Big Tech is deleting evidence needed to prosecute war crimes, and governments want them to do more of it

War crimes are among the most grisly and difficult-to-prosecute crimes; and yet, ironically, the criminals have made it easier for prosecutors, by uploading videos celebrating their atrocities to Big Tech platforms like Facebook and Youtube, where they can act as recruiting tools for terrorists and extremists.

It's these very videos that human rights activists, atrocity survivors and armchair sleuths turn to in order to perform "open source intelligence" analysis on the perpetrators, effectively doxing them and handing overworked, under-resourced prosecutors the evidence they need to bring war criminals to justice.

Against this trend, though, is Big Tech's zeal to remove "terrorist content," a kind of overreaction to years of indifference to complaints about all kinds of bad content that violated the platforms' own guidelines. The newly self-deputized platforms are playing content police and taking down "terrorist content" as fast as they can find it, using algorithmic dragnets that catch plenty of dolphins along with the tuna they're trawling for. To make things worse, Big Tech invents its own definitions of "terrorism," that barely overlap with internationally recognized definitions.

It's about to get much worse: in the wake of the Christchurch white terror attacks, the Australian government rushed through legislation requiring platforms to remove "terror" content within an hour (a deadline so short that it guarantees that there will be no serious checks undertaken before content is removed) and now both the EU and the UK are poised to follow suit.

And there's plentiful evidence that terror cops are incredibly sloppy when they wield the censor's pen: last month, a French intelligence agency gave the Internet Archive 24 hours to remove "terrorist" content, targeting the Archive's collections of 15,000,000 text files, its copy of Project Gutenberg, and its entire archive of Grateful Dead recordings. Read the rest