The Syrian Archive is an activist-run organisation run from a nondescript apartment in a suburb of Berlin. It gleans video clips from social media sites through a purpose-built web crawler, archiving the images on its own private server. The archive regularly negotiates with social media giants to restore and archive footage removed during periodic takedowns, following, for example, fears in the wake of terrorist attacks, and moral panics that the footage contains terrorist material or might cause ‘radicalisation’. But the archive also uses the material in order to build war crimes investigations. During my fieldwork there, the Syrian Archive were gathering together footage related to hospital bombings in order to use in a potential future war crimes tribunal. Open-source content used in a war crimes tribunal had often been described to me as the “last hope” by many media activists. And yet, I was told by a young lawyer volunteering at the archive that of the over 300 incidents of hospital bombings, often documented by multiple witnesses, only two or three were an “open and shut case” of a war crime. Across those 300 incidents, only visual elements reached the bar of evidence. My role, however, was to translate the speech of people who appear in the footage for the sake of background information. Their speech, even when it claims to know who the perpetrators were, cannot achieve the status of testimony. What are the implications of this evidentiary silencing, and how is this archive made to speak?