Mobile livestreaming is enjoying a moment in the spotlight with the launch of apps like Meerkat and Twitter’s Periscope. You can use livestreaming apps to broadcast your trip to the grocery store, or to illegally stream expensive boxing matches, but their most important use is not at all trivial: documenting news and serving as an important tool for highlighting social injustice or emergencies as they happen.

In the US we’ve seen this most recently in events in Ferguson, Missouri, where livestreamers shared the realities of protest on the ground, capturing live moments such as when a police officer threatened media and protestors with a gun.

The response in the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore to the deaths of young African American men at the hands of police is the latest example of citizen-shot live video playing a key element in justice movements. Other examples include the global Occupy movement on Livestream in 2011, activists in Libya and Syria on Bambuser in 2011-12, and [Ukrainians using Ustream](file://localhost/LINK/%20http/::www.ustream.tv:channel:aronets) from EuroMaidan in 2014. Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement was extensively documented on YouTube.

WIRED Opinion About Sam Gregory is the Program Director at Witness, the international human rights organization. He is a globally recognized human rights advocate who supports people use the power of the moving image and participatory technologies to create change. He is a 2012 Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, a 2013 Future for Good Fellow and is an Adjunct Lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Connect with him @samgregory.

Ben Rubin, creator of Meerkat, described some of his motivation for creating the app as a tool to bring us into crisis contexts:

“Whether it’s civil rights issues being protested in Ferguson or musicians interrupting each other at an awards show, we kept wondering if we could get access to these moments in an easier way.”

And here’s how the team at Periscope explained its product in their launch announcement:

Just over a year ago, we became fascinated by the idea of discovering the world through someone else’s eyes. What if you could see through the eyes of a protester in Ukraine?

At my organization, Witness, we support video for human rights and now live video for human rights. As we've focused on the possibilities of live video, here's what we've learned about how it can be used for social justice, and where the risks are.

Livestreaming and Human Rights

Live video takes many of the possibilities of recorded video and accentuates them. It pulls in and engages a distant audience with the visceral experience of what is happening on the ground—and makes it much more tangible because it is "now." It makes us all, even if we are not in the same physical space, direct witnesses to rights violations. And when live video is tied to your social graph it can engage people who know or care about you already directly in the middle of a dramatic experience in your life.

The best livestreamers engage their audience in a dialogue and commentary that makes them feel like part of the experience, using techniques from radio and sports commentary. It makes people on the ground feel supported—by those comments, or by cascades of emoji hearts on their screen. It puts pressure on perpetrators—a camera confronting an abusive police officer that has 5,000 people watching it live can be a powerful deterrent. At the least, it can ensure that no arrest occurs without scrutiny. Here’s how an activist on the ground in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2013 used it in precisely such circumstances. A police officer approached a man and said he was about to conduct a search of him. An activist holding a livestreaming camera declared, “I will watch the search, and there are 5,000 [other] people watching.”

Although he was arrested, the video attracted attention and secured a relatively swift release.

A camera confronting an abusive police officer that has 5,000 people watching it live can be a powerful deterrent.

And paradoxically livestreams can become the best archives. You can instantly back-up and “archive” footage against seizure and deletion from your mobile device– assuming the tools allows it (and here’s where Meerkat’s ephemerality plays against it for human rights purposes).

The Risks of Livestreaming for Activists

Live video also accentuates some of the risks and challenges of video in crisis situations. Video is not always a protection from violence—and there is a false sense of security that can also come from thinking that just because you have multitudes watching you are safe.

And what about people filmed? A big concern when shooting human rights video is how to protect people who speak out or who need to be anonymous. In a recorded video you can blur a face or edit a dangerous segment. But live video provides no option for that. It’s out there, like it or not, with all the impact that can have over the short and long-term on the filmer and filmed.

Graphic violence and the ethics of watching someone else’s crisis live have come up in the past. An earlyexperience on Justin.Tv was of someone committing suicide on live video. But what about the first time we’re live for the equivalent of the killing of Neda Agha Soltan on the streets of Tehran during the Green Revolution? Both companies dealing with issues of how to manage graphic content, and individuals deciding what they should see, shouldn’t see and don’t want to see will be faced with real dilemmas.

Video is not always a protection from violence.

As live video grows more prominent and we see more people not only sharing recorded video but live video of incidents of police violence (such as the shooting of Walter Scott), we can be sure that there will be a push-back on the "right to record" of citizens both here in the US and elsewhere. For the bystander who films an incident like Walter Scott's murder the ability to livestream could ensure that the video is not deleted by someone seizing their device or lost to someone intervening in their filming. However, livestreaming also reduces their options to take steps to protect themselves before sharing the material or to choose to release the material tactically (for example, to wait to see if the official version matches up, as the witness in the Walter Scott shooting chose to do).

There’s tremendous potential here that we’ve only just started to tap, and challenges that both companies and livestreaming individuals will have to face.

From Passive Witnessing to Action

For human rights activists and citizen witnesses who Periscope, Meerkat or Bambuser the scene of violations, there are ways to move people from being passive viewers to active witnesses who see something and do something. The key here is to offer actions to viewers that go beyond watching and commenting, and simultaneously to make sure we generate empathy and connection. Within the "Mobil-Eyes Us" project we’ve been exploring how layering tech innovation in smart calendaring and task-routing on top of robust tactics and storytelling with live video enables this.

What if five frontline LGBT activists in a repressive country knew thousands were watching and willing to call their governments if violence happened at a Pride rally? What if "distant witnesses" banded together to identify abusive officers in the suppression of a peaceful protest, and called ahead to police stations to say ‘We know you’ve taken people detained to this station’? What would it be like if the authorities could literally see the number of people watching a livestream via on a counter on the front of a camera? Could that deter violence in a protest?

Offer actions to viewers that go beyond watching and commenting, and simultaneously to make sure we generate empathy and connection.

Beyond the power of the crowd, sometimes all that matters is that one person is watching and supporting. Using the power of smart task-routing we could match a need on the ground with the right person, available then, with a useful skill or expertise: a lawyer to provide legal guidance to a community during a forced eviction or protest, or a video editor available to turn the visceral experience of a livestream into something much more shareable on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube after the fact.

Stay tuned [LIVE] for developments. This is going to be a bumpy ride, but the destination is worth getting to!