YouTube’s Drive to Clean Up its Platform is Erasing Vital Evidence of Potential War Crimes
Sites like Bellingcat, which document human rights abuses and identify state-sponsored assassins, are worried overzealous moderation is destroying evidence
In June, the award winning investigative outfit Bellingcat, which uses open source intelligence to investigate human rights abuses, had its YouTube account suspended for four hours.
Eliot Higgins, who founded and now runs Bellingcat, didn’t know anything about it until an email from YouTube at 7.30am that day, and it was only reinstated four hours later after an outcry from other media organizations and journalists.
For some, a YouTube account suspension is annoying but not devastating. For Bellingcat, and other investigative groups like it, YouTube is a vital source of information for their investigative work.
YouTube is the world’s largest video-sharing site, with two billion monthly active users visiting the website to watch the 500 hours of footage uploaded every minute. Its ease of access and ubiquity means that it functions as a living, growing archive. In some cases, the site records light-hearted cultural trends or memes that fade into obscurity, like…
