Bellingcat is an independent collective of researchers and citizen journalists that uses open-source tools and social media investigation to probe a variety of subjects. In an interview, Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins talks about the scourge of fake news and how the common user can deal with it. Excerpts:
Q/ Is it in the interest of a few majoritarian governments to let the disinformation system function?
A/ This may be a result of how the boundaries of what is acceptable political discourse have been pushed. Obviously, when it is a foreign actor pushing disinformation to your own population, governments tend to react differently, but if you accept disinformation as part of your own political process, it should not come as a surprise if your own population is vulnerable to foreign disinformation.
Q/ Is social media responsible for converting disinformation from a menace to a hazard?
A/ The real threat comes from online communities and how information is shared and amplified. You find these communities on all sorts of topics, some mundane, like supporters of a sports team or fans of a particular musician, and more bizarre, like communities who believe the earth is flat. A kind of group-think develops in these communities, and the information shared there generally reinforces those views.
Those individuals who draw their self-worth from membership of those communities often become key amplifiers in those communities, in turn making the whole community more extreme. Social media is a significant contributor to disinformation spreading outside the community, but it does not create the behaviour that leads to those communities in the first place.
Q/ Why do you think there has been a lack of diligence in the legacy media or is there more to it than meets the eye?
A/ There is a lack of understanding in the media of how these online communities operate, and it has been compounded by foreign governments’ use of those communities to spread disinformation, commercial pressures on newsrooms, and a lack of understanding about these issues among senior staff. Some media organisations are also happy to spread, and even generate, misinformation for their own ends.
Q/ Why are there few open-source tools for basic fact checks?
A/ There are some easy-to-use tools for images, like reverse image search on sites like Google and Yandex; it is just that most people have not heard of them or do not think to use them. Video is more complex as there are fewer methods for checking if a video has come from somewhere else, and these are less easily teachable.