Yusuf Omar: It’s easy to manipulate one camera, it’s difficult to manipulate thousands

He ended up in Egypt during the Arab Spring in 2011, and in a previous interview he said that he was in the right place at the wrong time: Some of his reports ended up getting published on the front pages of various newspapers in South Africa. He worked for different media outlets, working for newspapers but also experimenting with video. While working with eNCA (eNews Channel Africa) in 2014 and covering the war Syria he ended up producing stories with his mobile phone, despite the cameras and other tools available to him. It would bring him “faster and more intimate” stories, advantages he still thinks are part of mobile journalism. Not long later, he began to be hired by various international media outlets. He worked as a mobile editor at the Hindustan Times and CNN and in 2016 was named as the Thomson Foundation’s Mobile Journalist of the Year.

So mobile phones and mobile journalism and communities were communicating their own stories. And when we listen to their stories we have a far better sense of what’s going on in the world.I think that even when we look today the deep fakes that exists … we have seen the rise of these manipulating videos … for me, the only way to fight it is mobile journalism. The ability to have lots of mobile phones, all primed at one location, one event, to help us verify what’s going on. It’s easy to manipulate one camera, it’s difficult to manipulate thousands.