Tip: Verifying information during war

Credit: ThisIsEngineering on Pexels

Executive director and Russia lead for open-source investigative organisation, Bellingcat, Christo Grozev spoke to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) on hunting down the truth while reporting on Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 

Data is vital to the kind of work an organisation like Bellingcat does, however it is also a challenge, especially as this is one of the first wars to have almost entirely digitised the conflict. 

This, Grozev argues, makes journalists even more vital: "Now we're talking about multi-vector propaganda messaging coming from bad actors on one side and from good actors also putting out fakery. So we journalists have to be the gatekeepers and to simplify this for the audience."

If you do not have time to listen to the whole recording, RISJ pulls out seven pertinent points about Bellingcat's work on this crisis, which include: focusing on data over human sources, which always have an agenda; tracking human movements through monitoring activity within certain databases; and the triangulation of geolocation, verification and chrono-location, the latter being particularly important due to the reuse of old footage and images from the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea. 

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