Gallery: Injustice Went Viral Way Before Facebook Live (NSFW)
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The British misssionary Alice Seeley Harris used her Kodak dry plate camera to document atrocities committed in the Congo by the Belgian regime. In this image, Nsala of Wala gazes at the severed hand and foot of his five year-old daughter. She was murdered and canabilized, along with his wife and son, by ABIR militia after Nsala failed to meet rubber quotas. Harris presented slideshows of the images in Europe and the United States.
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This is one of four photographs secretly taken in August 1944 at the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz by a special unit of prisoners known as sonderkommandos. They were charged with disposing corpses of gas chamber victims, and documented their activity using what an eyewitness has described as a Leica. The film was smuggled out of the camp in a toothpaste tube.
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This film still is part of camcorder footage shot by Clayton Patterson on August 6, 1988 in New York’s Tompkins Square Park. Police were enforcing a curfew when they broke up the rally using brutal tactics. Six police officers were indicted as a result of the footage. When Patterson appeared on Oprah, he held up his camcorder and said, “This is a revolutionary tool. Little Brother is watching Big Brother.”
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In April 7, 2004, American contractor Tami Silicio was working at the Kuwait International Airport when she secretly took this photograph with her digital camera. It shows the coffins of American soldiers killed in Iraq aboard a US-bound cargo plane. Silica emailed it to a friend, who sent it to The Seattle Times. At the time, the US government banned images of dead or wounded soldiers.
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New Orleans resident Kimberly Roberts used a camcorder to film Hurricane Katrina floodwaters as they swept through her house in the Lower Ninth Ward in August 2005. The video brought attention to the lack of governmental aid given to the neighborhood.
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Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi protested government harassment by setting himself on fire in front of a government building in Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2010. His act inspired a wave of protests that many recorded on their cellphones and posted on Facebook. It helped spark the Arab Spring.
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On July 6, 2016, a Minneapolis police officer shot Philando Castile during a routine traffic stop. As Castile bled to death, his partner Diamond Reynolds recounted what happened on a Facebook livestream.
Bluesky Is Blocking Links to a Major Leak of DHS Employee Records
Bluesky tells WIRED it blocked links to a leaked archive of information on 41,000 ICE, CBP, and other DHS workers because it contains people’s contact information, shared without their authorization.
Dhruv Mehrotra
Feds Got Warrants to Use Fake Cell Towers to Hunt Down Don Lemon’s Producer
Investigators also sought permission to use an invasive surveillance tool called a cell-site simulators against journalist Georgia Fort and a Minnesota state Senate candidate.
Dhruv Mehrotra
French Government Calls Emergency Meetings With Platforms Over Protests
TikTok and other sites were told to curb protest footage and AI-altered images, while online retailers like Vinted and eBay reportedly signed an agreement stop looted goods from flooding resale sites.
Isabella Ward
What the US Movement Against Data Centers Can Learn From Everywhere Else
Paris Marx, author of Hyperscale, has been tracking global data center development for years. The US has a lot to learn from what’s happened everywhere from Ireland to New Zealand.
Molly Taft
ICE Has Been Dumping Protester Photos Into a Palantir Database
DHS agents not only tracked and intimidated people observing ICE activity in Maine, but stored information about them in a database run on Palantir software, newly unsealed court filings say.
Maddy Varner
Wikipedians Believed AI Would Come and Go. They Were Wrong
In a world of AI Overviews, Wikipedia usage declines. But the real loss may be far more existential than website traffic.
Richard Cooke
ICE Agent at NYC Shooting Has History of Alleged Violence and Illegal Arrests
Brenden Cuni, an ICE supervisor, has been accused of excessive force and tackling a pregnant woman to the ground. Several of his arrests were later found to be unlawful in federal court.
Dhruv Mehrotra
UK Politician Jess Asato Got Deepfaked. Now She’s Taking xAI to Court
Jess Asato’s public campaigning for victims of online abuse put her in the crosshairs of Grok’s deepfake scandal. Then the UK member of parliament became a victim of the abuse herself.
Rosie Swash
Please Let the Internet Die
Online spaces are captured by oligarchs and saturated with slop—and they’re exacerbating humanity’s worst impulses. It’s time to start over.
Miles Klee
You Probably Aren’t Going to Get the Plague
The death of a lab worker in Russia has authorities looking at whether plague played a role. Even if it did, though, the odds of it spreading are very low.
Emily Mullin
The US Government Is Hiding a Secret Court Ruling About How It Spies on Americans
Two US senators say the Trump administration is breaking the law by withholding the FISA court decision while it presses Congress to renew America’s most sweeping surveillance program.
Dell Cameron
Tristan Harris’ Tech Nonprofit Is Laying Off Most Staff and Going ‘Founder-Led’
The Center for Humane Technology helped spark a movement against excessive screen time, but internal tensions over its direction and strategy have simmered for years, sources tell WIRED.
Paresh Dave