Like every other large social platform, YouTube has come under fire for not doing enough to remove videos that contain hate speech and disinformation. The Google-owned company has said repeatedly that it is trying to get better at doing so. But in some cases, removing videos because they contain graphic imagery of violence can be a bad thing. That’s the case that Syrian human-rights activist and video archivist Hadi Al Khatib makes in a video that the New York Times published on Wednesday in its Opinion section. Khatib co-produced the clip with Dia Kayyali, who works for Witness, an organization that helps people use digital tools to document human rights violations. In the video, Khatib notes that videos of bombings the Syrian government has carried out on its own people—including attacks with barrel bombs, which Human Rights Watch and other groups consider to be a war crime—are important evidence, but that YouTube has removed more than 200,000 such videos.

“I’m pleading for YouTube and other companies to stop this censorship,” Khatib says in the piece. “All these takedowns amount to erasing history.” There are similar policies at Facebook and Twitter, both of which have also removed videos that included evidence of government attacks in Syria and elsewhere because they were flagged as being violent or propaganda. The problem, Kayyali says, is that most of the large social platforms use artificial intelligence to detect and remove content, but an automated filter can’t tell the difference between ISIS propaganda and a video documenting government atrocities. Many of the platforms have been placing even more emphasis on using automated filters because they are under increasing pressure from governments in the US and elsewhere to act more quickly when removing content. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has bragged that automated systems take down more than 90 percent of the terrorism-related content posted to the service before it is ever flagged by a human being.

Khatib runs a project called The Syrian Archive, which has been tracking and preserving as many videos of war crimes in that country as it can. But YouTube’s policies are not making it easy, he says. And user-generated content is a crucial part of the documentation of what is happening in Syria, Khatib notes, because getting access to parts of the country where such attacks are taking place is extremely dangerous, even for experienced aid agencies, journalists, and human rights organizations. YouTube hasn’t just been removing videos either: Since 2017, it has taken down a number of accounts that were trying to document the Syrian conflict, including pages run by groups such as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the Violation Documentation Center, and the Aleppo Media Center. Khatib says YouTube reinstated some of the videos it took down after he complained earlier this year, but that hundreds of thousands still remain unavailable.

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The Syrian activist isn’t the only one to raise a warning flag about this problem. Eliot Higgins, the investigative journalist formerly known as Brown Moses who now runs a crowdsourced journalism project called Bellingcat, started raising this issue in 2014, when he said Facebook was taking down pages and accounts that were documenting Syrian government attacks using the banned chemical Sarin gas. In many cases, both YouTube and Facebook have been targeted by pro-government forces who flag and report videos incorrectly, hoping to have them taken down. It’s not just Syrian content that is being taken down—Khatib says activists in Sudan, Yemen, and Burma have also had similar problems with important content being removed. Some have been able to have videos and accounts reinstated by YouTube, but the process is opaque and time-consuming.

The major web platforms now have a shared database of videos to use for their automated removals, a partnership called the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, but the exact criteria used to define what constitutes a terrorist video is unknown. In his Times op-ed, Khatib recommends that Google, Facebook, and Twitter hire content moderators in the countries where they are removing such videos, so that they can understand the context behind a video. The platforms, he says, could also work with researchers to assess these takedowns and in some cases reverse them if necessary.

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Here’s more on the platforms and takedowns:

Simple solutions : A report that Khatib co-authored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Witness talks about takedowns affecting Syria as well as groups in Chechnya and Turkey, and warns that: “The temptation to look to simple solutions to the complex problem of extremism online is strong, but governments and companies alike must not be hasty in rushing to solutions that compromise freedom of expression, the right to assembly, and the right to access information.”

: A report that Khatib co-authored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Witness talks about takedowns affecting Syria as well as groups in Chechnya and Turkey, and warns that: “The temptation to look to simple solutions to the complex problem of extremism online is strong, but governments and companies alike must not be hasty in rushing to solutions that compromise freedom of expression, the right to assembly, and the right to access information.” One hour : The European Union is considering a new content-takedown law that would require platforms such as Facebook and Google to remove terrorist content and hate speech within one hour of it being flagged. The legislation would also force them to use a filter to ensure content isn’t re-uploaded, and, if they fail to do either of these things, governments are allowed to fine them up to 4 percent of their global annual revenue. For a company such as Facebook, that could mean fines of as much as $680 million.

: The European Union is considering a new content-takedown law that would require platforms such as Facebook and Google to remove terrorist content and hate speech within one hour of it being flagged. The legislation would also force them to use a filter to ensure content isn’t re-uploaded, and, if they fail to do either of these things, governments are allowed to fine them up to 4 percent of their global annual revenue. For a company such as Facebook, that could mean fines of as much as $680 million. Santa Clara principles: New America’s Open Technology Institute released a report earlier this year that looked at how well the major platforms had been sticking to the Santa Clara Principles, recommendations that were made by the group and other organizations last year, aimed at getting Google, Facebook, and Twitter to be more transparent about why they removed content. All three companies report takedowns, and in some cases say who asked for the removal (if it was a government) but don’t say much about why.

Other notable stories:

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Mathew Ingram is CJR’s chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg.