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The problem is that we've equated some platforms with a certain kind of media. Youtube is video, Twitter is news, Facebook is.. reality tv, I dunno. It's pretty

The problem is that we've equated some platforms with a certain kind of media. Youtube is video, Twitter is news, Facebook is.. reality tv, I dunno. It's pretty debatable whether those platforms are the right place for the coverage of war crimes. I'm not going to start an argument about the media not doing their job right. However, this discussion would be moot if there was a news platform on par with the above, and I don't mean Twitter. I'd love to see someone build or modernize a news outlet that isn't driven by attention or clicks as a currency.

bilbo0s 7y ago
This. If your evidence for war crimes is Twitter, there's a problem. And the problem is not Twitter. Twitter and Facebook posts should not be evidence of anything. That stuff is so easily faked that courts would be entirely right to laugh such "evidence" out of the courtroom. Evidence should be gathered by appropriate authorities and kept in accordance with international standards on evidence storage. Hint: That's not "look at this tweet I got!"
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I guess the reason people put these things on social media is to raise awareness of it. The problem is that they fail to also send a copy to the relevant authorities.
- joeseeder 7y ago
  I think you are completely missing the point why they are ending up on these platforms... Try to imagine a world where "appropriate authorities" do not exist, as a first step. Places where these materials get captured are not first world countries with respectable, recognised law enforcement. Most of the people these sharing atrocities are aware only about platforms we call social media. For them these are the only ways they know how to make it public, for the world to see and hope we will act.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    >Try to imagine a world where "appropriate authorities" do not exist, as a first step. Places where these materials get captured are not first world countries with respectable, recognised law enforcement... I've lived in these nations, and if you can send via internet to Twitter, you can send to the UN. In fact, you can send to both at the same time.
    - joeseeder 7y ago
      And you know the UN address for submitting war crimes evidence by heart? adding to that, does UN have a convinietly preinstalled app on every phone just for that purpose? Just because it's reachable, doesn't mean that random witness will know how...
- chmod775 7y ago
  This makes no sense. Pretty much all evidence starts out in some nonprofessional hands. By this logic you could also say that you shouldn't record evidence of war crimes on your Android smartphone, because Android footage "shouldn't be evidence of anything" and "Evidence should be gathered by appropriate authorities and kept in accordance with international standards on evidence storage." Videos from Facebook or Twitter can and have often been used as evidence in court. > Twitter and Facebook posts should not be evidence of anything. That stuff is so easily faked that courts would be entirely right to laugh such "evidence" out of the courtroom. What courts usually do when such things may be disputed is they ask the platform to confirm that the content in question is real. Source: I have been asked to appear in front of a judge (usually in his office to sign a written statement) to confirm the accuracy/authenticity of data from one of my platforms in the past. I don't think there often is a dispute though, because both parties are aware this will happen and are also aware of the consequences of falsifying evidence. Obviously that screenshot/video together with electronic traces and your statement would then be stored wherever it is they store evidence, not just on FB/Twitter.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    >Obviously that screenshot/video together with electronic traces and your statement would then be stored wherever it is they store evidence, not just on FB/Twitter... Money quote. Twitter is not the evidence store. Twitter is the place the evidence is gathered from. Along with numerous other sources. And no, they don't simply take your word that the footage on your platform was recorded at place X at time Y and is verified to document persons of interest A, B, and C. They take your word that a twitter post was made at time W containing video N. That's all. I think you may have misunderstood what you were signing if you thought that your signature validated and verified the content of a twitter post. (Or any internet post for that matter.) That's what the investigations are for, investigations that I can assure you entail far more than twitter posts when you're talking about war crimes. Crimes require evidence. Real evidence, not twitter posts.
    - crummy 7y ago
      It seems like you're implying that twitter posts cannot contain evidence of crimes?
- rexpop 7y ago
  How naive. We should be using any and all methods at our disposal to document first-hand experience of atrocity. The library of Congress does not have an app for uploading biographical accounts of genocide. We live under Capitalism; all niche value is exploited by cynical firms.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- fit2rule 7y ago
  Do you know who Rodney King is? Which appropriate authorities investigated his beating?
  - rexpop 7y ago
    Excellent example. When we're blowing the whistle on our own authorities, we turn to out community. Private firms have coopted our communities, but they are not beholden to our welfare.
andrepew 7y ago
