How social media posts could be used as evidence of war crimes in Ukraine

Story originally published on Apr 16, 2022.

With every tweet and Facebook post she collects, Nadia Volkova hopes she can get a step closer to proving that Russia may have committed war crimes during its invasion of Ukraine. 

"What we're trying to do now is to follow the procedure of evidence collection to the best of our ability to the best standards that there are out there in the world with the hope that eventually it will see the inside of the courtroom and it will be admitted as evidence," said Volkova in an interview with Day 6 guest host Nicole Martin.

Volkova is a human rights lawyer with the Ukrainian Legal Advisory Group, which is part of a coalition that is collecting and archiving social media posts that contain potential evidence. 

Volkova said there is a procedure for collecting this data that also requires verification. She said her group is at the first stage of this process. They must record when and where the information was found, and what platform it was on.

Next, they check the veracity of the post.

"If we focus on a particular episode or a particular incident, then we would have to verify this information using different tools like the geolocation, spatial location … all these locations," said Volkova.

"Then after that … for example, if we have photos with faces at the time of the incident, then there is also tools that help to identify the person, for example, on the photo."

This kind of work has been going on since 2015, said Volkova, and in Syria and Yemen as well.

Case building

In the age of social media, a video can be posted and just as quickly be taken down. That means evidence could be lost before Volkova and her group can get to it. So they are working with big tech companies to try and save some of those files, though it's an imperfect process. 

Sam Dubberley is the head of digital investigations at Human Rights Watch. He said the work that Volkova and others are doing, including Human Rights Watch, is important because it provides another layer of evidence to use in documenting potential war crimes by any country.

"In Ukraine right now, we are getting volumes of information and content that we haven't seen," said Dubberley. 

The hope is the information they gather can build a case for future war crimes charges. Dubberley said it's important that social media evidence isn't the sole foundation of a case, and that there are other pieces of evidence that can be included. 

"This is another layer. This is another source of information and evidence we can use," said Dubberley. 

The social media posts are used along with firsthand interviews and satellite images, for example.

"For us it's about bringing all this information together. We don't rely on the content from social media alone."

Written by Philip Drost. Produced by Pedro Sanchez.