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  • Vying for vaccines, Jewish Israelis help fill near-empty clinics in Arab towns

    In Israel, Arab communities have welcomed those from neighboring Jewish communities into their cities to receive the COVID-19 vaccine as a means of "helping firm up the sluggish response to the vaccination drive among Arabs." Using social media and communication apps to determine where doses are available, Jewish Iranians have been "flocking" to Arab towns which in turn has created a "vaccine-bolstering buzz" among Arabs and encouraged many to also get the vaccination after initial hesitation and reluctance.

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  • A Year of Intersex Victories

    To promote the need to end intersex surgery, an organization launched a multi-pronged campaign that raised awareness about the potentially damaging impacts of the practice. The group used social media, created a petition, and held protests outside of a local hospital – all of which resulted in the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago issuing an apology and declaring that "they will no longer be performing intersex surgeries unless absolutely medically necessary moving forward." Throughout the world, similar awareness efforts have also garnered positive outcomes.

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  • Sextortion in Syria: Young women support each other

    To help Syrian women facing the threat of "sextortion" – harassment based on threats to expose women's nude photos – Gardenia magazine's It Is Your Right campaign has encouraged 1,100 women to come forward to sue their harassers. The campaign also provides counseling to the women. Another campaign, No To Electronic Harassment, acts more swiftly, seeking to close Facebook accounts used by harassers. So far it has closed dozens. The harassment often succeeds because of victims' fear, especially in Syrian society, of being found out by their families.

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  • Everyday resilience in a Lesvos refugee camp

    People living in the Kara Tepe refugee camp find creative ways to withstand the oftentimes inhumane conditions. To supplement insufficient food rations, volunteers bake and distribute up to 400 pieces of bread a day while others fish to provide their own food. The NGO Yoga & Sport for Refugees organizes swimming, running, and team sports to provide mental health outlets. Residents also organize non-formal educational activities because no formal schooling is provided for camp residents. The Instagram account Now You See Me Moria publishes photos taken by camp residents to raise awareness of these issues.

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  • How a 1980s AIDS Support Group Changed The Internet Forever

    In the 1980s, a virtual messaging network, then known as bulletin board systems (BBSs), acted as a support group for many who were in search of peer support and reliable information as the AIDS epidemic spread. Although the site was a grassroots effort with little to no financial stability, it grew to 500 daily users and 100 messages posted per day.

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  • Egypt's #MeToo Activists See Progress, but ‘the Road Ahead Is Long'

    A growing #MeToo movement brought sexual assault into national dialogues, even in remote governorates, and has led to arrests and legal reforms, such as allowing sexual assault victims and witnesses to remain anonymous. The current wave was started by a student who used Instagram to expose a fellow student as a perpetrator. Many women shared their stories of assault, and within days he was arrested and is standing trial. This encouraged more women to share their stories, with high-profile celebrities and influencers, including religious authorities, speaking out in support of women.

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  • How a Cyprus charity realigned its services to face the pandemic

    The humanitarian organization known as Refugee Support in Nicosia, Cyrpus has been using WhatsApp to provide useful information to refugee populations during the coronavirus pandemic in addition to delivering food to 200 people per week. Although the organization is limited in who they can offer help to due to financial feasibility, the group has still been able to ease the "tension, conflict, and frustration between migrants during the process of being quarantined."

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