These platforms aren’t being used to cover war crimes by an entity consciously trying to deliver news. These posts are first hand accounts of individuals currently living an event. It is as raw as it gets. I don’t think you can very easily direct where content like that gets created. People will use the platform they’re already using for the other parts of their life. I understand the desire to not traumatize people by causing them to accidentally view horrible events. But at the same time I think deleting the content is a disservice to humanity in the long run for a lot of reasons this article highlights.
intended 7y ago
We would all love to see that but it is - within the context of the current economy - impossible for the majority of people. This is a scenario where the regular incentives of the market result in perverse outcomes. Firstly - it’s not tech which did this. Tech mutated and accelerated a pre existing trend for the worse. The news cycle effect was well known, driving more and more sensational news reporting till at the cost of reason. At the same time newspapers were constantly going under or being bought up. With information distribution at scale, describing reality increasingly became the playground of nations (BBC, and lately various government owned news channels) or major firms (the Murdoch emptier.) There’s a deep problem at the nexus of human behavior, factual reporting and income. Attention and fear are easier and more reliable levers to pull in the human consumer. Humans are easily distracted by sex, violence, gossip and easy to consume content - our brains are wired that way for some of those things, and it’s always pleasing to consume mental sugar than mental vegetables. The only model which survives this is paying lots of money for specific information - usually linked to your profession. However general news reporting It is unlikely to recover because of the news cycle effect which creates a tendency to compete on attention, a race to the bottom.
vixen99 7y ago
You're right. The arrival of 'a news outlet that isn't driven by attention or clicks as a currency' is exactly what should happen and surely it will. Or will we have Facebook around in 2119?
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  If it were possible, an untied peer to peer platform. The problem then is shifted to trust and veracity. Once you include ratings you're back to square one with just a tiny bit less external control and harder discovery. Yes, this is Freenet again.
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> I'd love to see someone build or modernize a news outlet that isn't driven by attention or clicks as a currency. There are two motivations for running a news outlet, both with extensive historical precedent: - You want money. - You want to spread your view of the world, inflicting your culture on other people. There isn't a lot of immediate financial gain associated with the second approach, but the gains are real enough, long-term, that there tend to be plenty of such outlets receiving subsidies from people who believe in the message. But in the modern US, while we still have outlets of that type, there is a very strong belief that they shouldn't count as "news", and that they are less legitimate than "neutral" journalism. That reserves moral legitimacy to the money-oriented approach, and that approach is necessarily driven by attention. News that nobody reads can't sell.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  > But in the modern US, while we still have outlets of that type, there is a very strong belief that they shouldn't count as "news", and that they are less legitimate than "neutral" journalism. At least one of those outlets, in a court of law, by it's creator/owner/founder at the time, admitted that it was "entertainment" and not "news", but rather a channel that called itself "news" in name only, that its main purpose was orthogonal to its stated purpose. This small tidbit of information is often forgotten about, because it is inconvenient to the narrative. That doesn't mean that other outlets aren't doing the same, or have elements of it - but only one that we know of has admitted it under oath. That counts for something. It also doesn't help that this "news" organization also has (or had, until its sale) a side actual entertainment arm that allowed it to hide behind. It was a curious "sleight of hand", all the more shadowy considering that the owner of the channel was not a citizen of the United States, and so not only could push his own views, but views that may be in direct contradiction to the values of our country. Unfortunately, there are no laws against this - and I am honestly not sure there should be, for that matter.
  - mAEStro-paNDa 7y ago
    Used to be, somewhat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
mirimir 7y ago
Back in the 90s, I recall much talk about "citizen-based news". But the reality is far more complicated. I could build a Tor onion site with throwaway clearnet proxies. But how would anyone know that it existed? And even if they did, how would they use it from phones? You'd need apps for that, and so that requires approval from Google and/or Apple.
- Sephr 7y ago
  Android apps don't require approval from Google to be installed.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    From Google Play they do, right? And how many people use alternate sources for Android?
    - 0xADEADBEE 7y ago
      It is my understanding that Fortnite precipitated a large swathe of apk installs without the Play Store [0], though I'd agree it's mostly atypical: [0] - https://9to5google.com/2018/09/07/fortnite-android-fragmentation-malware-player-count/ https://9to5google.com/2018/09/07/fortnite-android-fragmenta...
Jommi 7y ago
This is the core problem. And it's just natural. These platforms have a tendency to be natural monopolies. That means it requires government interference.

