The same leak platform can serve either denialists or environmental justice activists.

Evidence

No technological revolution has an innate politics: witness how WikiLeaks catalyzed Climategate on the one hand—by leaking University of East Anglia emails on climate change that were gleefully seized on by right-wing denialists—and, on the other, leaked the cables that enabled Ivory Coast environmental justice activists and their allies to achieve a settlement for damages from the British commodities giant, Trafigura, which for years had denied responsibility for dumping highly toxic oil slurry in landfills around Abidjan. The slurry killed fifteen people in the short term and sickened 108,000.27 The activists’ successful settlement in the Trafigura case was a digital-era warning shot against those who assume that the environmentally-afflicted poor are terminally invisible, disposable people. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 845

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete counterexample to the ‘terminal invisibility of the poor’ thesis — resolves despair about digital distraction.