After a Loss in Vancouver, Troubling Signals of Citizen Surveillance - Alexandra Samuel - Harvard Business Review
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Documentation and narration is a core part of social media culture. There's nothing wrong with social media users snapping photos or video as part of their organic experience of an event. Whether it's for a Facebook update now or a blog post you're writing tomorrow, posting live images is a routine part of telling a story online.
But it's one thing to take pictures as part of the process of telling your story, or as part of your (paid or unpaid) work as a citizen journalist. It's another thing entirely to take and post pictures and videos with the explicit intention of identifying illegal (or potentially illegal) activity. At that moment you are no longer engaging in citizen journalism; you're engaging in citizen surveillance.
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