Table of Contents

Background

Motivation

Israel has been breaking international law and violating fundamental human rights since its foundation and especially after the genocide since October 2023. The apartheid system, forced migration, war crimes and genocide committed by Israel and Western allies has been documented by Palestinian journalists and Palestinian victims, but also Israeli aggressors on social media. These documentation can be used for forensic purposes to persecute states at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), persecute political decision-makers at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and individual criminals, eg Israeli soldiers or lone soldiers, at national courts.

To protect these aggressors, social media platforms are in the process of removing such content from their platforms under pressure from Western governments, influence of their Zionist owners, eg Metaverse (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram), or after Zionist take-overs, eg TikTok (USA). Therefore, it is of special importance to secure the content of these accounts for forensic purposes.

Below I propose technical solutions for self-archiving of social media content for forensic documentation of the Gaza genocide by Israel & allies. Since self-archiving can be a challenging task, I recommend using the support of organizations and communities which share these interests, eg the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPO) [1].

Other private archives for forensic documentation of the Gaza genocide by Israel & allies are listed in another blog [Link].

Figure 1: Meta deleted account of Palestinian Journalist Saleh Al-jafarawi

Warning to Reporters

Corporate platforms aim to appropriate and control the provided content and are often under zionist or (US) government control. Therefore, they will (shadow) ban, temporarily or permanently remove content or accounts and create technical barriers (“APIcalypse”) to archive the content [2]. Therefore, one should make sure one still controls and owns one’s media and dcouments (who, when, where, what, how) and archives them for future forensic use.

While there are some limited archiving (export) functions for one’s own account, these archives are often not self-contained, eg as pure text files with links to on-line images and on-line videos, but not the off-line files themselves.

Therefore, professional journalists, citizen journalists, activists or private citizens or any other individual reporting crimes should:

post their content on popular, corporate platforms to maximize reach to the public (eg, Facebook, x.com, instagram.com, linkedin.com, youtube.com)
(cross-)post their content also on federated, open-source platforms (eg, Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, Bluesky) to avoid (shadow) banning and temporary or permanent removing content or user accounts and blocking the archiving of content on other systems.
store the content in their own private clouds and make the content publicly available (eg Nextcloud)
tag in your post and share the material with other organizations who may legally persecute the aggressor, eg the International Criminal Court (for the prosecution of individuals) and the International Court of Justice (for the prosecution of states), and private organisations like Hind Rajab Foundation or Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights.

Personal Solutions

The cross-posting of relevant content across different social media platforms (corporate vs private, centralized vs federated, legal systems) will diversify and mitigate the risk of completely deleting forensic content by zionist platforms.

Legal Solutions

Depending on national law, eg in Germany, social media content may be regarded as private property. To protect social media accounts, eg of killed Palestinian journalist, to be deleted, they may state a Last Will (Testament) that there social media accounts are inherited to their remaining family, trusted friends, or trusted organisations, eg Hind Rajab Foundation.

Technical Solutions

Self-hosted Solutions (Open-Source)

Webrecorder provides open source tools for everyone to archive the complex, interactive Web:

https://webrecorder.net/browsertrix/
High-fidelity crawling, innovative quality assurance, and collaborative organization empower you to preserve, curate, and share archived web content with confidence.
https://webrecorder.net/archivewebpage/
Archive websites as you browse with the ArchiveWeb.page Chrome extension or standalone desktop app.
https://webrecorder.net/replaywebpage/
Browser-based Web Archive Viewer, explore and replay interactive archived webpages directly in your browser.
https://webrecorder.net/developer-tools/
Developer Tools, Utilities, packages, and scripts for building your own web archiving tools.

Warning! Webrecorder automatically shares any links to be archived with the Internet Archive, which is problematic if you store private accounts with potentially sensitive data.

ArchiveBox.io is a popular open-source and self-hosted tool that allows users and organizations to archive entire social media pages and websites. It retains full control over saved data, supporting HTML snapshots, media downloads, and WARC exports. You can run it on your own servers to maintain independent archives of Instagram profiles or Twitter posts.

Auto Archiver (Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit) can systematically save posts, videos, and images from multiple social media platforms including X/Twitter. It stores both textual and visual copies (via screenshots and downloaded media) locally or in storage services like Google Drive. It supports automation through CSV, API keys, and command-line setups, suitable for investigative uses.

Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine can snapshot and preserve public posts or profiles from X/Twitter. While it’s not a full offline archive, it records most pages and makes them retrievable even if deleted later (cf “Save Page Now”).

pywb (command-line tool) is a Python 3 web archiving toolkit for replaying web archives large and small as accurately as possible. The toolkit now also includes new features for creating high-fidelity web archives. This toolset forms the foundation of Webrecorder project, but also provides a generic web archiving toolkit that is used by other web archives, including the traditional “Wayback Machine” functionality.

Instaloader (command-line tool) is a tool to download pictures (or videos) along with their captions and other metadata from Instagram.

Corporate Solutions

Arkiwera.se is a commercial-grade social media archiving service that supports Facebook, X.com, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. It captures posts, comments, reactions, and metadata while remaining compliant with each platform’s terms of service. The data can be downloaded as ZIP or WARC files for long-term, separate-server storage.

Note: After a request for proposal to archive my LinkedIn account, I got a quote of 1000EUR (!!!) for a single instance by Arkiwera, which is a ridiculous price beyond discussion. I interpret this as that they are either not interest in archiving activist accounts (for Palestine) or they are targeting corporate accounts.

Anonymity of Public Archives

All centralized and decentralized, identifiable archives can be targeted by Zionist organisation via internet protocol addresses. Therefore, it may be recommended to hide archives in the dark web via the Tor network, which prevents bad actors from identifying and geolocating the server and the provider. Other forms of attacks, eg denial of service attacks, may happen, which, however, will can be defended against and only prevent additional users from accessing the server, but do not threaten to remove the content in the archive itself or the owner of the archive.

For the storage of large amounts of data, ie multiple Terabytes of data, a cost effective solutions maybe providing a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) system (eg, QNAP, Synology, Buffalo), which can run Docker containers and thereby, eg the ArchiveBox software. This NAS can then be made available in the Tor network as a hidden service and will not be identifiable. The server can be found though via Dark Web search engines, eg Ahmia.fi.

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