Occasionally, an image from a conflict zone makes the world stop and take notice.
Like in September 2024, when a heart-breaking picture went viral online of 10-year-old Tala Abu Ajwa’s pink rollerblades protruding from her cloth-shrouded body.
Her parents in Gaza City said she had been killed by an Israeli airstrike as she went outside her home to skate.
But what about the huge quantity of online material from conflict zones that most of us don’t see?
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.
“Between the internet shutdown and massive censorship by social media companies, the documenting of genocide was totally at risk,” says Ghaddar, a Lebanese academic based in Beirut and founding director of the Archives and Digital Media Lab, which archives multiple forms of media including documents, artifacts and social media posts from Gaza.
“Our team is comprised of archivists and historians, and we recognise how important it is to document what’s happening, to know what’s been done on the ground, to understand who was displaced and where they should return to.
“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”.
Israel bombarded Gaza for 15 months following Hamas’ October 7 attack in which more than 1,200 people, including an estimated 30 children, were killed and over 200 hostages taken, according to the Israeli government.
More than 46,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October 7, according to the health ministry in Gaza.
The October 7 attack was a significant escalation in the long-standing conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Information is power
Control of the war’s narrative has proven to be its own bitterly fought battleground: Israel barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza and stymied mainstream reporting of the conflict.
In November 2024, with 167 dying since the start of the war, according to the .
It’s been left mostly to Palestinian journalists and ordinary citizens to report on the conflict from inside, at great personal risk.
From afar, archivists like those on Ghaddar’s team seek to document the content that emerges from the conflict, source and interrogate videos and links, capture, manage and store data in a safe and efficient way.
“Archival destruction institutionalises silence and erasure. This is about saving history,” she says.
Evidence for an arrest warrant
During the anti-government uprisings in Arab countries in the 2010s, known as The Arab Spring, smartphones and social media played an immeasurable role in the coordination and documentation of the protests and violence that followed.
Hadi Al-Khatib founded the Syrian Archive in 2014 to document the atrocities of the Syrian regime.
“The aim was to counter misinformation and disinformation in a systematic way and create a counter-narrative that was based on facts,” Khatib says.
“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.
Khatib later founded Mnemonic, an archiving company that provides a software program that forensically collects, verifies and preserves content from Yemen, Sudan Ukraine and other conflict zones.
It’s costly and time-consuming work and all for the purpose of getting accountability for the victims of war.
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.
“That was really important for the people who faced these crimes for over 14 years. It’s important to for justice and to keep up the hope that someday we will be able to rebuild society and live in peace together again,” Khatib says.
Khatib has been optimistic that his archive can be used in a future justice and accountability process.
Australian barrister Peerce McManus says while it is possible that archived social media content could be used in international and domestic criminal proceedings, there would be concerns about the source and the reliability of media.
“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’
Ghaddar says the extreme complexity of archiving social media material in comparison to physical documents or objects lies in its dynamic and impermanent nature.
“A website will constantly keep changing as long as it’s live. So, what the web archives folks do is they try to capture multiple screenshots over time,” she says.
“You can then say: ‘this was the fixed final version of this website on that date.’
“But with social media you quickly get far away from the original idea. We think about the ‘fixity’ — authenticity and reliability — in a different way. It pushes the boundaries on ideas about what constitutes the final version of something – what the reference point is and therefore what evidence is.
“As archivists, these are the things that keep us up at night.”
In addition to the dynamic evolving nature of the material there is, according to Ghaddar, mountains of it.
“It could take arguably dozens if not hundreds of organisations doing this to even begin capturing what you might call ‘most things’.”
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
Before archivists can reach the point of preserving online material, they increasingly face censorship from social media platforms.
According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), guidelines and standards, increasingly using algorithms to identify and remove content so quickly that no user sees it before it is taken down.
Meta’s community standards (the company owns Instagram and Facebook) sets out content that is prohibited on its sites, such as hateful or violent videos. But it says in a commitment to free expression, some content that violates its standards may be allowed where it is newsworthy or in the public interest.
Another HRW report from 2023 claimed Meta systematically censored voices in support of Palestinian human rights since the October 7 attacks.
Responding to the report, Meta said in a statement: “This report ignores the realities of enforcing our policies globally during a fast-moving, highly polarized and intense conflict, which has led to an increase in content being reported to us. Our policies are designed to give everyone a voice while at the same time keeping our platforms safe.”
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.
Ghaddar says one way to combat censorship is for governments to change data laws so that content is owned by its creator and not the platforms that host it.
“The social media companies don’t want people to archive their content. They want to control it as proprietary data, and that’s a huge problem,” Ghaddar says.
“When your history is erased you as a people are erased.”
“We don’t know how long it’ll last, but we hope it lasts forever”, Ghaddar says.
