Representatives are demanding some services to retrieve publications.
Some services publish a lot of video and image material related to the war in Ukraine. Adobe Stock / AOP
Four members of the U.S. House of Representatives have written a petition to the CEOs of Meta, Tiktok, Youtube and Twitter. The petitions call for the services to archive all content uploaded to the services that could be used as evidence of possible war crimes in Russia.
House of Representatives Carolyn Maloney, Gregory Meeks, Stephen Lynch mixed William Keating believe that publications on social media can help hold perpetrators of human rights abuses accountable for their actions.
Videos and live broadcasts from Ukrainian battlefields have been published in Tiktok, especially popular with young people. Tiktok is by no means the only platform on which such content is published, but similar content has also been seen on Youtube and Facebook, for example.
Often, war-related videos may be hidden from some services because, for example, they may violate the Terms of Service due to their violence. Letters addressed to managers indicate that it is not clear what will happen to these videos when they are removed from the app. For example, Facebook keeps deleted videos for 90 days.
– We are concerned that social media platforms do not have sufficient methods in place to archive such content to make it available to international organizations investigating war crimes allegations and other atrocities, in the message it is said.
– We are concerned that the processes by which social media platforms remove and block this content may lead to the unintentional removal and permanent disappearance of content that could be used as evidence of possible human rights violations such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, in the bulletin states.
News TechCrunch also raises an important issue in this regard. Even if the publications on the platforms could be used as evidence, it must be ensured that there is no false information and falsified videos. TechCrunch, for example, highlights videos that were from a video game.