The ability to quickly share images of destruction via social media has transformed how we view conflict, particularly the war in Gaza, having an enormous effect on public opinion worldwide. Yet the way that platforms are being used in 21st-century conflicts surpasses the everyday sharing of information. Social media has become an important tool in setting down a historical record of the war, verifying exactly what has happened and, ultimately, prosecuting any potential war crimes that have occurred.
As this new role of social media — whether X (formerly Twitter), Telegram, Instagram or Facebook — edges into place, many are wondering what mechanisms exist for preserving these documents of war. The answer is not particularly reassuring. The archiving policies of the major social media companies remain opaque — as do the algorithms and other internal policies that govern what content is seen and promoted. In the case of Gaza and other conflicts in the Arab world, faith in platforms such as Meta acting as neutral archives has been eroded by documented cases of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias, brought to the fore by nonprofit digital rights organizations like 7amleh.
Preservation of this material from conflicts has therefore fallen to smaller organizations, which have developed their own archives and workarounds in the face of the potential mass disappearance of digital information. Many, like the material they collect, emerged from the grassroots: individuals and collectives who scrape data off the internet, often using it to reveal trend lines. Others are more established but still rely on small teams and face constant fundraising struggles and political insecurity. In terms of archiving at scale, the best-known organization — and the progenitor of the field — is the Syrian Archive, which the activist Hadi Al Khatib started as a side project in his apartment in Berlin in 2014. It now holds more than 15 million digital records of violence and conflict.
Al Khatib, whose family witnessed the 1982 Hama massacre, recognized early in the Syrian uprising that the videos being uploaded to social media could eventually be used to tell the truth about what was happening in his country. He also understood their vulnerability. Online censorship in Syria was common: The government shut down internet connectivity across the country on several occasions starting in 2011, with blackouts coinciding with increased rebel activity. Al Khatib began archiving posts that documented the protests and violence in Syria, and as the conflict became more brutal and entrenched, he quit his job and focused on the work full time. He later realized that the methodology he had put in place for Syria could benefit other countries and expanded the project to become an organization, known as Mnemonic — which now covers conflicts in Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, Iran and elsewhere. Its rapid response team for the war in Gaza is now archiving over 25,000 records on a daily basis. These, like the rest of its archive, are available to historians, accountability institutions and human rights investigators on request.
Information is tightly controlled in the war in Gaza, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip rank near the bottom of the press freedom index for the security of journalists. “International accountability mechanisms, such as the U.N., cannot access Gaza at the moment,” Al Khatib says. “Open-source information will be crucial for understanding what is happening there.”
Mnemonic’s archiving methodology is not as simple as taking screenshots or downloading posts and imagery and storing them in a folder. Every post that is archived first has to be forensically collected, verified and tagged before it is stored in their database, which has multiple backups. The latter processes are automated by software that Mnemonic has specially developed, but the bulk of the verification work is done manually by analysts, poring over the videos frame by frame. Most are from the country whose violence they witness. (Mnemonic provides weekly psychotherapy counseling for these analysts.)
“To potentially use open-source information for legal purposes, it must be archived in a specific process to ensure its authenticity and availability,” Al Khatib says. There is a huge amount of contextualization and verification that takes place before the work can be credibly used.
“It has to be content that you can verify: Is it geolocatable using satellite imagery?” he continues. “Are we able to identify any individuals? Are we able to see impact sites, weapons or craters? Are we able to hear potential victims or witnesses?”
This means that Mnemonic only preserves a limited quantity of the posts that people see on social media. But as the project has grown, both it and others are redefining the uses to which grassroots digital information can be put. Mnemonic follows the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations, which was produced in 2022 (with feedback from Mnemonic) to enable social media information to be used in legal cases and human rights investigations. To stand up in court, the post’s metadata has to be intact and shown to be unchanged, its online provenance has to be clear and its material has to be geolocated if possible, among other criteria. Mnemonic archives all its posts according to these standards, and they are known in legal terms as evidentiary copies.
Other nongovernmental organizations have also been breaking new ground in demonstrating how social media information can be used. Airwars, based in the U.K., was founded in 2014 and aggregates posts from Facebook, X, Telegram and other platforms. It focuses on drone strikes and, in particular, the civilian casualties that are often left out or undercounted in official military reports.
Airwars was one of the main sources of documentation of U.S. drone attacks in the war against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2017, and frequently disproved the body count issued by the Pentagon. According to its own figures, 70% of the investigations by the U.S. military into its drone campaign against the Islamic State have stemmed from material submitted by Airwars. Today, Airwars has moved its focus to the airstrikes in Yemen and Gaza. Each incident is verified and logged on its publicly available platform, with links to screenshots of each of the posts or tweets that show the event.
In this sense, Airwars is part of the open-source intelligence revolution that technology has now made available to anyone with an internet connection and computer. Military analysts, academics and armchair enthusiasts can provide a remarkably precise picture of conflicts via the posts they see on X, alongside satellite imagery — either from commercial providers or free resources such as Google Earth — and publicly available data such as mobile phone usage.
The large amount of material from the Russia-Ukraine war in particular has spurred takeup by legacy media, as soldiers and citizen-journalists on both sides in that conflict regularly post information about strikes, equipment and casualties, and analysts are able to observe the war as if in real time via this handheld and aerial footage. The website Oryx is able to count each tank and piece of military equipment that has been destroyed or abandoned — with geolocated links to each crowdsourced image of the defeated bits of metal, looking like squashed beetles seen from above.
