Remembering Bassem Masri
If you have any information about backups of Bassem Masri’s live footage from Ferguson please get in touch at info@docnow.io.
If you are among the millions of people who watched live streams from the streets of Ferguson in August 2014 as the police attacked peaceful protestors following the killing of Michael Brown, you may know Bassem Masri, even if you don’t remember his name.
Masri’s courageous and artful use of social media during the protests documented the militarization of the police in Ferguson for a worldwide audience. Indeed, his footage connected what black activists were seeing in the United States with activists in Palestine. His videos were literally viewed by millions of people. Masri died last Tuesday, and from his public posts he seemed to have wanted the videos to be remembered as archival documents:
Unfortunately the vagaries of platform capitalism have removed this archival material from the web.
Ustream was purchased by IBM in 2016 and at some point thereafter they moved to a service model where videos more than 30 days old were deleted, unless you paid for a subscription. Masri’s account is still there, but it’s empty.
Similarly in January of 2018 Bambuser pivoted from a model of hosting activist live streams to facilitating video solutions for businesses. Content creators could download their videos until the shutdown, after which point the videos would no longer be available. Masri’s Bambuser profile is now completely gone.
It’s possible that the videos still exist in the remaining infrastructural residues of Ustream and Bambuser. If you have any information about that please get in touch with the Documenting the Now team, we’d like to help.
Apart from the tragedy of Masri being taken so young, even as he ran for public office, the deeply ironic thing is that the web archiving community already knew that these videos were in need of preservation.
Using the waybackprov utility we can see that between 2014 and 2018 his Ustream profile was crawled 100 times:
The Internet Archive’s various automated crawls of the web and ArchiveTeam’s volunteers are to thank for many of these snapshots. You can also see that several Archive-It subscribers archived Masri’s Ustream page such as Philadelphia-region Web Media Ecosystem, Alabama State University, and the University of Denver. The Ustream profile was either selected individually, or was archived because it was linked to elsewhere in something that was selected for archiving (a Facebook profile page for example). Jess Ogden pointed out in the Documenting the Now Slack that using the Memento Time Travel Service we can see that the Library of Congress also selected Masri’s profile for preservation.
On a more personal note, early in the Documenting the Now project we collaborated with the Internet Archive to identify URLs referenced in a dataset of 13 million tweets mentioning Ferguson in the two weeks following the murder of Michael Brown. We sent the dataset of 417,972 URLs to the Internet Archive where they were crawled and added to their #blacklivesmatter collection (Rollason-Cass and Reed, 2015).
But even with all these crawls unfortunately it doesn’t appear that Masri’s streams themselves were collected, or perhaps they just aren’t playing back correctly:
This is not surprising because archiving (and playing back) streamed video is quite difficult due to the various technologies that are used to make the video available, and the storage costs you can face when crawling wide swathes of the web even when you are able to capture video.
The need for high fidelity recording of websites, particularly ones with interactivity, is one of the reasons that the Webrecorder project was created. Internally Webrecorder uses the (amazing) youtube-dl to collect streaming video and audio.
It’s possible that the stream was collected and is simply not playing back. If you have any insight into that question please comment here in this post or here.
However, this small case study of Masri’s videos also highlights a key conceptual difficulty when archiving the web.
When we sent 417,972 URLs to the Internet Archive to be archived, was that a realistic expectation? Are there pragmatic and useful approaches to how we could have done quality assurance on an archiving job of that size? What kind of process would help us catch problems like what was encountered with Masri’s Ustream profile?
Perhaps it would have been more useful for us to have used our Twitter data to identify users like Masri who were generating impactful content, and see if he would like to donate his material to an archival collection? Given his tweet about how he wanted his streams to be remembered it’s quite likely he would have been interested in this. This is the strategic direction we would like to go in phase 2 of the Documenting the Now project, particularly with the DocNow application.
More broadly we are looking for ways to continue making meaningful connections to social activists who are doing this important political and cultural work.
Can we shift web archiving work to center content creators such as Bassem Masri? Can we develop practices that include activists who want to use social media as a means for stewarding their own community archives (Caswell et al, 2016)? Look for a call for proposals to participate in our community workshops organized around this theme in the new year.
References
Caswell, M., Migoni, A. A., Geraci, N., and Cifor, M. (2016). ‘To be able to imagine otherwise’: community archives and the importance of representation. Archives and Records.
Rollason-Cass, S. and Reed, S. (2015). Living movements, living archives: Selecting and archiving web content during times of social unrest. New Review of Information Networking, 20(1–2):241–247.
