Nearly half of the world’s population owns a smartphone . For those living in conflict zones or suffering human rights violations, these de...
Nearly half of the world’s population owns a smartphone. For those living in conflict zones or suffering human rights violations, these devices are crucial. They help ordinary people record and share the atrocities they witness – alerting the world to their plight and holding to account those responsible for crimes against humanity.
Yet when they come to post this vital digital evidence on social media platforms, citizens often find their posts censored and permanently removed. Companies such as Facebook have no obligation to preserve the evidence and have been accused of rushing to moderate content on an ad hoc, sometimes incoherent basis.
Given that Human Rights Watch has called atrocities the “new normal” in the modern world, we must urgently set about creating a system through which citizens across the globe can preserve, share and publish digital evidence of atrocities without the fear of retribution or censorship.
Recent history has shown that social media companies cannot be trusted to preserve vital digital evidence of atrocities. Take the perplexing role of Facebook in Myanmar as an example. Facebook recently banned accounts related to Myanmar’s military in response to the February 2021 coup.
But in 2017, during the genocide of Rohingya Muslims by the same military, Facebook took little action against military-linked accounts. Instead, the platform was accused of whipping up hate in the country,...
