RightsCon Toronto 2018

In June 2017, Google announced four steps intended to fight terrorism online - including more serious detection and faster removal of content related to violent extremism. The human rights activist organization Syrian Archive lost 400,000 videos overnight. In September 2017, Facebook  sanctioned Rohingya activists for posting videos depicting the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya villages in Myanmar for violating their terms of service, which ban graphic videos. Twitter has long succumbed to requests from the Turkish government to take down tweets criticizing the state. While these takedowns are currently retrievable when the human rights community knows they have happened and can react to them, what happens when the efficiency of the removal system means the human rights community does not even know the content existed before it disappears? In this panel, experts in using social media and open source information for human rights investigations will discuss what can be done about this situation. It will ask who the takedowns are protecting and why, the problems around trusting publicly listed corporations with stories opression, the challenges for activist groups who need to let the world know about the abuses they're suffering, the ramifications for such takedowns and, Crucially, what solutions may be possible to balance out the pressure on social media networks to comply with local legislation with the need for survivors to share stories of human rights abuses.