bilbo0s 7y ago

This. If your evidence for war crimes is Twitter, there's a problem. And the problem is not Twitter. Twitter and Facebook posts should not be evidence of anything. That stuff is so easily faked that courts would be entirely right to laugh such "evidence" out of the courtroom. Evidence should be gathered by appropriate authorities and kept in accordance with international standards on evidence storage. Hint: That's not "look at this tweet I got!"

saagarjha 7y ago
I guess the reason people put these things on social media is to raise awareness of it. The problem is that they fail to also send a copy to the relevant authorities.
joeseeder 7y ago
I think you are completely missing the point why they are ending up on these platforms... Try to imagine a world where "appropriate authorities" do not exist, as a first step. Places where these materials get captured are not first world countries with respectable, recognised law enforcement. Most of the people these sharing atrocities are aware only about platforms we call social media. For them these are the only ways they know how to make it public, for the world to see and hope we will act.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  >Try to imagine a world where "appropriate authorities" do not exist, as a first step. Places where these materials get captured are not first world countries with respectable, recognised law enforcement... I've lived in these nations, and if you can send via internet to Twitter, you can send to the UN. In fact, you can send to both at the same time.
  - joeseeder 7y ago
    And you know the UN address for submitting war crimes evidence by heart? adding to that, does UN have a convinietly preinstalled app on every phone just for that purpose? Just because it's reachable, doesn't mean that random witness will know how...
chmod775 7y ago
This makes no sense. Pretty much all evidence starts out in some nonprofessional hands. By this logic you could also say that you shouldn't record evidence of war crimes on your Android smartphone, because Android footage "shouldn't be evidence of anything" and "Evidence should be gathered by appropriate authorities and kept in accordance with international standards on evidence storage." Videos from Facebook or Twitter can and have often been used as evidence in court. > Twitter and Facebook posts should not be evidence of anything. That stuff is so easily faked that courts would be entirely right to laugh such "evidence" out of the courtroom. What courts usually do when such things may be disputed is they ask the platform to confirm that the content in question is real. Source: I have been asked to appear in front of a judge (usually in his office to sign a written statement) to confirm the accuracy/authenticity of data from one of my platforms in the past. I don't think there often is a dispute though, because both parties are aware this will happen and are also aware of the consequences of falsifying evidence. Obviously that screenshot/video together with electronic traces and your statement would then be stored wherever it is they store evidence, not just on FB/Twitter.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  >Obviously that screenshot/video together with electronic traces and your statement would then be stored wherever it is they store evidence, not just on FB/Twitter... Money quote. Twitter is not the evidence store. Twitter is the place the evidence is gathered from. Along with numerous other sources. And no, they don't simply take your word that the footage on your platform was recorded at place X at time Y and is verified to document persons of interest A, B, and C. They take your word that a twitter post was made at time W containing video N. That's all. I think you may have misunderstood what you were signing if you thought that your signature validated and verified the content of a twitter post. (Or any internet post for that matter.) That's what the investigations are for, investigations that I can assure you entail far more than twitter posts when you're talking about war crimes. Crimes require evidence. Real evidence, not twitter posts.
  - crummy 7y ago
    It seems like you're implying that twitter posts cannot contain evidence of crimes?
rexpop 7y ago
How naive. We should be using any and all methods at our disposal to document first-hand experience of atrocity. The library of Congress does not have an app for uploading biographical accounts of genocide. We live under Capitalism; all niche value is exploited by cynical firms.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fit2rule 7y ago
Do you know who Rodney King is? Which appropriate authorities investigated his beating?
- rexpop 7y ago
  Excellent example. When we're blowing the whistle on our own authorities, we turn to out community. Private firms have coopted our communities, but they are not beholden to our welfare.

andrepew 7y ago

These platforms aren’t being used to cover war crimes by an entity consciously trying to deliver news. These posts are first hand accounts of individuals currently living an event. It is as raw as it gets. I don’t think you can very easily direct where content like that gets created. People will use the platform they’re already using for the other parts of their life. I understand the desire to not traumatize people by causing them to accidentally view horrible events. But at the same time I think deleting the content is a disservice to humanity in the long run for a lot of reasons this article highlights.

