Your voice. Your truth. Protected.
VocalWitness is a privacy-first public square where anyone can share what they saw or experienced — with strong protection so reports cannot be quietly rewritten. We start in Africa — rooted in Nigeria (including Enugu and Lagos) — and grow outward.
In a world full of edited media and noise, ordinary people get a place to publish photos, voice notes, and reports. Media is fingerprinted on your device; sealed entries are designed to stay on the public record.
Photos, voice notes, and files receive a SHA-256 digital fingerprint on your device before upload. Anyone can check that a download matches the sealed hash via Evidence Packs and the Verify page.
Speaking out is your choice. We strip routine location and device metadata from media where privacy mode applies. Phone checks are for anti-spam; they are not written onto the public sealed ledger as your identity.
No single person decides what is true. Trust grows through participation, corroboration, and clear reputation signals. We aim to stay neutral infrastructure — not an editorial channel.
Publishing sealed reports, reading the Square, and basic verification stay free — no ads on testimony, no paywall on the public record. Optional Support and an optional Independent Citizen Press Credential help keep the lights on. Trust tiers are never for sale.
Everyone can begin in open citizen reporting. Optional phone verification helps reduce spam (Citizen Circle). Higher Trust / Witness Circle is earned through platform checks — not by payment.
Once a report is sealed and published, the original is designed so it cannot be quietly edited or deleted through normal user actions. Integrity rests on client-side hashing, server rules, and auditability tools.
VocalWitness is a public square for evidence-bearing speech. We provide structure and safety rails; we do not rewrite your report to fit a storyline.
Infrastructure, storage, and continuous development cost real money. We fund the project without turning citizen reporting into a payment product:
Paying never buys a higher truth rank or voting power. Supporter recognition is thank-you only.
Media is hashed locally with SHA-256 before upload. Evidence Packs and the Verify flow let third parties recompute hashes and compare them to sealed metadata.
Journalists and investigators can follow the short guide: Journalist Verification Guide. Also see the live Transparency dashboard and the Prove-It-Yourself lab.
Application-level sealing: Firestore security rules (including no ordinary delete of sealed testimonies), client-side hashing, and operational audit logs. This is not a full public blockchain. Optional public-chain anchoring may come later.
• Citizen Talk — open participation
• Citizen Circle — phone verification (anti-spam)
• Witness Circle / Higher Trust — stronger membership checks and evidence tooling
• Reputation grows with honest use; it is not a paid ranking product
“In the age of noise, the clearest voice is the one that can prove it was never altered.”