Meta erases Gaza journalist's Instagram | Hacker News Reader

Meta erases Gaza journalist's Instagram

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> While it’s unclear how or why those archives vanished, Abulhawa says the coincidence raises concern about a broader digital erasure of Palestinian documentation.

Note: I am making no comment on the conflict itself here.

I understand that journalists have to go where the people are, but if your archive strategy relies on posts on social media, you do not, in fact, have an archive strategy.

His feed is an archive of war crimes documented under conditions of imposed starvation and an information blackout, in a "conflict" that has had the highest journalist mortality rate by far.

First, he's under no obligation to archive his posts. It's on the world to archive them and prosecute the perpetrators of the documented crimes.

Second, the platform in question has, at the highest levels, intelligence officers from the entity committing those crimes.

Third, humanity has failed in its moral duty yet again, and this sort of "neutral" commentary that ends with a glib remark directed at a murdered non-combatant is shocking to the conscience.

Is he under an obligation? No. Is he, and any other professional who doesn't, an idiot for not backing up his data? Yes.

Are you calling a man that was living under a g*nocide documenting the horrific war crimes an idiot because he didn't back up his data, do you hear yourself??

If you can upload it to Meta's servers, you can back it up too.

The number one priority was for him to spread the information as fast as possible to as many people as possible. Given the limited bandwidth, limited electricity, limited availability for physical storage devices, and limited everything, do you really think that backing up his data was his priority? Have some empathy...

Given the circumstances, actually yes, I would think that contingencies and backups would be top priority. Google Drive would have been sufficient. Unlike the hell that is social media, you own your data, and your friends can access it and post to Instagram from outside the war zone.

Technically there was a backup we knew about that was taken down, too.

This is HN. This thread is about data and backups. Yes.

Begging the question there, aren’t we? I can’t imagine that as the takeaway.

You are making some assumptions here.

He is dead. Any backups he might have made might be long gone, or otherwise, unknown. What we do know is that the IG posts AND the backups done via the Internet Archive are gone.

So, my question to you is: where can you set a backup for no cost, available from Gaza, and that won't be taken down 3rd parties. Note, anything online has the potential to have data removed, and even then, we don't know what other backup locations he might have been using. We just know what was available now to the public.

In addition, let's say he had hardware backups (which are now gone after he was killed), or let's say just a random S3 bucket. We have to know about it. Know how to get access to it. And hope that AWS doesn't nuke it because someone asks them to do it.

It's a big mess, and blaming him for not having more backups than an entire country is incredible.

Google Drive would be good enough (if you can access Meta, you can access Google Drive) or any other cloud storage where you maintain ownership of your data. You can give people anywhere in the world the credentials to access it and upload to any social media. Internet Archive allows takedown requests from content owners, so it's not really a backup. Meta probably automatically sends one when it deletes an Instagram page.

> Google Drive would be good enough

It gets deleted. TOS violation.

> (if you can access Meta, you can access Google Drive)

Not necessarily. No capable person that understands tech at all would think this.

> or any other cloud storage where you maintain ownership of your data.

If you don't own the infrastructure, do you really own it? And none of these are resilient to takedown requests, or other means of removal.

> Internet Archive allows takedown requests from content owners,

That's not what happened here. He was the content owner. Also, you pretend like other groups don't also do that.

> You can give people anywhere in the world the credentials to access it:

Like IG did?

None of your solutions meet my criteria in the slightest.

The TOS for Google Drive is nothing like social media. You maintain ownership and do not grant a license to use. Meta's TOS grants them a license to use and delete whenever they want. Instagram isn't a storage product in any sense of the word and Google Drive is. Whatever the details about ownership of the photos are, Internet Archive coppied them from Meta's domain, so Meta can order the takedown. Try knowing something about what you are talking about.

If you die right now, will people on the internet know how to restore your backups or that you had them or are you an idiot?

People on the internet, no. People involved in my work, yes.

I think we don’t know if he backed up his data.

We do know that he is dead, though.

I intentionally chose not to comment on the politics, and I won’t here either. Please respect that.

My comment only addressed the possible failure to understand the importance, and controversy, of this work and publishing exclusively on social media. Important and controversial things should not be entrusted to social media.

I say this as a former AP photo stringer, who has been in handcuffs, forest fires, and shoot outs in that job. My concern is, genuinely, that socially relevant documentary work needs to be held outside of social media for this exact reason.

For what it's worth, my opinion is that there was no a better platform than social media to host that material.

The media companies are virtually all editorially aligned with one side, and they put their thumbs on the scale when it comes to the news about this subject.

The mainstream reporting is so clinically sanitized that it loses all potency and the sense of urgency. They were never going to be conduits for this material.

The best platform is the one that allows you to reach a wide audience so the onus is on them to archive, not on the vulnerable people being hunted with impunity.

His mistake in choice of archive does not absolve Facebook of the moral bankruptcy of deleting his photos.

It's acting as a willing propaganda mouthpiece for absolutely abominable people. If they were doing nothing wrong, they wouldn't be hiding the truth of what they did from the world.

There's no reason to believe he didn't have an archive strategy. I'm guessing he did have one, and his photos and videos are backed up somewhere, but he was relying on not being dead to be able to retrieve them.

> I understand that journalists have to go where the people are, but if your archive strategy relies on posts on social media, you do not, in fact, have an archive strategy.

Opposite view: platforms should have no say on content if it is not violating any law.

It's called moderation and it existed since the dawn of public internet. The fact that we have such a nice place talk at HN here, is because the platform has a say in it. Notably, no sane person wants to even visit platforms who have no say about the published content, like 8kun and other cesspools.

I don't believe the Internet Archive would be described as social media. I do believe the quote you provided is referring to the Instagram posts being archived on the Internet Archive, not that the journalist in question expected Instagram to be a sound archive strategy. It's the fact that the posts disappeared on archive.org that's a concern imho, not that Meta arbitrarily deleted a profile.

FB should make it available again. It is a historical record of the conflict as seen by someone experiencing it. To deny it is unfair. I don’t think FB is going around deleting the pages of Israelis killed in this conflict - it seems to be exclusive to Palestinians.

Usual endless whinging that goes on in HN comments

I'm an Israel supporter but I think the way these companies just hand waive is endlessly infuriating. Whether it's this or Youtube removing covid "misinformation" or other things (from actual experts) - hey, we never have to explain anything to you; "violates our community standards" suffices as an explanation (but, god help you if you actually report things that need to be taken down, for very good reason - then, suddenly, it DOESN'T violate ANY of our community standards!)

They should all be in prison, most likely

Without discussing this specific "journalist" which we all know it's nonsense. Those who relay on large company for there digital life should know it's not their data, you sign a deal with companies that have sole single target don't be surprised with any action it takes.

Facebook has double standards and is clearly sided in this conflict.

They probably have also shared data and tech with the IDF, like Microsoft has done and most big tech corps.

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