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Digital evidence is disappearing faster than we can save it. From Melitopol to Mariupol, residents of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories post on Telegram and X knowing their phones could be searched or their accounts suspended. Every shaky video of a checkpoint, every screenshot of a curfew notice, every geotag on a destroyed school is a fragment of history under siege. The Free Press Foundation treats this material as the raw archive of a people documenting their own occupation in real time.
Archiving is not the same as downloading files. It requires chain-of-custody discipline, source protection, legal review, and patient funding for unglamorous infrastructure. Readers in Sydney and Perth may wonder why a Kyiv organisation asks for support from the other side of the world. The answer lies in shared democratic values and in a recognition that what is preserved today will shape the moral and legal judgments of tomorrow.
Posts on social platforms are designed to be ephemeral. Algorithms bury content within hours, suspended accounts vanish, and platforms can comply with takedown requests without warning. In occupied territories the fragility is compounded by the physical risks of being seen filming. A clip uploaded from a Kherson apartment may last a week, a day, or an hour before it disappears, taking its metadata with it.
The result is a widening gap between events and their record. Historians of past conflicts worked from letters and diaries. Researchers of this war will work primarily from phones, which are far less forgiving of neglect than cardboard boxes in a state archive.
International prosecutors have already built indictments on social media material. Footage geolocated to Bucha, Kramatorsk, and Izyum has appeared in investigations by the International Criminal Court, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, and national war crimes units in Europe. Australian Federal Police officers seconded to the Joint Investigation Team have drawn on publicly posted videos to triage cases.
A saved post, properly hashed and dated, can be authenticated in court years after the original account is gone. Without that work, denials become easier and accountability becomes a slogan rather than a verdict.
Australia has its own tradition of treating fragile records as a public good. The Australian War Memorial in Canberra holds correspondence, diaries, and photographs from past wars that once seemed equally doomed to loss. State libraries in Adelaide and Brisbane have spent decades recovering radio broadcasts and oral histories that were never expected to survive.
This habit shapes how many Australians approach the Ukrainian crisis. The same instinct that keeps a veteran's letters in a Melbourne shoebox supports a server in Kyiv storing geolocated footage from a village no foreign journalist can reach. Our reporting on the importance of local news in rural Ukrainian communities shows how village correspondents and social media posters are often the same people.
Capturing content is the easy part; preserving context is harder. Archivists must record the original URL, upload time, device type, and any edits. They must verify that the location shown matches the claimed location, often by cross-referencing open-source mapping tools, satellite imagery, and weather records. A video of a destroyed bridge is much stronger evidence if shadows match the time of upload.
Source protection is equally demanding. A post from inside an occupied town can endanger the person who filmed it, their neighbours, and anyone visible in the background. Teams sometimes delay publication, blur faces, or restrict access to vetted researchers. None of this is cheap.
The materials we collect most often fall into recognisable categories.
Archiving cannot be done well by people who do not understand the risks. The foundation runs hostile-environment courses and digital-security workshops for journalists near the front line. The story of how safety drills prevented fatalities during a missile strike is a reminder that training is survival, not paperwork.
ABC regional bureaus in Darwin increasingly send staff to cover overseas conflicts, and several have drawn on foundation materials. The same protocols that protect a reporter in Donetsk can protect a cameraman in the Pacific.
Every saved file sits at the intersection of several legal regimes. Australia's Privacy Act 1988 restricts publication of personal information about identifiable individuals, even when posted publicly overseas, while the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 limits how material linked to foreign interference can be shared. Ukrainian law treats some occupation-era footage as state secrets regardless of where it is held.
Archivists need legal counsel, not just server space. A clumsy release can harm a source or expose the foundation to defamation claims under Australia's plaintiff-friendly uniform defamation laws.
No single approach fits every archive. The table below compares the main models currently used for social media material from conflict zones.
| Model | Speed of capture | Source protection | Cost per post | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bulk automated scraping | Very high | Low | Low | Open-source intelligence feeds |
| Manual curated collection | Low | High | High | War crimes investigations |
| Hybrid on-the-ground partnership | Medium | High | Medium | Long-term historical archive |
| Academic partnership | Slow | Medium | Medium | Educational and research use |
| Newsroom-only retention | Fast | Medium | Low | Active reporting desks |
Beyond the technology, the foundation focuses on practical commitments that keep the archive alive.
Evidence is a kind of journalism too. If you would like to support the archive and the foundation's mission, you can help sustain our work or simply follow our public reporting as it develops.
