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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: YOUTUBE AND FACEBOOK ARE REMOVING EVIDENCE OF ATROCITIES, JEOPARDIZING CASES AGAINST WAR CRIMINALS ABDULSALAM WAS IN the middle of Friday prayer at his neighborhood mosque in al-Bab, Aleppo, when he heard a crash — a nearby bakery had just disintegrated under the force of a barrel bomb, a deadly metal container filled with shrapnel and explosives, favored by the Syrian military. Scanning the sky he saw the hovering chopper that had dropped the weapon. He tried to snap photos as it loomed above the rubble, but the images looked fuzzy. Abdulsalam hopped on the back of a passing ambulance and was among the first on the scene. He trained his camera on the smoldering facade of a bakery, panned to series of blasted-apart food stalls, and then settled his lens on mangled bodies. He kept snapping photos in rapid succession, until he spotted his cousin amid the carnage. Holstering his camera, Abdulsalam decided to join the rescue effort and helped his relative to a nearby hospital. It was January 2014, almost two years after the Syrian army opened fire on protesters in Abdulsalam’s hometown of al-Bab, in the north of Aleppo province, bringing the country’s raging war to a farming community that had, until that point, remained largely untouched. Since then, Abdulsalam had worked with a group of local media activists to publicize the human toll of the civil war as rebel fighters established a foothold in al-Bab and the Assad regime pounded the town from above. Within hours of the attack that injured his cousin, Abdulsalam uploaded his photos to Facebook. He thought it was the best way to simultaneously preserve the images — he didn’t know when his camera or computer could be destroyed — and get them out to the world. “It was a particularly horrific bombing,” he told me recently. There had been a pause in the fighting that week, and families who’d spent months cowering inside had just emerged to stroll through an outdoor bazaar near the mosque. Seven months later, Abdulsalam got an automated email from Facebook notifying him that the images had been removed. Other users had complained that his photos were too gory. By the time he got the email, Abdulsalam’s other copies of the pictures were gone; his hard drive had been burned, along with his small office, when the Islamic State stormed al-Bab and Abdulsalam fled across the border to Turkey. There’s good reason to believe Abdulsalam’s photos could have been used to address the atrocities he had witnessed. Since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, investigators with Human Rights Watch have been making regular trips to Aleppo to document potential war crimes, including a disturbing pattern of Syrian helicopters blowing up bakeries with barrel bombs. By the time Abdulsalam snapped his pictures, the Islamic State had begun to move into the city, and HRW could no longer collect on-the-ground evidence. Ole Solvang, an HRW researcher who visited Aleppo more than a dozen times, in part to research the bakery attacks, said of Abdulsalam’s photos, which he never saw, “If there is ever a trial, this is the stuff that could become important evidence.” Civilians react following a reported airstrike on the Tariq al-Bab district of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on February 1, 2014. Syrian government and opposition delegations leave 10 days of peace talks with few results and a follow-up meeting uncertain, but analysts and negotiators say the discussions are an important beginning. AFP PHOTO/Mohammed Al-khatieb (Photo credit should read MOHAMMED AL-KHATIEB/AFP/Getty Images) Civilians react following a reported airstrike on the Tariq al-Bab district of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on February 1, 2014. Photo: Mohammed Al-Khatieb/AFP/Getty Images The disappearance of Abdusalam’s photos are part of a pattern that’s causing a quiet panic among human rights groups and war crimes investigators. Social media companies can, and do, remove content with little regard for its evidentiary value. First-hand accounts of extrajudicial killings, ethnic cleansing, and the targeting of civilians by armies can disappear with little warning, sometimes before investigators notice. When groups do realize potential evidence has been erased, recovering it can be a kafkaesque ordeal. Facing a variety of pressures — to safeguard user privacy, neuter extremist propaganda, curb harassment and, most recently, combat the spread of so-called fake news — social media companies have over and over again chosen to ignore, and, at times, disrupt the work of human rights groups scrambling to build cases against war criminals. “It’s something that keeps me awake at night,” says Julian Nicholls, a senior trial lawyer at the International Criminal Court, where he’s responsible for prosecuting cases against war criminals, “the idea that there’s a video or photo out there that I could use, but before we identify it or preserve it, it disappears.” Worries over disappearing evidence are not just theoretical. This past summer, YouTube rolled out a new artificial intelligence system designed to identify violent content that may be extremist propaganda or disturbing to viewers. Almost overnight, it shut down 900 groups and individuals documenting the civil war in Syria. That included a channel run by Bellingcat, a reputable U.K.-based organization devoted to analyzing images coming out of conflict zones including Syria, Ukraine, and Libya. YouTube also took down content from the group AirWars, which tracks the toll of U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. Countless media organizations run from Syria were also shut down, including the Idlib Media Center, one of the few groups producing videos from the last Syrian province controlled by rebels. Meanwhile, in September, Facebook began removing photos and images documenting ethnic cleansing and torture of the Rohingya ethnic minority at the hands of the Myanmar government. Like the images taken by Abdulsalam, other users had flagged the Rohingya images as disturbing, and Facebook agreed. The takedowns, and the murky processes that led to them, represent a dramatic shift from the heady days of the Arab Spring, when protesters posted images of their governments firing on them, and social media chiefs promoted their platforms as nearly limitless tools for reform. “Anyone with a mobile handset and access to the Internet will be able to play a part in promoting accountability,” Google Executive Chair Eric Schmidt wrote in his 2013 book, “The New Digital Age.” Around the same time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared, in a 10-page paper about wiring the world for internet: “I believe connectivity is a human right.” “They could have said: ‘Don’t use your platforms for this,’” said Alexa Koenig, executive director at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley. “But they actually tried to get these people use their platforms [for it] — they held themselves up as arbiters of social good, and at that point of creating dependency, I would argue they acquired a heightened responsibility.” “They had grandiose ideas,” added Keith Hiatt, a former software engineer turned human rights activist who’s served as a sort of intermediary for the tech industry and the human rights community. He is now vice president of Human Rights Programs at the NGO, Benetech, and serves on the Technology Advisory Board for the ICC, a group of experts trying to bridge the gap between investigators and technology. “The big story these companies told, justifying the massive freedom that they had to operate, was that their technologies would lead to openness — and openness will lead to democracy and human freedom,” he said. Now that their own behavior is at issue, social media companies seem oblivious to the stakes, said Mohammad Al Abdallah, executive director of the Syrian Justice and Accountability Project, an NGO backed by more 30 governments, including the U.S., which works to preserve social media evidence of atrocities. “They just don’ Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 1.
#1. To: Ada (#0)
(Edited)
Most anything related to photo journalism is susceptible to being photo shopped. Facebook is a CIA operation with unknown abilities to track and even project the user's thought process. Over time they will eliminate any and all objectionable materials submitted to them. (And laugh out loud) ! FACEBOOK should be renamed "FAKEBOOK" and those using it would by definition be "FAKERS" !
There are no replies to Comment # 1. End Trace Mode for Comment # 1.
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