The majority of people today publish personal information about themselves and their family members on social media every day, rarely thinking about privacy protection in the online space. The central topic of the 16th Travelling International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival Docudays UA this year is digital technology and human rights protection online.

The new digital world is changing us, our thinking, habits, ways of communication, our whole consciousness. Thus, in 2012, even a new term “digital rights” was coined. Docudays UA at the Ivan Kotlyarevsky Regional Universal Science Library in Poltava opened with the film Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World by Hans Pool. The screening was followed by a discussion on the topic of “What society needs to know about digital security online? How do we protect our loved ones?”

This powerful documentary is not only about the work of #Bellingcat volunteers, about how they collect, store, analyze digital traces and evidence of crimes. And not only about how, in the contemporary world, a computer, internet access and some skills are the only things that are required to solve some military or political crimes or to expose fake news.

The film clearly demonstrates how exactly the world has changed in the past few years. Virtual space has already become part of the objective reality and grown through the body of our civilization like its nervous system. Every day, millions of people voluntarily leave an enormous amount of open digital traces: in search requests, on social media, and on various websites in the form of text messages, photos, audio, video or statistical data. Every day, hundreds of satellites monitor what is happening on the Earth. Thousands of gigabytes of information settle down on the web. This way, privacy becomes quite conditional.

“In the digital world, it is becoming ever harder for people who commit crimes such as the downing of the #MH17 flight to hide it. And some of ‘the powerful of this world’ are only now coming to realize that the old rules and methods of information control are ceasing to be effective. In the world of post-truth, truth becomes a value,” says Andriy Karpenko, a digital security expert at the Poltava Branch of the Social Service of Ukraine.

Hanna Kiyashchenko, the head of the Poltava Branch of the Social Service of Ukraine, noted: “By affecting emotions, documentary cinema allows us to reach different people and to look at life differently. The filmmakers show life as it is. And when people see it on screen, new meanings are revealed to them.”

The Poltava Branch of the Social Service of Ukraine, headed by Hanna Kiyashchenko, has been the Festival’s regional partner for 13 years. You can find the event schedule here.