Help the Accountability Archive store its data.

Who are we?

The Accountability Archive is a crowdsourced archive of posts, articles, and statements by politicians, journalists, and public figures that endorse or encourage genocidal violence in Gaza, or defame pro-Palestinian activists and/or protesters. The Archive was co-founded by Dr. Philip Proudfoot, an anthropologist whose research focuses on economic inequality, forced migration, and humanitarianism, and Mahdi Zaidan, who has worked on similar data gathering projects centred on the Syrian civil war. It has grown to a group of about a dozen researchers, activists, archivists, tech experts, translators, and lawyers. We are based in the UK but the group has representation from around the globe.

What are the aims of the Accountability Archive?

As Amnesty International’s Scott Edwards says, “The explosion of content shared on various digital platforms in recent years has given human rights investigators the unprecedented ability to research grave abuses…” Our increasingly accessible and online lives means that the both the genocidal violence in Gaza and the reaction to it globally is available on social media to a degree never before seen in a prior conflict. And yet, digital evidence is extremely fragile. It can be deleted with a stroke of the keyboard. Social media companies have aggressively removed evidence of war crimes that they see as violating their terms of service, like when YouTube deleted video evidence of crimes in Libya in 2017.

The Archive was founded as a response to the feelings of watching in horror as Western officials and journalists egged on, justified, or provided cover for the genocidal violence in its early days despite the mass death being shown to us on social media. We remembered the pundits and politicians who manufactured consent for the disastrous Iraq war and how nearly none of them faced any consequences for their roles in the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. With this in mind, we created a means for people across the world to log statements from their journalists, politicians, and public figures that they believe are contributing to or condoning the atrocities in Gaza. We want the Archive to be available to researchers, journalists, and lawyers for their future endeavours. The hope is that this dataset will be useful for the creation of the historical record, as well a tool for academic research and legal cases.

In the long term, we hope to demonstrate the usefulness of this crowdsourcing technique for studying genocides and war crimes as they happen. There is scope for the Archive to become a global tool, allowing those monitoring all conflicts to gather evidence in real time.

How far along is the project?

Currently, we are in the Collection Phase of the project. We have created a bespoke submission portal on our webpage and have collected already 1,500 pieces of evidence from our nearly 27,000 followers on X (Twitter). Our tech team are looking into how to safely allow people to submit media not in the form of links to posts and articles, such as video and screenshots, as we have had requests to submit many different forms of evidence.

We are in the process of registering with the UK Charity Commission and are putting together our trustee board. We have also started having discussions with more established organisations about becoming institutional partners.

The next part of the project will be the Analysis Phase in which we will begin sifting through the crowdsourced evidence and publishing the results. Currently, our plans for the first two publications will be a methodology report explaining our process and a high-level analysis that examines common themes and motifs that have been identified in the dataset.

What do we need the money for?

The money we are aiming to raise will serve two functions. First, it will help us to gather the overheads required to securely hold the data we are collecting. Up to now we have been fronting the costs, however, our variable costs will increase significantly with the amount of data we collect. This is especially true for when we begin to make the data available for download, as there are egress charges each time we download the dataset from the cloud storage. The numbers below are estimates of our overheads for keeping the archive for its first year.

Second, we want to begin entering our analysis phase, and we have costed the hours of the translators, analysts and archivers that will be required to write our first two papers. One of these papers will be a methodology paper outlining the steps we have taken to create the archive. The second will be an overview paper that outlines the general themes and motifs found within the data, giving a rough taxonomy that will help structure our future research. While we will need to rely on crowdfunding for these first two papers, we hope future research will be completed once we have an institutional partner who can help us secure funding.

While fortunately thus far we have been able to rely on the work of volunteers, we believe in paying those who work on this project a UK living wage of £12 per hour for their vital efforts. We have attempted to keep costs to a minimum, as evidenced by our budget below. Any funds raised beyond the projects that we have costed as part of this first year will be donated to MAP. We will be fully transparent with our spending, posting regular spending and budget updates.

Total: £3670