Open-Source Platforms as Repositories of Shared Knowledge and Memory about Conflict
Written by the Wikimedia Foundation’s: Valentina Vera-Quiroz, Human Rights, Policy, and Tech Fellow.
In the early 2000s, the Colombian army lured young men to rural areas with offers of work, assassinated them, and passed them off to authorities as guerrillas killed on the battlefield in order to increase the “body counts” of military operations. The victims were civilians whose families still fight for the truth and justice. These atrocities erupted into public view in 2008 and became known as the “false positives” scandal, a name given to the killings of innocent men carried out by the Colombian army.
Although the 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the largest rebel group promised to end the cycle of revenge and retaliation of the last six decades, new forms of conflict-related violence have emerged, and serious violations have continued throughout the country. Recently, there were several lawsuits brought forth by high-ranking military officers to have their armed conflict-related information deleted from online platforms. Today, information about the atrocities would not exist if open-source platforms had not documented them, building and keeping records about the more than 6400 confirmed “false positives” that make for one of the most shameful episodes of Colombia’s conflict.
Such attempts to remove content from high-ranking members of the Colombian military could potentially lead to weakening or even erasing the online memory of these massive human rights violations in the country, aggravating the path to justice and the possibility of holding perpetrators to account. The case of Colombia is one of many examples that illustrate the critical relation between collective memory and open-source platforms in post-conflict situations.
This blog post discusses the impact of technology on collective memory and how open-source platforms are increasingly helping to document and remember past atrocities. It explores the role of open-source platforms in building collective memory, and the challenges that these platforms face as repositories of knowledge in conflict societies. Finally, the article explains why the engagement of non-state actors in this discussion is an urgent matter.
1. Collective Memory in the Digital Age
Collective memory is a key pillar of any country’s transitional process. Ensuring that what happened in the past is not forgotten is the primary vehicle of public remembrance. The use of publicly available information to offer retellings of violence has a powerful democratizing potential in terms of broadening who contributes to open-source investigations and whose stories are shared with the public. Truth-finding contributes to the development of collective memory by building a version of history provided by those who have lived in war and conflict, as well as the memories of those who have suffered the consequences of a traumatic past.
In parallel, advances in digital technologies have transformed the way we build our collective memories as a society. Unlike in the past, when journalists, civil society organizations and NGOs, and governments were the main sources of information and narrative construction, technological advances have led to open-source information increasingly helping to document and remember past atrocities. Furthermore, current and emerging technologies are shaping the memories we build, both as individuals and collectively, while reframing the way history is constructed.
Open-source platforms can become witnesses of history by ensuring that what has happened in the past is not forgotten. In places where trust in governments has been eroded, open-source platforms have become “an alternative set of truth practices” by providing open and transparent verification processes of evidence and testimonies. For example, Wikimedia Argentina, an independent Wikimedia chapter and nonprofit organization, has focused its efforts on creating and editing content on Wikipedia about crimes against humanity committed during the civic-military dictatorship of Argentina in an initiative called Wikiderechoshumanos (in English, “wikihumanrights”).
Open-source platforms can contribute to this goal and restore the dignity of victims of human rights abuses by helping to create a historical archive that protects against the denial of these atrocities. The democratic value of open-source investigations enabled by these platforms becomes an opportunity to achieve social justice for those whose voices were previously muted and excluded from the public forum.
Furthermore, remembering past atrocities can increase awareness of human rights abuses and enhance actions to redress wrongdoings, while victims can find in collective memory an instrument for healing their suffering and recovering the voice they lost in victimhood. Doing so with digital technologies, however, presents various challenges.
2. Assessing the Challenges
History-telling and the formation of collective memory are neither neutral nor objective, since they can change over time — and often do so. Finding a neutral and reliable version of the facts has become more challenging in today’s world, where the modern information environment is saturated with tremendous amounts of data. Every day in 2018, people around the world generated at least 2.5 exabytes of data — in other words, 2.5 billion gigabytes of new data daily. By 2025, we will be creating 463 exabytes — that is, 463 billion gigabytes — of data each day, a number that defies human imagination and is only likely to continue to grow exponentially, as it already has in the past.
This growth trend poses a special challenge to researchers and activists seeking to collect and archive vast amounts of conflict-related information in order to minimize the likelihood of leaving human rights abuses undocumented. Managing large amounts of data runs the risk of disregarding the narratives of marginalized people whose participation in the digital realm is already negatively affected by dominant power structures — which limit these groups’ access to online participation in a similar manner to how they are often segregated and driven away, when not expelled, from the public square.
Another critical challenge to memory building in the digital age is government censorship. These practices are more common in conflict societies, where authorities often prevent the spread of online information and increase regulatory pressure on digital platforms to remove content that depicts abuses and human rights violations. Likewise, these governmental actions disproportionately impact marginalized minorities and vulnerable groups, who are often the target of repressive regimes that seek to remain in power and maintain their control over society.