In tandem, international accountability agencies such as the United Nations are making more requests for open-source material and are setting out ways to legislate proper usage. Legacy media institutions have also recently set up visual investigations teams that mimic the kind of open-source methodologies of NGOs like Mnemonic and Airwars. (In fact, both The Washington Post and The New York Times have hired staff from Airwars for their visual investigations teams.) With this increased profile comes — arguably — increased influence. Five months after The New York Times published an analysis of 2,000-pound bombs that Israel dropped in Gaza, for which the paper’s visual investigations unit analyzed satellite imagery of craters, the Biden administration announced it would be withholding these powerful bombs in its arms shipments to Israel. And artist-activist research groups, such as Forensic Architecture, based at Goldsmiths at the University of London in the U.K., are using media and exhibitions in new ways to publish their analyses of the material.
The war in Gaza comes at the tail end of this 15-year process of understanding and developing uses for open-source information in conflict. Thus, although social media appears to have been disproportionately powerful in this war, much of its ability to effect change stems from open-source information protocols that were already in the process of being established — and the sheer amount of killing in the small territory of the Gaza Strip.
“The nature of the information isn’t so different from somewhere like Mosul or Raqqa,” says Emily Tripp, the director of Airwars. “It is still often a civilian who will post, on whatever platform they would normally use, about something that is happening. It’s the scale that’s different — it’s just insane.”
Organizations like Mnemonic concentrate on major airstrikes and potential human rights abuses, including infamous events such as the May airstrike on the Tal al-Sultan tent encampment in Rafah. Yet most of the everyday content — the images of destroyed homes, sick and starving children, and people clutching shrouded family members — is more likely to disappear into the internet’s constant churn. Few mechanisms exist for documenting the internet, largely because of its scale and the speed at which it changes. The most comprehensive is the Internet Archive, which since 2001 has held past versions of the internet, including now-defunct webpages, on its server. (That same year, its founder, Brewster Kahle, also created Alexa, which it later sold to Amazon.) The archive’s mechanism, the Wayback Machine, crawls the internet, but it only preserves a partial image of it — whatever is on a site at the moment it happens to crawl, or whatever cache is manually uploaded to the Archive — meaning much activity remains unpreserved. And questions like how much data social media companies preserve, how long they archive it for and to whom they make it accessible are generally unknown. Neither Meta nor X responded to requests for clarification on their policies for this article.
Moreover, it has been difficult to come to grips with the scale of disinformation in the war in Gaza — or even to quantify its scale. In the initial days, social media companies failed to rein in the hoaxes, conspiracy theories and misunderstandings that followed the enormous digital response to the Oct. 7 attack, creating an impression of the event that sanctioned the aggressive Israeli response. There is also deliberate propaganda. After the start of the war, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs invested millions of dollars in ads on X, Facebook and Instagram, targeting citizens of Western nations in order to shore up support for the idea of collective punishment of Palestinians.
“Social media is a double-edged sword,” says Eric Sype, a national organizer for 7amleh. The NGO, which is based in Ramallah, was set up in 2013 to ensure a neutral space online — which means policing disinformation, hate speech and advocating against unwarranted exclusions. “Writ large, social media has changed the global public perception of what’s happening in Israel and Palestine and keyed the global audience into a more honest understanding of the events, but it has also facilitated a lot of harm against Palestinians.”
In social media, visibility is the prize — with punitive measures against users taking the form of withholding visibility through “shadow-banning” (limiting the reach of an account without informing the user) or deleting accounts. What that does to the users’ posts in the long term is unclear. In the U.S., where most of the companies are headquartered, there is no comprehensive framework around user data protection (which generally refers to the information that can be withheld from social media companies, not the information that must be stored), and laws differ from state to state.
“Many people believe social media platforms are accidental documentation platforms,” says Tripp, of Airwars. “But they have become essential to human rights documentation. And it means that when Elon Musk says something flippant, like he’s going to delete loads of Twitter accounts that have no longer been active, that’s a huge loss to the human rights space.”
The exorbitant power of the heads of social media companies means that individuals such as Musk can suddenly change the rules of the game — as he did in 2023 when he announced he would delete X accounts that had been inactive for a number of years, many of which had posted information about conflicts that Airwars and others relied on for documentation. And governments can also easily shut down social media — as happened in Egypt in 2011. Then, as now, external workarounds emerged: The Twitter shutdown sparked the project Speak2Tweet, where Egyptians called landlines outside of the country to record their tweets on voicemails, which were then transcribed and passed on to social media. (The episode is now documented in the artistic project of the same name by the artist-activist Heba Amin — more famous for the graffiti she smuggled into the TV show “Homeland” when asked to help create a set, writing “Homeland is racist” in Arabic.)
Every conflict has its corresponding media — the Vietnam War was the TV news war, the Iraq War was the cable news war, the Arab Spring was the Twitter revolution, and the war in Gaza is the Instagram, or perhaps TikTok, war. The ability to bypass mainstream outlets has meant information getting directly into the hands of the public, and opinions and foreign policy have changed in ways that feel extraordinary to those who have long seen a pro-Israel media bias. While the archiving efforts of the NGOs that have stepped into the breach give hope for future historians and legal cases, their legacy is by no means assured. Relying on fragmentary and badly funded efforts is a fragile endeavor — a patchwork of preservation that falls far short of the enormous importance they bear.
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