Technology has always mattered in the prosecution of war crimes. Social media opens a new frontier in such investigations
TECHNOLOGY HAS always mattered in the prosecution of war crimes. The Nazis who stood trial at Nuremberg were damned not only by war reporters’ photographs and films but also by their own typewriters and mimeographs. Forensic science and satellite imagery aided the prosecution of Rwandan and Yugoslavian war criminals.
User-generated evidence is especially useful for international bodies like the International Criminal Court that do not necessarily have the ability to serve subpoenas or search warrants, or adequate funding to mount a thorough investigation. In 2017 the ICC was able to issue an arrest warrant—the first based on social-media evidence—for Mahmoud al-Werfalli, a commander in the Al-Saiqa Brigade for his involvement in the murder of 33 people.
Such deletions are common. The Syrian Archive, a non-profit group that records and analyses evidence of human-rights violations in Syria, estimates that of the nearly 1.75m YouTube videos it had archived up to June 2020, 21% are no longer available. Almost 12% of the 1m or so tweets it logged have disappeared. Had the Syrian Archive not collected copies, this evidence might have been lost for ever.
It is unclear precisely what happens to content that is removed from platforms. It is often retained for a time, though this varies with platforms’ terms of service and legal restrictions. But once it is removed, investigators have difficulty gaining access to it. And legal requirements regarding data retention may lead to permanent deletion.
Social-media companies have tried to mitigate the problem on their own. In December 2016 Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube established the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism , a communal database where terrorist content is marked with a unique “hash” that other sites can track. As of July 2020 it had over 300,000 hashes. But a hash does not lead to the automatic removal of content.
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