As I write this, the genocide in Gaza being perpetrated against the Palestinian people continues unabated, with the explicit support of many western governments and politicians across the political spectrum.

Facilitation of war crimes is generally recognized as a war crime in International Humanitarian Law, the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court and Customary International Humanitarian Law (I know this thanks to my many years spent as an ICRC field delegate, but you can do your own further research on this point if you’d prefer).

In an age where public statements facilitating of the war crimes happening in Gaza are shared primarily on Twitter and in media interviews, the documentation of these statements is an important issue.

Many people believe that what is on the internet is forever, but one look at r/DataHoarder will show plentiful examples of this not necessarily being the case.

If you would like to help document instances of people responsible for facilitating war crimes in Gaza, keep reading for a step by step guide of how you can use Notado to do this.

Getting Started⌗

Archiving Comments on Twitter⌗

  • In the browser, right click on the “2h”, “3h” etc. link at the top of the Tweet which shows how long ago it was posted, then select “Send Comment Link to Notado”
  • On iOS, press the share button on a Tweet, then “Share via”, then select the “Save Comment to Notado” action
  • If possible, an archival copy of the URL will also be saved to the Web Archive automatically for users with subscriptions

Archiving Comments on Reddit, Mastodon and Lemmy etc.⌗

  • In the browser, right click on the comment permalink buttons (on Mastodon this is usually “2h”, “3h” etc. like on Twitter), then select “Send Comment Link to Notado”
  • On iOS, press the share button on a comment, then “Share via”, then select the “Save Comment to Notado” action
  • If possible, an archival copy of the URL will also be saved to the Web Archive for users with subscriptions

Archiving Highlights from Press Articles⌗

  • Highlight the selected text your browser, then select “Send Selection to Notado”
  • If possible, an archival copy of the URL will also be saved to the Web Archive for users with subscriptions

Why Use Notado for This?⌗

Notado was never intended to be used for something like this. Let’s just get that out of the way first.

Metadata and Archiving⌗

When you save Tweets and comments from social media sites with Notado, not only do they get automatically archived on web.archive.org, but they are also enriched with basic metadata which makes it easy to filter by source and by username.

Additionally, saving this way also ensures that the unique identifiers for each Tweet, comment etc. are preserved, even if the posts themselves deleted in the future.

Multi-Lingual Full-Text Search and Tagging⌗

While filtering on basic metadata and a powerful, fuzzy multi-lingual full-text search engine are both helpful, documentation of information like this also benefits from more granular additional metadata added in the form of tags.

Tagging Automation⌗

With Notado you can set rules to automatically tag content that comes from certain users or websites. For example, you could tag all content saved from the @POTUS and @JoeBiden Twitter accounts with #dnc and #joebiden:

IF url CONTAINS ANY OF "twitter.com/JoeBiden" "x.com/JoeBiden" "twitter.com/POTUS" "x.com/POTUS" TAG "dnc" "joe-biden"

Tagging rules can also be use to automatically tag based on dog-whistles used in the content saved, or to create a common tag for people with multiple accounts with different usernames on different platforms.

If there is content that needs to be tagged manually, you can also use tag aliases to create shortcuts which don’t sacrifice the descriptive nature of your tags, so you could use an alias like this to automatically expand #wcig to #war-crimes-in-gaza:

wcig => war-crimes-in-gaza

Ease of Backup⌗

Perhaps most importantly, a full backup of your entire library of saved content is immediately available to you at any time.

Caveats⌗

Notado does not currently and will not in the future support the saving of multimedia content.

Should You Do This?⌗

I’ll start by saying that I personally am not mentally or emotionally capable of doing this.

There are very serious concerns around repeated long-term exposure to violent and dehumanizing content that should not be overlooked or minimized.

If you are an experienced genocide or war crimes researcher who has experience documenting instances of war crime facilitation, and who is already engaged in the documentation of war crimes being committed in Gaza, please reach out to me on Twitter and I will be happy to set you up with a permanently free account on Notado.