Consider that in 2017 YouTube removed thousands of videos and various channels reporting on the Syrian conflict after its algorithms were modified to flag extremist content. YouTube, while attempting to urgently respond to government pressure to remove extremist propaganda from the platform, inadvertently deleted critical videos that could have been used to document atrocities in Syria. It was only through the tireless work of human rights groups that the information was restored online. These videos would not exist today if the Syrian Archive, an open-source platform that collects, verifies, and analyzes visual documentation of human rights violations in the country, had not promptly downloaded and stored them elsewhere.
Decisions about what information should be preserved in open-source platforms also pose critical challenges to representation: research in the hands of the few can affect the types of violations that are reported, who gets to hear and share those stories, and even how narratives of human rights violations are constructed. The “false positives” scandal illustrates this point, since these requests from members of the Colombian military could have led to silencing the experiences of victims of the armed conflict and shaping the online memory of these atrocities in favor of the perpetrators.
However, efforts around preserving the memory of the Colombian conflict on open-source platforms have offered a space for underrepresented groups to be heard. In fact, since new forms of violence have emerged in the country after the signature of the Peace Agreement, a joint collaboration between universities, editors, and journalists working in remote regions have learned from Wikimedia Argentina’s Wikiderechoshumanos and led the documentation of the recent murders of social leaders and human rights defenders on Wikipedia.
Consequently, groups designated to determine what should be allowed on the platforms or removed and archived should be representative enough so as to ensure that they reflect a wide range of opinions and lived experiences. Ensuring that there is a broader representation among archivists can empower more people to document their experiences and express their views in public.
3. Fostering the Engagement of Non-State Actors
Civil society organizations, journalists, academic institutions, and truth commissions have played a vital role in documenting atrocities in conflict societies, especially where there is an absence of state actors conducting investigations. The work of non-state actors can prove critical when preserving evidence and testimonies of human rights abuses in open-source platforms for creating a collective memory.
Collaborations between the stakeholders mentioned above and open-source platforms can remarkably assist the development of online archives, shaping collective memory in a manner that is informed by the stories of those who have lived and suffered the conflict. On Wikipedia, the joint collaboration between journalists, editors, and universities in Colombia mentioned earlier has served to document crimes against human rights defenders and social leaders in the country in order to ensure that these murders and abuses can be remembered collectively.
In an era where the internet is used to spread disinformation and propaganda across borders, counting on non-state actors’ expertise in documenting and archiving information related to human rights abuses becomes crucial. Furthermore, open-source platforms can also benefit from stakeholders playing an active role in developing policies around data preservation, including decisions around who should access an archive and for what purposes.
Overall, collaboration among multiple non-state actors facilitates knowledge sharing, improves memory preservation, and helps to establish sounder policies and practices when aiming to build the archival models needed for public remembrance in societies transitioning from conflict to peace.
Conclusions
Memory-building practices reveal the importance that victims place on their individual experiences, but also the significance of publicly acknowledging the harms they endured collectively. Making public the individual and collective stories of victims of human rights abuses contributes to restoring their dignity while also holding perpetrators accountable for severe atrocities.
The “false positives” scandal and the rapid response of open-source platforms in memorializing the occurrence of these atrocities illustrate how these technologies have become a vehicle for remembering the stories of victims of the armed conflict and their families. Information about these crimes would neither exist nor be accessible today if open-source platforms had not built and kept records about the thousands of innocent men who were passed off as guerrilla members to increase the body counts of military operations.
At the same time, open-source platforms can contribute to creating historical records that protect against those who deny the occurrence of these atrocities as well as against the reocurrence of such abuses in the future. Although several open-source platforms are already moving in this direction, there is still a long way to go. Some of the challenges these platforms face include finding mechanisms to protect the stories of marginalized groups, whose participation in the digital sphere is often jeopardized by power dynamics. Similarly, censorship practices are often present in societies transitioning from conflict to peace, where governments tend to increase regulatory pressure on online platforms to remove content that evidences abuses of power and human rights violations.
Ultimately, ensuring that open-source platforms can serve as a means to restore the voices of these marginalized groups depends largely on creating synergies among non-state actors. Their work can help document abuses that might otherwise go undocumented and, more importantly, contribute to shaping collective memory by establishing a version of history informed by the memories of those who suffered the consequences of a painful past.
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Correction: This blog post was corrected on 4 August 2023. In the original post, various lawsuits filed by high-ranking military officers in Colombia were incorrectly referred to as “an increase in takedown requests to online platforms.”
The second sentence in the second paragraph of the introduction now reads: “Recently, there were several lawsuits brought forth by high-ranking military officers to have their armed-conflict related information deleted from online platforms.” A Fundación para la Libertad de Prensa (2019) reference was removed, and an article from the El Espectador (2021) was added. Also responding to these corrections, a sentence in the third paragraph of the introduction as well as a sentence in the fifth paragraph of the second section, which incorrectly referred to “the aggressive takedown requests,” now read, respectively: “Such attempts to remove content […]” and “[…] these requests […].”