intended 7y ago

We would all love to see that but it is - within the context of the current economy - impossible for the majority of people. This is a scenario where the regular incentives of the market result in perverse outcomes. Firstly - it’s not tech which did this. Tech mutated and accelerated a pre existing trend for the worse. The news cycle effect was well known, driving more and more sensational news reporting till at the cost of reason. At the same time newspapers were constantly going under or being bought up. With information distribution at scale, describing reality increasingly became the playground of nations (BBC, and lately various government owned news channels) or major firms (the Murdoch emptier.) There’s a deep problem at the nexus of human behavior, factual reporting and income. Attention and fear are easier and more reliable levers to pull in the human consumer. Humans are easily distracted by sex, violence, gossip and easy to consume content - our brains are wired that way for some of those things, and it’s always pleasing to consume mental sugar than mental vegetables. The only model which survives this is paying lots of money for specific information - usually linked to your profession. However general news reporting It is unlikely to recover because of the news cycle effect which creates a tendency to compete on attention, a race to the bottom.

vixen99 7y ago

You're right. The arrival of 'a news outlet that isn't driven by attention or clicks as a currency' is exactly what should happen and surely it will. Or will we have Facebook around in 2119?

AstralStorm 7y ago
If it were possible, an untied peer to peer platform. The problem then is shifted to trust and veracity. Once you include ratings you're back to square one with just a tiny bit less external control and harder discovery. Yes, this is Freenet again.

thaumasiotes 7y ago

> I'd love to see someone build or modernize a news outlet that isn't driven by attention or clicks as a currency. There are two motivations for running a news outlet, both with extensive historical precedent: - You want money. - You want to spread your view of the world, inflicting your culture on other people. There isn't a lot of immediate financial gain associated with the second approach, but the gains are real enough, long-term, that there tend to be plenty of such outlets receiving subsidies from people who believe in the message. But in the modern US, while we still have outlets of that type, there is a very strong belief that they shouldn't count as "news", and that they are less legitimate than "neutral" journalism. That reserves moral legitimacy to the money-oriented approach, and that approach is necessarily driven by attention. News that nobody reads can't sell.

cr0sh 7y ago
> But in the modern US, while we still have outlets of that type, there is a very strong belief that they shouldn't count as "news", and that they are less legitimate than "neutral" journalism. At least one of those outlets, in a court of law, by it's creator/owner/founder at the time, admitted that it was "entertainment" and not "news", but rather a channel that called itself "news" in name only, that its main purpose was orthogonal to its stated purpose. This small tidbit of information is often forgotten about, because it is inconvenient to the narrative. That doesn't mean that other outlets aren't doing the same, or have elements of it - but only one that we know of has admitted it under oath. That counts for something. It also doesn't help that this "news" organization also has (or had, until its sale) a side actual entertainment arm that allowed it to hide behind. It was a curious "sleight of hand", all the more shadowy considering that the owner of the channel was not a citizen of the United States, and so not only could push his own views, but views that may be in direct contradiction to the values of our country. Unfortunately, there are no laws against this - and I am honestly not sure there should be, for that matter.
- mAEStro-paNDa 7y ago
  Used to be, somewhat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

mirimir 7y ago

Back in the 90s, I recall much talk about "citizen-based news". But the reality is far more complicated. I could build a Tor onion site with throwaway clearnet proxies. But how would anyone know that it existed? And even if they did, how would they use it from phones? You'd need apps for that, and so that requires approval from Google and/or Apple.

Sephr 7y ago
Android apps don't require approval from Google to be installed.
- mirimir 7y ago
  From Google Play they do, right? And how many people use alternate sources for Android?
  - 0xADEADBEE 7y ago
    It is my understanding that Fortnite precipitated a large swathe of apk installs without the Play Store [0], though I'd agree it's mostly atypical: [0] - https://9to5google.com/2018/09/07/fortnite-android-fragmentation-malware-player-count/ https://9to5google.com/2018/09/07/fortnite-android-fragmenta...

Jommi 7y ago

This is the core problem. And it's just natural. These platforms have a tendency to be natural monopolies. That means it requires government interference.