Understanding verification and documentation SOCIAL MEDIA DATA In June 2014, a video of an extrajudicial execution A couple of examples can help illustrate the in the Central African Republic was posted online vast opportunities for event reconstruction and by a newspaper and was widely shared through long term investigations. In Egypt, content from social media. However, after verifying it, Amnesty social media allowed reconstruction of the killing International discovered that the incident of a peaceful protester by police in 2015, and actually took place in Nigeria, and the video subsequently forced an investigation and trial. ended up being the basis for Amnesty’s research In Nigeria, social media content played a crucial implicating Nigeria’s military in war crimes. role to document war crimes in 2014. This example shows the enormous pitfalls and When researchers are more skilled in asking opportunities of social media content for human questions of social media and employ technical rights research. Whether text, photos, video or tools to parse bigger data sets, they can audio, it has the potential to uncover hidden do advanced analysis across time, place or atrocities, while at the same time endangering the language. In 2016, Abodo, an online housing reputation of an organisation if used carelessly. marketplace, analysed millions of tweets to Additionally, the large amount of content shared see how use of derogatory language about across multiple platforms can easily overwhelm race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual researchers and sometimes calls for specialised orientation varied in different parts of the organising and discovery skills. United States. In 2014, Global Voices performed Social media is very different from traditional sources such as eyewitness testimony or newspapers, not least because the original source of information is often unclear, and because misinformation can spread incredibly fast from one person to thousands. At the same time, social media is growing increasingly important. Even governments and militaries use online channels (sometimes exclusively) to distribute information directly to the public. Recent examples include the Russian military’s ongoing reporting on military operations in Syria on YouTube, and the Israeli Defense Forces online broadcasts about operations in Gaza in 2014. 32 a “sentiment analysis” of Russian tweets about the threat of war in Crimea showing weak opposition.