#orphanimages

The documentary The Uprising, by Peter Snowdon, portrays the amateur footage shot during the Arab Revolution started in 2010. The protesters - motivated to fight against their oppressive regime - claimed that they were documenting such raw scenes so that the rest of the world could see. The movie not only depicts peaceful moments of the demonstrations, but also bloody ones. For instance, vehicles running over citizens or street shootings. Enrico De Angelis, in the chapter of the book The Arab Archive called “The Controversial Archive: Negotiating Horror Images in Syria”, questions the morality of showing such raw footage - defined by him as “horror images.” Is it fair to show dead bodies for the sake of triggering an international reaction? Particularly, is it right to show pictures of deaths of the Arab world while those of the Western world are often hidden?

A representative example for the fact that Western world dead bodies are more dignified, in respect to the ones of the Arab world, is the way in which the yellow vests deceased were honored. The yellow vests movement, started in Paris in 2018, protests against the rise in fuel taxes. Since the start of the yellow vests demonstrations, 11 people died. Unlike the “horror-images” of the Arab world, the dead bodies of these people have never been publicly shared. Rather, the yellow vests dead members have been honored on the streets of the cities with signs (Picture A).

Picture A. Taken in Carcassonne (France) on December 22, 2018.

Fallen yellow vests members have been also identified as their names and date of decease were clearly written in the signs (Picture B), informations that are not often specified in the Arab “horror-images.” Because often pictures in the Arab world lack contextualization (Where were they shot? Who is the subject? etc.), they may be considered “orphan-images” in line with De Angelis’ definition. Pictures are defined orphans by De Angelis when they are “circulating mostly without the name of the photographer or the photographed. Often without even a caption or any other reference” (page 78).

Picture B. Taken in Paris (France) on January 19, 2019.

The fact that there is a clear difference between how the Arab and the Western world share and frame their deaths is very problematic. Both the yellow vests movement and the Arab revolution have been bloody. Yet, on one hand, the deceased have been honored and identified without showing their corpses, while on the other hand, the images of the deaths have been publicly shared without specifying their names or circumstances. What gives to the Western corpses the right to be more dignified?

In the same book where Enrico De Angelis writes, Donatella Della Ratta, in the chapter “Why the Syrian Archive is no Longer About Syria”, questions some of the dynamics of the Syrian archive which - in the end - apply not only to the Syrian political situation, but to the whole world. Commercial content moderation (CCM), defined as the field in which workers clean up the web from content such as hate speech or child pornography, is core in this discussion. Gatekeepers, the people who work as commercial content moderators, have only a few seconds to decide which content should be removed and which content should be kept online. For this reason, the margin of risk that they make the wrong decision is very high. Moreover, given the fact that they are employed by big corporations, such as Facebook, demonstrates that there is an inner structure behind CCM which is biased. In other words, standardized algorithmic procedures or human gatekeepers tend to work at the advantage of the company they are employed in, which proves that the commercial content moderation system is flawed by design.

In the case of the yellow vests movement, gatekeeping worked in favor of the activists on Facebook. French social media journalist Vincent Glad called Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg the Yellow Vest movement’s “best ally.” This is because the algorithm of the platform overemphasized the content posted by the yellow vests protesters. “After a few likes for a group, we find ourselves submerged with that group’s content in our news feeds. The new algo pushed the Yellow Vests into a ‘filter bubble’ in which they hardly see content anymore that isn’t yellow” says Glad in the same article. Therefore, content moderation was of help to the yellow vests movements as it put into disadvantage the spread of counter-informations, such as Macron’s side of the story.