Truth Decay in Online Conflict Documentation: A Digital Humanities Framework for Understanding and Measuring Information Degradation in Conflict

Abstract

The proliferation of digital conflict documentation has created an unprecedented archival paradox: evidence of atrocities is produced at scale while simultaneously being lost at scale. This thesis develops a digital humanities framework for understanding and measuring this phenomenon, termed Truth Decay — the systemic degradation of authentic conflict documentation in online environments. Drawing on information theory, archival science, platform governance scholarship, and computational digital humanities methods, the thesis proposes a three-layer model of Truth Decay that distinguishes between disappearance, decontextualization, and displacement as analytically distinct but interrelated mechanisms of information degradation. The theoretical framework is grounded in Shannon's (1948) mathematical account of information entropy, Abrams's (2026) multivalent model of digital preservation success, and Kavanagh and Rich's (2018) foundational account of Truth Decay as a systemic social phenomenon. The empirical component applies this framework through a proof-of-concept link rot analysis of 357 URLs drawn from documentation submitted in International Court of Justice proceedings concerning the genocide in Gaza — a dataset whose legal significance makes preservation failure particularly consequential. The analysis finds that 28% of evidentiary URLs lack any independent preservation copy in the Wayback Machine, with acute failure concentrated in Twitter/X visual media links, of which 92.6% are entirely unarchived. Critically, the news and other institutional domain category exhibits a preservation failure rate of 39.7% — higher than standard social media posts — dismantling the assumption that established journalistic sources offer more durable evidentiary foundations than social media links. These findings demonstrate that preservation failure in conflict documentation is not random but structurally produced, concentrated in the content types and platforms that current archiving infrastructure is least equipped to capture and that platform governance systems are most likely to suppress. The thesis contributes a replicable methodology for measuring documentary disappearance, a theoretical framework extensible to decontextualization and displacement analysis, and an empirically grounded argument for systemic reform in platform governance and preservation infrastructure. It situates these contributions within the political context of the Gaza genocide, arguing that Truth Decay is not merely a technical problem but a governance failure with direct consequences for international accountability.

Date of Award	2026
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Humanities and Social Science