Privacy and Viral Videos: Where is the line?

Recently a video of a woman being stripped down in the CBD because of her dress code has been doing rounds on the internet. Messages of anger both from men and women have flooded all avenues of social media with calls to protest being shouted from every proverbial rooftop. #KOT is angry about this, the Free Thinkers Initiative want to picket the bus company that allegedly employs the touts who stripped the lady and there’s even an Avaaz petition started by the Flone Initiative. All these are great ways to address the issue however we are concerned by another method used to bring this heinous act to light. What we at UP would like to know is whether the original news site that posted the video considered the lady in question’s dignity. Responsible/ethical journalism and basic decency requires recognizing the rights of third parties when it comes to reporting on stories such as this. Especially when the story and accompanying video footage documents a traumatizing experience that happened to someone that’s not in the public eye. We don’t know who the lady in the video is but despite whatever accompanying caption your tweet or blog post has i.e “This is shameful no one should go through this” or “This is what our city has come to” sharing the video only compounds her suffering.

Many Kenyans online have weighed in and said that sharing the video is important as more and more people will get to know that incidences like this occur, However Yule Mbois Mdiandala says on Facebook “Just like we do not need a photo of a rape in progress to be mad at its injustice, just as we need not have been in Darfur, Gaza or Rwanda to empathize and be proactive about our anger, so do we not need to watch, like and share these images of clickbaiting porn. At least not if we truly are human.”

According to section 19 of the Code of Conduct for the Practice of Journalism in Kenya released by the Media council of Kenya “The media should not identify victims of sexual assault or publish material likely to contribute to such identification. Such publications do not serve any legitimate journalistic or public need and may bring social opprobrium to the victims and social embarrassment to their relations, family, friends, community, religious order and to the institutions to which they belong.” This evidently is the case in this video, anyone who knows the lady can identify her, and although the websites sharing the video are independent blogs that rely on clicks and views to stay afloat it would only be gracious to take down the video and not rejoice that they were able to upload it to Vimeo when YouTube banned it. Ghetto Radio has even taken screenshots of the video, one of which shows the lady’s face clearly, to use on their Facebook page to provoke a discussion. A lot of us at UP have been unable to watch the video and we recommend that no one else does. What we do recommend however is signing the Avaaz petition “Violation of women will not be tolerated” and help prevent incidences like this from occuring in future, whether there’s a camera present or not.