Seeing through the fog of war

Read more: "Mapping the human cost of Syria's uprising"

THE clich? about truth being the first casualty of war is gradually being eroded by technology - at least when it comes to counting the actual casualties.

Volunteers in Syria and the US - the former taking considerable personal risk - are using data mined from news reports and crowdsourced from Twitter, Facebook and the like to tally up the dead in the country's uprising (see "System tracks violence in Syrian uprising"). Their efforts are especially valuable as the UN has admitted that accurate figures are hard to come by. It relies largely on Syrian government statistics.

The figures are nowhere near as large or contentious as similar estimates for the civilian body count in Iraq in 2006, which were an order of magnitude higher than the invading coalition's official tally (New Scientist, 21 April 2007, p 44). But they still add to the pressure on the Assad regime to end its campaign of violence and human rights' violations.

It is in the interests of justice to make body counts as accurate as possible. Much has been made of how technology such as Twitter helped to foster the Arab spring. It seems those same technologies are now exerting pressure from the other direction.

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