Testimonies and evidence of possible violations of human rights may have been lost after technology companies purge their social networks, the BBC writes.
Videos of violence and its aftermath are deleted from social networks, and material that may be useful for investigations is often deleted permanently and without archiving. Meta and YouTube have said they are trying to find a balance between their responsibilities to preserve evidence and protect users from potentially harmful content.
The platforms state that they
allow exceptions in cases where the publication of the material is in the public interest.
Artificial intelligence is capable of finding and deleting harmful and illegal content on a large scale, but when it comes to managing violent images from war zones, machines lack the ability to see the nuances of human rights violations. Human rights groups say social media owners must work immediately to prevent evidence of crimes from disappearing.
US Ambassador for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaak said it is impossible to prevent companies from policing the content they post online, but the problem arises when information suddenly disappears.
Former travel journalist Ihor Zakharenko encountered it in Ukraine. Since the Russian invasion, he has been documenting the aggressor’s attacks on civilians. The BBC met Zakharenko on the outskirts of Kyiv, where a year ago
Russian soldiers massacred women, men and children trying to escape the occupiers.
He recorded at least 17 dead bodies and burned-out vehicles. When Ihor uploaded the videos to Instagram and Facebook, they were quickly deleted.
The BBC uploaded Ihor’s videos using fake profiles. Instagram deleted three out of four videos within a minute. YouTube first applied an age restriction, but after ten minutes all videos were deleted. Repeated attempts failed to upload the video at all. A complaint that the video should be restored because it contains evidence of war crimes was rejected.
YouTube and Meta say that their public interest exemptions allow information that would otherwise be deleted to be retained. However, the BBC’s experiment with the Ihor’s video shows that this is not the case at all. The Meta said it responds to legitimate requests from authorities and continues to look for ways to support international processes related to the determination of responsibility for crimes.
YouTube informed that the
platform allows exceptions for the sake of public interest, however, it is not an archive:
“Human rights organizations; activists, human rights defenders, researchers, citizen journalists and others documenting human rights abuses (or other potential crimes) should observe best practices for securing and preserving their content.”
Imad, who once owned a pharmacy in Aleppo, Syria, told the BBC about his experience. In 2013, a bomb exploded near his pharmacy, and the devastation it caused was filmed by local television channels. The material was posted on Facebook and YouTube, from which it was later deleted. Copies of the footage that Syrian journalists had were destroyed in subsequent airstrikes. After several years, when trying to get asylum in the European Union, Imad had to prove that he had been there. The man knew that there must be video footage proving his presence in Aleppo, but all he could find on the internet was a statement that the video had been deleted. He was assisted by Mnemonic, a Berlin-based human rights organization whose mission is to preserve war documentation before it disappears from social media.
Human rights advocates say a formal system is needed to collect and securely store deleted content. It also includes the storage of metadata that can confirm the authenticity of the content.
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