Countering disinformation in conflict situations [Video]

Excerpt from Welcome Change: Open Sourcing Human Rights investigations

When the Syria uprising started nearly 10 years ago, witness account videos of chemical attacks and bombed hospitals started appearing on social media and news reports. International human rights investigators couldn’t get into the country, but citizens were risking their lives to document and share the abuses and war crimes on the ground.

When many social media platforms and governments started taking down this potential evidence from the Internet, Ashoka Fellow Hadi al Khatib understood that new open-source tools, methods and content moderation policies were needed. He founded the Syrian Archive in 2014, and Mnemonic in 2017, to properly archive and fact-check footage that would become an invaluable accountability tool to both journalists and future human rights investigations. So far, they’ve preserved and verified more than 3.5 million digital records from more than 3,000 sources, enabling criminal investigations by judicial authorities in Germany, France, and Sweden, among others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU2CujlvDYI