Notebook: Real Time (Part Two)

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Author Serhiy Zhadan (left) and friends in their “mobile unit” delivering supplies and helping to evacuate people in Kharkiv, Ukraine, March 29, 2022

Read Part One of this post here!

When it comes to streamed participation in live history, TikTok in particular has proved a compelling source of connection across cultures and a dangerous conduit for misinformation. Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, in their “Media Manipulation Casebook,” have studied uploads from the Ukraine battlefront and detailed the ways in which TikTok’s platform, editing tools, and algorithm invite and obscure the distortion of images. Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins, Berkeley’s Alexa Koenig, and policy analyst Ben Rhodes have called for more detailed metadata and time- and location-stamping of posts to make open-source material searchable and verifiable. Rhodes has suggested that the platforms create an archive of posts removed for violence, to preserve a record of atrocities. Meanwhile media outlets from around the world are using platforms like WhatsApp and Signal to keep track of their correspondents and collect information, even as they fear transmissions falling into the wrong hands.