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New social media tools empower citizen journalism

Gillmor said the Reynolds video was not necessarily something new but showed “the velocity of change is accelerating” in citizen news production. “Her video was a three-faceted act: witnessing, activism and journalism,” Gillmor said in a blog post.

“Even though few people saw it in real time, she was saving it to the data cloud in real time, creating and — one hopes — preserving a record of what may or may not be judged eventually to have been a crime by a police officer. What Reynolds did was brave, and important for all kinds of reasons.”

Gillmor said Reynolds “taught the rest of us something vital: We all have an obligation to witness and record some things even if we are not directly part of what’s happening.”

These events also raise questions about how platforms such as Facebook respond to their role as conduits for citizen journalism.

Facebook’s role came into question when it briefly took down Reynolds video, before restoring it.

Gillmor and others argue that the event underscores that Facebook is part of the news industry, despite its claim to be a neutral platform.

“Facebook hasn’t given a plausible explanation for its initial removal of Reynolds’ video,” Gillmor said.

“The point is that the video remains visible because Facebook allows it to be visible.”

Gillmor added that it is “enormously dangerous that an enormously powerful enterprise can decide what free speech will be. I don’t want a few people’s whims in Menlo Park overruling the First Amendment and other free speech ‘guarantees.’”

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