When news disappears, who controls digital memory?

In September 2026, a boatman named Abbas Mallik stood before Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal and described what he said he had witnessed more than 15 years earlier on the Baleshwar River, near the Sundarbans.

According to Mallik, officers of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) would arrive around midnight with detainees whose hands and eyes were bound. Local shops were ordered to close, and their lights switched off. The detainees were then taken by boat into deeper water, where, Mallik testified, an officer he knew as “Zia sir,” former RAB officer Ziaul Ahsan, would shoot some of them at close range. Their bodies, he alleged, were weighted with cement sacks and thrown into the river. Others were taken toward the Sundarbans, killed, and later presented to the press as victims of “gunfights.”

Buried in Mallik’s testimony was a second, quieter detail, one that matters just as much for understanding how enforced disappearance actually works. His younger brother, Alkas, disappeared in 2011 after speaking publicly about RAB operations. The family searched RAB offices in several cities. When they eventually tried to file a police report, Mallik testified that officers refused to record the names of Ziaul Ahsan or RAB despite repeated requests. The defence has challenged Mallik’s credibility; the tribunal will weigh the evidentiary value of his account.

What interests me here goes beyond the brutality itself.

For more than a decade, I have worked with and followed human rights documentation in Bangladesh. Across that period, one pattern has recurred with almost mechanical regularity alongside serious violations: denial that they happened at all.

Sociologically, this denial deserves attention in its own right. An enforced disappearance does not end with the physical suffering of someone abducted and held for months or years in a secret cell. An extrajudicial killing does not end when a body is recovered and described in the press as the outcome of a “gunfight.” A second struggle begins immediately after, over whether the victim’s account will be believed, whether the family’s memory will be recognized and whether the event itself will survive in the public record.

This process is called epistemic erasure: the gradual weakening, discrediting or removal of accessible knowledge about an injustice. The violence acts first on the body of the victim. Denial then acts on society’s capacity to know what happened. When that denial becomes powerful enough, it hands the perpetrator an extraordinary advantage. If nothing happened, there is no crime to investigate, no victim whose testimony merits recognition and eventually no perpetrator left to hold accountable.

This dynamic is especially potent in cases of enforced disappearance because disappearance is, by design, an absence of knowledge. In such cases, the family knows where the person is, and authorities deny ever detaining him; in doing so, no arrest record exists. Feeling the uncertainty, witnesses are often too frightened to speak, and if the disappeared person survives and returns years later, the very absence of an official record can be turned against him and used to cast doubt on his own story.

Absence of evidence begins to masquerade as evidence of absence.

Even after Bangladesh’s July uprising brought down the previous government, survivors began speaking publicly about secret detention facilities that had long been denied. When some of those sites were later opened to official and media visits, a rival narrative still circulated: that the facilities were staged or that some of the disappeared had never been detained at all, but had simply hidden abroad and reappeared after the government’s fall.

To an outside observer, such claims might seem too implausible to warrant serious attention. But after more than ten years of watching how denial operates around human rights violations, I recognize this as something more consequential.

Repeated denial reshapes the very conditions under which truth is recognized. A returned victim must now prove he was actually a victim. His family must prove that years of searching genuinely happened. Journalists must defend reporting published years earlier. Human rights organizations must reproduce documentation they have already compiled once. Slowly, the burden of proof shifts away from those accused of disappearing people and onto those who insist the disappearances occurred.

There is a further problem I have encountered directly in my own work.

Since 2017, Chronicles of Tyranny, a long-term documentation project I developed, has recorded reported human rights violations in Bangladesh and preserved the sources through which those incidents can later be verified. Returning to some of those cases years later, I found that the original pages no longer existed online.

The incident itself had not disappeared from memory. What had disappeared was the evidence through which anyone else could independently verify it.

This is not unique to Bangladesh; rather, many countries experienced the same problem. Such projects exist because societies eventually discover that accountability depends not only on whether evidence was once recorded, but also on whether it survives.

Digital documentation often treats a hyperlink as though it were a stable citation; nevertheless, it is not. After a period, due to technical reasons and/or political motives, old news is removed, and thus entire archives can become inaccessible. A citation that worked when a report was prepared may lead nowhere 10 years later.

The consequences are more serious than an inconvenient broken link.

Suppose a researcher years from now wants to examine a recurring pattern of political violence in Bangladesh. If 20 incidents occurred but reports documenting half of them have disappeared, the researcher may identify only part of the pattern. The events themselves have not changed. What has changed is their retrievability.

A distorted history can therefore emerge without anyone inventing false events. It can emerge because real events become progressively more difficult to recover from.

Not every missing webpage is censorship. Digital journalism everywhere suffers from broken links, outdated content-management systems, server failures and website redesigns. But where political pressure, intimidation or deliberate removal also exist, the disappearance of information acquires a different significance.

This is why archives are not politically neutral warehouses. They help determine what future generations can know.

George Orwell imagined a “memory hole” in which inconvenient documents were physically destroyed so that yesterday’s truth could be replaced by today’s official version. Digital societies do not require such a dramatic mechanism. A report can disappear because of censorship, political pressure, commercial decisions, technological decay or simple negligence. The causes may differ, but for the researcher who arrives twenty years later, the result can look remarkably similar: the evidence is gone.

This matters especially for societies emerging from authoritarian rule or mass political violence.

Justice depends not only on punishing perpetrators. It also depends on preserving the conditions under which truth can remain knowable. Court testimony, forensic evidence, newspaper archives, victims’ accounts, photographs, videos and human rights documentation together form a society’s evidentiary memory.

An enforced disappearance removes a person from the visible world. Denial then attempts to remove the violation from accepted knowledge. If the documents that could establish what happened also disappear, the victim risks being erased a third time, from history itself.

This is why preserving digital memory is not merely an archival problem. It is part of the infrastructure of justice.