Archiving the Gaza Genocide on Instagram
📌 16.1% of Instagram posts published by Gaza content creators were geo-tagged.
📌 4.2% of content was automatically flagged by Meta's algorithm as graphic or sensitive.
📌 "TikTok Genocide" archives over 10,000 videos by hand.
📌 "SaltPillar" has archived 300,000 videos and 1 million images by developing a custom data scraping tool.
🗓️ After the events of October 7, 2023, the Israeli army unleashed a withering assault on the Gaza Strip that has continued to the time of writing (April, 2025). In that time, it is believed that over a hundred thousand Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, and as many or more have been injured. Nearly the entire population has been internally displaced. Most buildings, including hospitals, many schools and places of worship, have been obliterated.
📸 For unfiltered coverage, the world has relied upon a handful of news outlets which had equipment and crews already based on the ground in Gaza prior to October 7. This includes ordinary Palestinian residents of Gaza who have taken it upon themselves to film, photograph, and narrate the violence and hardship. Social media content creators, such as Hind Khoudary or Bisan Owdeh, have documented the genocide firsthand.
❗Social media companies are not configured to preserve content for the sake of collective memory. According to their business model, original uploaded content is the property of the content creator, and it is their prerogative to delete or hide it – even, for example, if it amounts to evidence of war crimes.
🔎 To fill the void left by social media companies, civil society organizations and concerned citizens across the world have been making sincere efforts to archive social media content pertaining to the genocide. This has been documented by «Arabi Facts Hub» in a research paper titled: 'Archiving the Gaza Genocide on Instagram.'
🎯 The Accountability Archive provides a platform to receive crowd-sourced data on journalists, politicians, or other public figures, who after October 7 applauded and encouraged the genocide or ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
🎯 TikTok Genocide is an effort to archive videos uploaded to TikTok – often by Israeli soldiers deployed in Gaza – demonstrating evidence of potential war crimes.
🎯 SaltPillar is a Tech For Palestine project focused on archiving Instagram content with relation to the Gaza genocide. This involves archiving images, videos, text, and metadata of content creators (320+ during the time of writing) posting since the outbreak of the war until present.
📥 To learn more about the role these initiatives play in confronting the restrictions imposed by social media platforms, and the security and digital challenges they face, visit our website:
