This is the aftermath of a bombing
of a busy food market in Syria.
More than 30 people
killed.
Here are bodies of Ukrainian civilians
shot and burnt by Russian soldiers.
These videos that were posted online
show evidence of potential war crimes.
But look on the big social media platforms
and you won’t find them anymore.
When I filmed all these shots
shots of war crimes
I immediately tried to post them on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube
but my post was banned immediately.
Violent images are being removed
for breaking rules on graphic content.
But that means evidence needed to prosecute war criminals
can be lost
for good.
Whether or not the social media companies publish it or take it down
you can't afford to lose this material.
These videos and these images are very graphic
but it’s important
because
the world needs to know what’s happening.
This market reminds me of the market in Tariq al-Bab, Aleppo.
It also had a place for chicken
and the same vegetables.
Ten years ago, Imad owned a pharmacy near the local market
in his hometown Aleppo in Syria.
He was at work when a barrel bomb hit the area.
There was a big explosion without sound at first
and everything was destroyed in the pharmacy.
When I left the pharmacy, I needed to take it all in.
First of all, you see something in front of you that you are unable to process.
But what brought me back to reality were the corpses.
A hand.
A leg.
Bodily remains.
Burnt corpses.
Vegetables and blood mixed together.
It was an attack by the Syrian government.
Imad’s friends and customers
among the dead.
He now lives in France.
We’ve hidden his identity to protect his family back home.
It’s still hard for him to talk about what happened.
The [Syrian] regime would justify every strike by saying they were targeting terrorists.
But most of the victims [in Tariq al-Bab]
were children, women and civilians shopping in a vegetable market.
At that moment you couldn’t tell who had died or survived.
Corpses, blood. People were screaming and crying.
It was a terrifying scene. It was like Judgement Day.
He remembers a local TV company filming the attack
and had seen the footage online.
Years later, when applying for asylum in the EU
he looked for it again.
I was asked to provide documents that proved
my identity and that I was there [in Tariq al-Bab].
I was sure that my pharmacy was captured on camera.
But when I went on Twitter and YouTube, it was taking me to a deleted video.
Removed by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for breaking rules on graphic content.
In the chaos of a country at war
the original footage was also lost.
It appeared the images showing evidence of potential war crimes
were missing for good.
And here lies the problem.
Social media companies have long been criticised
for allowing easy access to distressing content.
Now, they are increasingly cracking down swiftly to delete it.
But by deleting it, evidence of crime and abuse can be lost forever.
The social media companies are being
overcautious.
They've copped a lot of criticism over the years
for leaving graphic and violent stuff up
and I think their instincts are to over- moderate now
and to take stuff down
because that seems like the course of least resistance.
Most of this content is taken down by Artificial Intelligence.
It automatically finds things like violence, pornography or child abuse.
We wanted to see how it worked.
So we contacted Hive
a company that provides sites like Reddit with AI software to moderate their platforms.
They gave us an account and we uploaded videos to test it.
The programme searches for things like blood
corpse or nudity
and gives a score from 0 to 1.
A higher score means the machine is more confident in what it identified.
It correctly found dead bodies in our videos
like these
which got more than 0.9.
This result means the video is likely to be removed automatically
without being flagged for review.
But the software lacks the nuance to spot human rights violations.
You can see why they have developed and train their machines
that the moment they see something that looks
difficult or traumatic
to take it down.
I think the next question for them is
how to develop
the machinery
to then make more reasonable decisions.
Major platforms claim: graphic content from war zones can stay online
if it’s in the public interest.
But our experiment suggests the opposite.
We decided to see what the platforms would do with the videos we tested.
Instagram took down three of four within a minute.
YouTube age-restricted the same three
but 10 minutes later removed them all
and gave us this warning.
We tried again
but they failed to upload altogether.
And then our appeal to restore the videos was rejected.
I couldn’t believe this was possible in the 21st century.
We saw dead bodies of civilians
then burnt cars.
The videos we tried to upload were filmed by Ihor from Ukraine.
He used to be a travel journalist
but since the Russian invasion
he’s been documenting attacks on civilians.
Like this one
on a road
outside Kyiv.
These were people who lived close to Kyiv and they wanted to flee [Russian] occupation.
There were families driving:
men, women, children and the elderly.
And they were simply shot dead.
We counted more than 17 bodies
and additionally a pile of bodies
where we saw five women shot and burnt.
Ihor posted the videos on Facebook and Instagram.
They were immediately taken down.
He wanted to share the images to challenge the Kremlin’s claim
that the murder of civilians never happened.
