A video of a strike is a claim about a place, a time and a cause. Each of the three is checked separately, and a video that fails one is not a weaker piece of evidence — it is a different event.
Preserve before you analyse.
- Capture the earliest instance you can find, not the copy that reached you. Reposts are re-encoded, cropped, and captioned by people who were not there.
- Keep the original file untouched, record a hash of it, and work on a copy. A file you have cropped or enhanced is your work, not the source's.
- Record where you got it, the exact time you retrieved it, and the account that posted it. Material disappears; the record of retrieval is what survives a deletion.
Where. Geolocate against independent imagery: the shape of a roofline, the position of a mast, road markings, the pattern of a fence. One matching building is a coincidence; three fixed features in the right relationship to each other is a location.
When. Chronolocate: shadow direction and length, weather that can be checked against records, construction that appeared or disappeared between known dates, foliage. The upload time is the latest it can have been filmed, and nothing more.
Metadata helps and proves nothing. It is trivially removed and trivially forged, most platforms strip it on upload, and its absence says nothing at all about authenticity.
What is actually shown. Distinguish what is visible from what is being asserted about it. Damage is visible; the munition that caused it usually is not, and the identity of who fired it almost never is.
Do not amplify what you have not verified. Repeating a wrong location for a strike is not a small error: it is a claim about who did it, and it gets people killed and cases lost.
Look after yourself. Repeated exposure to graphic material causes real harm. Work in sessions, turn off autoplay, mute by default, and stop.
Source. OHCHR and the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley, Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations, published by OHCHR at https://www.ohchr.org/ ; Eurojust and the Genocide Network, Documenting international crimes and human rights violations, https://www.eurojust.europa.eu/publication/documenting-international-crimes-and-human-rights-violations
What this is not. The association is not an investigative authority. This describes how published protocols say such material is handled, so that a member who finds something does not destroy it.