Perhaps the most insidious threat is the one that follows you home. In 2024, a man in Florida filmed a Karen-style meltdown at a supermarket. The video went viral. The woman lost her job, received death threats, and her children were bullied out of school. The documentarian? He also lost his job. His employer said he "created a hostile online environment." His face was doxxed. His address was posted on a forum. He had to move.

But safety is not a binary state. You can be safe legally while being in immense physical danger. You can be safe physically while destroying your social or professional life. To understand the safety of documenting reality, you have to break the risk into three distinct categories.

But ask any war correspondent, any activist with a body cam, or any teenager who livestreamed a fight at school, and they will give you a different answer. The question isn’t whether documenting reality is valuable . The question is whether it is safe . And the answer, like the footage itself, is complicated, messy, and often contradictory. First, let’s acknowledge the miracle. The cellphone camera is arguably the most powerful tool for civil rights since the printing press. The 1991 beating of Rodney King was caught on a camcorder. The 2020 murder of George Floyd was caught on a smartphone. Without those recordings, history would be different. Justice, however imperfect, would have been blind in a way that served the powerful.