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In hindsight, it was inevitable. Facebook, which began life as an innocuous social networking site for Harvard students, has now become a theatre of war, and a record of war. Of the Syrian Civil War, to be precise. Facebook management doesnt know what to do about it, but they are going to have to think of something fast.

Feb. 4 articles by Michael Pizzi in The Atlantic and by Matthew Ingram on the Gigaom.com site have reported that Facebook pages belonging to various Syrian opposition groups are being taken down wholesale, apparently because their content violates Facebook content rules. According to Pizzi, the tendency was first spotted by Ottawa-based cyber-security consultants SecDev Group, who have compiled a list of dozens of pages belonging to opposition citizen-journalism outfits or non-aligned NGOs that have reportedly been shuttered since last fall for posting what Facebook deemed to be graphic imagery or calls to violence.

British blogger and Syrian armaments specialist Elliot Higgins, a.k.a. Brown_Moses, tweeted on Feb. 4 that Ive been looking into the August

21st Sarin attack and thanks to Facebook, nearly every Facebook page reporting

on the attack is gone / This means that key information about the initial

reports of the attack and photographs are gone.

Higgins told me on Feb. 6 that I come across deleted pages all the time in my research, sometimes it seems like 75%+ are gone. He says the same applies to YouTube. He has also compiled a list of missing pages relating to the Aug. 21 gas attack.

Higgins believes, and statements from Facebook executives reported by Ingram support, that the deletions are not being done with malice, but as a result of what Higgins calls (deletion) policies not suited to the current climate. In other words, the activists are posting ghastly pictures of atrocities and Facebook, whether manually or automatically, is taking them down. The problem is that in doing so, they are destroying original and irreplaceable historical records.

Ive seen some of it; probably many readers have too. Its horrifying, grotesque. So is the Syrian Civil War and its getting more horrifying every day. You wouldnt want to see it on your childs social networking site. You wouldnt even want to see it at the Nuremburg Trials, though hopefully some of the perpetrators might be tried at The Hague one day. But not if original evidence is missing, deleted from history through the law of unintended consequences.

Social media have been becoming more and more central to the recording indeed, the creation of history for about the past five years. The tendency was probably first seriously noted in the Iranian Green Revolution of 2009, the (failed) Twitter Revolution against Ahmedinejads crooked re-election. For some years before, extremist groups like al-Qaida, the Taliban and the Caucasus Emirate had been posting atrocity propaganda on social media and they still do, but that is a horse of another colour, partly (be it admitted) because there is a far smaller Western audience for it. The Arab Spring captivated a wide Western audience through social media, and social media is now almost the only means of monitoring what is going on in Syria and then only thanks to dedicated activists, specialist bloggers like Higgins, and specialist consultants like SecDev. Most of the posted materials are and will remain the only historical record. If they survive.

Excerpt from:
Op-Ed: Social media must stop censoring images of war