There is recent historical precedent that makes the importance of archiving this footage obvious. Back in 2017, Toler conducted a similar effort to catalog videos from the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. By his estimation, users deleted nearly half of the clips within a few days of the event. “I archived almost all of them,” Toler says, “but if I hadn't, they'd just be gone, forever. I used a lot of these videos later to help identify some of the more violent types.” This included Daniel Borden, one of the men who would later be sent to prison for the beating of a Black man in a parking garage during the white supremacist rally.
The FBI is already calling for tips and footage to help them identify the people who went inside the Capitol building. “Law enforcement can look if they want—the same as anyone else—but we aren't going out of our way to share it with any law enforcement body,” Toler says. “We're just collecting footage that is already open source and out there into one place.”
There are now a number of different repositories for this footage, and Bellingcat isn’t the only group working on an archive. On Reddit, a group called DataHoarders began a similar effort, while a collective known as Woke is focused on archiving streaming footage, airing it on platforms like Twitch and YouTube, and keeping it for the historical record.
In the past, some citizen journalism eff ..
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