The Libya conflict, which started in 2011, was the first major war that took place entirely during the social media era. Militants and civilians documented the conflict in real time.
This has fundamentally shifted how war crimes are prosecuted. A thread: buzzfeednews.com/article/meghar…
This has fundamentally shifted how war crimes are prosecuted. A thread: buzzfeednews.com/article/meghar…
Militants and ordinary Libyans began posting thousands of videos of brutality to social media. But for academics, activists and war crimes investigators who were looking, this was more than a stream of violence — it was a windfall of potential evidence. 
This is a huge shift. Investigators documenting abuses used to depend heavily on diaries, records, and interviews with witnesses that sometimes took place years after the fact. Now, the evidence is available immediately — sometimes uploaded by militants incriminating themselves.
Investigators at international bodies like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court are harvesting, cataloging, and analyzing millions of photos, posts, and videos from social media in an effort to hold human rights abusers accountable in court.
However, their efforts are coming up against another shift: social media companies are facing unprecedented criticism for failing to police their platforms, allowing neo-Nazis and other extremist groups to spread their messages online. buzzfeednews.com/article/meghar…
Those platforms have continued to struggle with addressing the criticism. Meanwhile, the videos of executions and other extremely graphic violence have become low-hanging fruit for the platforms to take down and show that they’re trying to do something.
The removal of this kind of content is posing a major problem for researchers who are using it for documentation. If the history of conflicts is being written in social media, what happens when it disappears? buzzfeednews.com/article/meghar…
