Share and Follow
Unless it’s archived, it’s at risk of being lost forever.
Mother of 10-year-old Tala Abu Ajwa holds the pink roller-skates that were taken from her body. Source: Anadolu / Anadolu/Anadolu via Getty Images
Archivists such as Dr Jamila Ghaddar seek to capture and preserve as much online material as they can, from videos shared on Telegram to viral posts on Instagram.
“It’s part of providing the evidence needed to realise the right of return as enshrined in well over one hundred UN general assembly resolutions.”
Archivist Dr Jamila Ghaddar verify and preserve materials, including social media content, emerging from conflict zones such as Gaza, in order to use them as evidence in potential criminal proceedings in the future.
, with authorities dismissing them as “lies”.
The October 7 attack was a significant escalation in the long-standing conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Information is power
It’s been left mostly to Palestinian journalists and ordinary citizens to report on the conflict from inside, at great personal risk.
“Archival destruction institutionalises silence and erasure. This is about saving history,” she says.
Evidence for an arrest warrant
“We saw more footage being published in Syria than in any other country during the Arab Spring because of the scale of violence that people were facing, unfortunately.”
Hadi Al-Khatib, founder of the Syrian Archive, which provided archival evidence of war crimes that helped attain an arrest warrant for the former Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad.
Khatib’s team has documented more than seven million visual records of human rights violations in Syria since 2011.
To that end, French authorities used Mnemonic’s archive in 2024 as evidence to secure an international arrest warrant for former Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad and three others, following the use of chemical weapons on civilians outside Damascus in 2013.
“A primary concern of most courts is that the evidence is reliable. Content uploaded or shared on social media may have been edited or differ to the original video, photos or accounts. These things can affect how much weight a court can put on it as evidence,” he says.
‘Fixity’
“As archivists, these are the things that keep us up at night.”
Khatib and Ghaddar try to verify content by checking metadata and using geolocation techniques. Deepfake videos are also a major challenge of the future.
As archivists, these are the things that keep us up at night.
Dr Jamila Ghaddar
Khatib’s company Mnemonic has also worked with international investigative organisation Bellingcat to preserve content from the Ukraine war, in which content is archived with a hash — essentially a unique barcode — that’s stored and protected separately to prepare the material as potential court evidence.
Palestinians walk through the debris of destroyed buildings as they return to their houses following the announcement of a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. Source: Anadolu / Anadolu/Anadolu via Getty Images
Censorship
Meta has since abandoned the use of independent fact-checkers on Facebook and Instagram, replacing them with a ‘community notes’ system, similar to that used on the platform X. Community notes rely on users to comment on the accuracy of posts. Meta argues the approach further promotes freedom of speech and less censorship.
“We don’t know how long it’ll last, but we hope it lasts forever”, Ghaddar says.
