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Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

theatlantic.com

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Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#21

Post by chmod775 »

bilbo0s wrote: post #11
tetrisgm wrote: post #6

The problem is that we've equated some platforms with a certain kind of media. Youtube is video, Twitter is news, Facebook is.. reality tv, I dunno. It's pretty debatable whether those platforms are the right place for the coverage of war crimes. I'm not going to start an argument about the media not doing their job right. However, this discussion would be moot if there was a news platform on par with the above, and…

This. If your evidence for war crimes is Twitter, there's a problem. And the problem is not Twitter. Twitter and Facebook posts should not be evidence of anything. That stuff is so easily faked that courts would be entirely right to laugh such "evidence" out of the courtroom. Evidence should be gathered by appropriate authorities and kept in accordance with international standards on evidence storage. Hint: That's no…

This makes no sense.

Pretty much all evidence starts out in some nonprofessional hands.

By this logic you could also say that you shouldn't record evidence of war crimes on your Android smartphone, because Android footage "shouldn't be evidence of anything" and "Evidence should be gathered by appropriate authorities and kept in accordance with international standards on evidence storage."

Videos from Facebook or Twitter can and have often been used as evidence in court.

> Twitter and Facebook posts should not be evidence of anything. That stuff is so easily faked that courts would be entirely right to laugh such "evidence" out of the courtroom.

What courts usually do when such things may be disputed is they ask the platform to confirm that the content in question is real. Source: I have been asked to appear in front of a judge (usually in his office to sign a written statement) to confirm the accuracy/authenticity of data from one of my platforms in the past.

I don't think there often is a dispute though, because both parties are aware this will happen and are also aware of the consequences of falsifying evidence.

Obviously that screenshot/video together with electronic traces and your statement would then be stored wherever it is they store evidence, not just on FB/Twitter.

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#22

Post by intended »

What do people expect?

Isn’t this uncharted territory for everyone?

Everyone can report, but the public sphere where this happens is owned by a company which needs profit.

Humanity was always insulated from what the worst that happened at that minute by the difficulty of transmitting information over older mediums.

This means incentives are not aligned here - speaking the truth, keeping you engaged, and keeping Disney land clean.

A person in the UK who wakes up in the morning doesn’t want to see evidence that South American violence has resulted in an entire village being eradicated.

As a species We were insulated from thinking at species scale. We could do village and perhaps nation scale on and average human basis. A rare few people can think at a planetary or greater scale regularly.

So how precisely should this be structured ?

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#24

Post by rexpop »

bilbo0s wrote: post #11
tetrisgm wrote: post #6

The problem is that we've equated some platforms with a certain kind of media. Youtube is video, Twitter is news, Facebook is.. reality tv, I dunno. It's pretty debatable whether those platforms are the right place for the coverage of war crimes. I'm not going to start an argument about the media not doing their job right. However, this discussion would be moot if there was a news platform on par with the above, and…

This. If your evidence for war crimes is Twitter, there's a problem. And the problem is not Twitter. Twitter and Facebook posts should not be evidence of anything. That stuff is so easily faked that courts would be entirely right to laugh such "evidence" out of the courtroom. Evidence should be gathered by appropriate authorities and kept in accordance with international standards on evidence storage. Hint: That's no…

How naive. We should be using any and all methods at our disposal to document first-hand experience of atrocity.

The library of Congress does not have an app for uploading biographical accounts of genocide.

We live under Capitalism; all niche value is exploited by cynical firms.

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#25

Post by vixen99 »

tetrisgm wrote: post #6

The problem is that we've equated some platforms with a certain kind of media. Youtube is video, Twitter is news, Facebook is.. reality tv, I dunno. It's pretty debatable whether those platforms are the right place for the coverage of war crimes. I'm not going to start an argument about the media not doing their job right. However, this discussion would be moot if there was a news platform on par with the above, and…

You're right. The arrival of 'a news outlet that isn't driven by attention or clicks as a currency' is exactly what should happen and surely it will. Or will we have Facebook around in 2119?

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#26

Post by lopmotr »

nunez wrote: post #23

Aren’t sites like LiveLeak better for this kind of content? Won’t this kind of content make it there anyway?

It could be ordinary people using what they're familiar with. If an emergency suddenly happens, who's going to spend half an hour dicking around researching what site to use and going through their signup procedure and installing their app and all that?

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#27

Post by thaumasiotes »

tetrisgm wrote: post #6

The problem is that we've equated some platforms with a certain kind of media. Youtube is video, Twitter is news, Facebook is.. reality tv, I dunno. It's pretty debatable whether those platforms are the right place for the coverage of war crimes. I'm not going to start an argument about the media not doing their job right. However, this discussion would be moot if there was a news platform on par with the above, and…

> I'd love to see someone build or modernize a news outlet that isn't driven by attention or clicks as a currency.

There are two motivations for running a news outlet, both with extensive historical precedent:

- You want money.

- You want to spread your view of the world, inflicting your culture on other people.

There isn't a lot of immediate financial gain associated with the second approach, but the gains are real enough, long-term, that there tend to be plenty of such outlets receiving subsidies from people who believe in the message.

But in the modern US, while we still have outlets of that type, there is a very strong belief that they shouldn't count as "news", and that they are less legitimate than "neutral" journalism. That reserves moral legitimacy to the money-oriented approach, and that approach is necessarily driven by attention. News that nobody reads can't sell.

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#28

Post by lopmotr »

wnoise wrote: post #16
behringer wrote: post #3

I'm not interested in seeing war crimes on facebook. If you want to disseminate that stuff, use a public forum where that stuff is welcome. There are countless places. Facebook and the spin users give is not welcome by me and no doubt by others.

Facebook is millions , if not billions of tiny public forums. The problem is that people seem to want them all to have the same standards. If you don't want stuff like this on your wall or feed, it's easy to keep out. If the admins of a group don't want this showing up, they too can filter it out. But people seem to be demanding that not only do they not have to see content they dislike, but that no one else can eith…

It's the nature of censorship that people want to censor what other people see, not what they see themselves. We believe we're able to make our own decisions and we're in control of our minds, but those other people who aren't us might not be and are in danger of bad influences.

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#29

Post by [deleted] »

bilbo0s wrote: post #11
tetrisgm wrote: post #6

The problem is that we've equated some platforms with a certain kind of media. Youtube is video, Twitter is news, Facebook is.. reality tv, I dunno. It's pretty debatable whether those platforms are the right place for the coverage of war crimes. I'm not going to start an argument about the media not doing their job right. However, this discussion would be moot if there was a news platform on par with the above, and…

This. If your evidence for war crimes is Twitter, there's a problem. And the problem is not Twitter. Twitter and Facebook posts should not be evidence of anything. That stuff is so easily faked that courts would be entirely right to laugh such "evidence" out of the courtroom. Evidence should be gathered by appropriate authorities and kept in accordance with international standards on evidence storage. Hint: That's no…

[deleted]

Re: Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

#30

Post by mandelbrotwurst »

lopmotr wrote: post #28
wnoise wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is millions , if not billions of tiny public forums. The problem is that people seem to want them all to have the same standards. If you don't want stuff like this on your wall or feed, it's easy to keep out. If the admins of a group don't want this showing up, they too can filter it out. But people seem to be demanding that not only do they not have to see content they dislike, but that no one else can eith…

It's the nature of censorship that people want to censor what other people see, not what they see themselves. We believe we're able to make our own decisions and we're in control of our minds, but those other people who aren't us might not be and are in danger of bad influences.

Speak for yourself. People who support censorship, sure. "We"? No.
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