Photo by Thyagi Ruwanpathirana

The poor mainstream media coverage of the anti-Muslim riots in Aluthgama in June 2014 was a vacuum filled, in large-part, by content published in real-time and for weeks after the violence on the web and online social media fora.

This volume, variety and velocity of perspectives and content, while in the main insightful and bearing witness to inconvenient truths, nevertheless featured partially correct or downright false information, paraded as fact and shared widely.

Amnesty International’s Citizen Evidence Lab was launched in early July, and intends to support human rights researchers and advocates to better take advantage of the new digital data-streams emanating from conflict zones and other human rights hot spots. It is an online space to share best practices, techniques and tools for authenticating user-generated content for human rights defense.

Given how timely and useful information on this blog was for journalists and citizens connected to online media in Sri Lanka, Groundviews, Vikalpa and Maatram are pleased to release, with the permission of Amnesty, Tamil and Sinhala translations of key content published to date. Topics and content relevant to Sri Lanka’s domestic context, as and when published on the site, will be translated into Tamil and Sinhala.

All content is free and available here.

Translations to date include the verification of user generated video published online, how to download video and audio content on the web for archival purposes and use offline, how to verify photographs posted on the web and in social media, and how to extract important metadata from videos.

Please revisit the repository of Tamil and Sinhala content regularly to get new content.