<div style="text-align: justify; "><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Platforms remove graphic videos, often using artificial intelligence - but footage that may help prosecutions can be taken down without being archived.</span><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Meta and YouTube say they aim to balance their duties to bear witness and protect users from harmful content.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But Alan Rusbridger, who sits on Meta's Oversight Board, says the industry has been "overcautious" in its moderation.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The platforms say they do have exemptions for graphic material when it is in the public interest - but when the BBC attempted to upload footage documenting attacks on civilians in Ukraine, it was swiftly deleted.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Artificial intelligence (AI) can remove harmful and illegal content at scale. When it comes to moderating violent images from wars, however, machines lack the nuance to identify human rights violations.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Human rights groups say there is an urgent need for social media companies to prevent this information from vanishing.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"You can see why they have developed and train their machines to, the moment they see something that looks difficult or traumatic, to take it down," Mr Rusbridger told the BBC. The Meta Oversight Board that he sits on was set up by Mark Zuckerberg and is known as a kind of independent "supreme court" for the company, which owns Facebook and Instagram.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"I think the next question for them is how do we develop the machinery, whether that's human or AI, to then make more reasonable decisions," Mr Rusbridger, a former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, adds.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">No-one would deny tech firms' right to police content, says US Ambassador for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaak: "I think where the concern happens is when that information suddenly disappears."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Ihor Zakharenko, a former travel journalist, encountered this in Ukraine. Since the Russian invasion he has been documenting attacks on civilians.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The BBC met him in a suburb of Kyiv where one year ago men, women and children had been shot dead by Russian troops while trying to flee occupation.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">He filmed the bodies - at least 17 of them - and burnt-out cars.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">He wanted to post the videos online so the world would see what happened and to counter the Kremlin's narrative. But when he uploaded them to Facebook and Instagram they were swiftly taken down.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Russians themselves were saying those were fakes, [that] they didn't touch civilians, they fought only with the Ukrainian army," Ihor said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">We uploaded Ihor's footage on to Instagram and YouTube using dummy accounts.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Instagram took down three of the four videos within a minute.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At first, YouTube applied age restrictions to the same three, but 10 minutes later removed them all.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">We tried again - but they failed to upload altogether. An appeal to restore the videos on the basis that they included evidence of war crimes was rejected. BBC</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">bnbd24/kh</div>