Russians themselves were saying those were fakes
they didn’t touch civilians
they fought only with the Ukrainian army.
It was really important not only to film this evidence
but to spread it.
Because the whole world had to see it.
The Russian war in Ukraine is being called the most documented in history.
So why does it matter that a few videos are being deleted?
Open Source investigators say
the loss of even one visual record
could weaken their understanding of the whole event.
Whether it’s in Ukraine, Syria or elsewhere.
Proving that war crimes have been committed is incredibly hard
so getting as many sources as possible is vital.
It’s almost like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle.
Some angle, like this one, can help us understand the direction
of travel of a missile, for example.
And some of the other videos
you can see here we’ve blurred the footage for you
but for my colleagues, it’s really important to understand
how a person was wounded and what caused their death.
And the close ups of videos can really help us determine that.
In order save videos like these
some have taken it upon themselves to preserve them.
This is a video of bombing of a central hospital in Izyum in Ukraine.
This is a video of shooting of protesters in Khartoum, in Sudan.
Mnemonic is an archiving organisation based in Berlin.
Their small team has created a tool that quickly
and automatically downloads and preserves footage
from war zones before it’s deleted.
On a daily basis
we monitor
different countries
for any content that is uploaded on social media.
We archive this content
related to different types of human right violations
such as
the use of illegal ammunition
like chemical weapons or cluster ammunition.
They’ve saved well over 700, 000 images from war zones
before they were removed from social media
including three videos of the attack on the market in Aleppo
where Imad witnessed his friends and customers die.
But their limited resources mean they can only focus on a few
of the world’s countless areas of conflict
leaving others to fill the gaps.
Rahwa lives in the United States.
And has family in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region.
In recent years the country has been wracked with violence.
I knew what I was looking at was horrible.
I’d never looked at stuff like that before.
From her New York flat
she spends her spare time watching videos with dead bodies.
It’s been two years now.
It was a sense of duty.
It was just hard.
The work was hard.
I spent hours doing research
and so when you’re seeing this content trickle in
you’re trying to verify it
using all the open-source intelligence tools you can get your hands on
but you don’t know if your family is ok
that’s really hard.
Shootings.
Massacres.
Mutilation.
All of these were saved by Rahwa and other members of her community.
She says they feel compelled to document what’s happening thousands of miles away
as Ethiopia’s authorities tightly control the flow of information.
All we had outside of
regional and government-backed
TV programmes that were coming out
the only glimpse in
to what was going on back home
was through social media.
We all felt that we had the responsibility
to archive this information and be active online to preserve
this event.
But I’ve seen things already get deleted.
We tried - as a community - to track down some videos and we couldn’t.
When videos are deleted
they pretty much become inaccessible.
Social media companies don’t have any obligation
to give them to private individuals, human rights groups or lawyers.
The only organisations who can demand access
are national law enforcement agencies.
But even this isn’t straight forward.
Investigators need to provide the precise URL
for the video they are looking for
which might be years after the incident.
The complicated process and huge time involved
is why the US State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice says
content must be preserved for years.
Tech companies have a role to play here
in recognising that while the wheels of justice do turn slowly
they do turn indelibly
and so eventually this information could be critically important.
We have already had situations
in which the information that was on social media platforms
such as Facebook or otherwise
has been used as evidence in a court of law.
And so we need to be able to preserve this
so that a potentially evidentiary value can later be mined
when we have a better understanding about what happened and who might be responsible.
Human rights organisations say the answer is
to warn users that a video is graphic and keep it online.
Or, to remove it
but create an independent archive for deleted footage from war zones.
This would protect people
while allowing the videos to be preserved for possible future use as evidence.
We are asking the social media companies
to allow for a system
that international investigators
could use to get access to content
that's been taken down
to investigate potential war crimes.
Activists say the major social media platforms claim they’re open to the idea
but have yet to act.
We have been engaging with the companies for years now on this topic.
And in these meetings they say all the right things.
They say that they're, you know, dedicated to
ensuring accountability, and they want their platforms to help ensure that accountability.
In reality they haven't been willing to take any real tangible steps
to solve this bigger problem.
We asked YouTube, Twitter and Meta
the owner of Facebook and Instagram
what they think about that idea and requested an interview.
They declined.
Meta and YouTube sent comments.
Meanwhile, people affected by wars
are doing what they can
to ensure evidence and history aren’t lost.
You can’t block and ban people
who are telling the truth.
These videos are very important for me.
My kids must know what happened.
I have a story to tell. And this story must be truthful.
When I’m thinking about what justice looks like
it’s really
putting this material forward to show that we haven’t forgotten about you.