New York Times columnist Nick Kristof says:
A lot of people including me were really taken aback by the videos of police violence during Occupy Wall Street. A decade ago nobody would have known about that because there wouldn't have been a reporter there and even if someone did write about it, it wouldn't have been that dramatic. Likewise in Syria, widespread video does provide some constraint on a government if it knows that if it massacres people, there will be video of that. They may still decide to massacre people, but it raises the price.
