When the Syrian uprising started nearly 10 years ago, videos taken by citizens of attacks against them such as chemical and barrel bomb strikes started appearing on social media. While international human rights investigators couldn’t get into the country, people on the ground documented and shared what was happening. Yet soon, videos and pictures of war atrocities were deleted from social media platforms – a pattern that has continued to date. Ashoka Fellow Hadi al-Khatib, founder of the Syrian Archive and Mnemonic, works to save these audiovisual documents so they are available as evidence for lawyers, human rights investigators, historians, prosecutors, and journalists. In the wake of the Facebook Leaks, which are drawing needed attention to the topic of content moderation and human rights, Ashoka’s Konstanze Frischen caught up with Hadi. Hadi al-Khatib, founder of Mnemonic and the Syrian Archive warns us against an over-reliance on … [+] machine learning for online content moderation. HCPlambeck Konstanze Frischen: Hadi, you verify and save images and videos that show potential human rights violations, and ensure that prosecutors and journalists can use them later to investigate crimes against humanity. How and why did you start this work? Hadi al-Khatib: I come from Hama, a city in the north of Damascus in Syria, where the first uprising against the Syrian government happened in 1982, and th… Click below to read the full story from Forbes
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Human Rights Documentation In The Digital Age: Why Machine Learning Isn’t A Silver Bullet
