Digital Memory, Evidence, and Social Media. Lessons Learned from Syria

Abstract

The Syrian Archive was founded in 2014, in the wake of the Arab Spring. It became clear that content posted to social media platforms was both digital memory and potential evidence of human rights abuses. Syrian Archive created tools and processes to archive that content, which proved useful in myriad places. The lessons learned from Syria have informed work all around the world. The Syrian Archive was followed by the Yemeni Archive, Sudanese Archive, and most recently the Ukrainian Archive. In 2017 the organization Mnemonic was created as the umbrella organization for these different archives, and to coordinate policy advocacy, rapid response, and capacity building for other human rights defenders and organizations. Mnemonic’s policy advocacy work has focused in particular on the removal of human rights documentation from social media platforms. Since the start of this year, the conflict in Ukraine has whetted the appetite of policymakers to address this problem. Now is the time to assess how social media content has been used, and bring together stakeholders to provide lasting solutions to the need to preserve this content.

Keywords

• archiving
• syria
• digital memory
• conflict
• human rights