14 Russian journalists launched an interregional project of monitoring websites and social networks to identify the victims of restrictions imposed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Anastasiya Sechina, coordinator of the initiative and the Fourth Sector Project, told 7x7 about this.
Every day, a group of editors studies signals about victims and divides them into categories: there are problems with only hypothetical negative consequences in the "gray zone", there are irreversible consequences in the "black zone". In other zones ("yellow", "orange", "red", "purple"), problems are divided depending on the number of signals.
Participants of the project note the problems that residents of the regions have already faced — the smashup of small businesses and growing unemployment — and the difficulties that are just beginning to appear: the aggravation of domestic violence, interruptions in medication, and punishment for publicity. According to Anastasiya Sechina, pandemic and restrictive measures have negatively affected media workers, farmers, non-profit organizations that faced with reduced donations, and patients who need medical care in situations not directly related to COVID-19. In addition, during the first weeks of monitoring, there was information about excesses in the work of security forces, bullying sick people, no food in animal shelters.
— The problems that combating coronavirus has led to are still not sufficiently covered. This is a journalistic routine, and we have made it large-scale, public, and well-dressed. The result is a mosaic of problems. The project is valuable for a wide audience as the opportunity to signal about a problem, for journalists — the opportunity to find new approaches for publications, for human rights activists and NPOs — the opportunity to craft a strategy of reacting to events, for the authorities — to prevent the aggravation of the problems. Using the project, we expect to get a flow of external signals about problems. We plan that new journalistic stories will be born from it.
The Public Verdict Human Rights Foundation prepared a template for appealing court decisions on fines for violating the self-isolation regime during the coronavirus pandemic on April 27.
