2024-06-28
13 分钟Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins has been working with young people not just to show them how to sort fact from fiction, but to give them a reason to believe that truth can still empower the weak and hold the guilty accountable.
So I am someone who has spent an awful lot of time on the Internet from about 90 meet Elliot Higgins.
And I was very much part of kind of online communities and forum culture and stuff like that.
He's the founder of Bellingcat, a research group that uses publicly available data to conduct open source investigations.
In 2011, I was spending a lot of time on the Guardians Middle east live blog and I found it really fascinating how much information was being shared from the ground on places like Egypt, in Libya and Syria and how that was being discussed online.
The Guardian newspaper in the UK, it had a blog with a community of people in the region posting pictures of attacks or news on the ground alongside their own commentary.
And back then, Eliot said everyone on this Guardian Middle east blog seemed to think everything was a conspiracy.
You had a community of people who really took a conspiratorial view of this material.
Users saw the hand of the CIA in everything.
They would look for like the one white guy in a video from Syria and say that's the CIA officer who's telling them everything to do.
And I found it really frustrating because I could see there was useful stuff in there.
There was details of where combat was happening, weapons being used, the real nitty gritty that mainstream journalists weren't looking at at all.
And he ended up trying to change that from recorded future news.
Im Dena Temple Raston and this is click heres mic drop, an extended cut of an interview we think you might want to hear more of.
Our episode on Tuesday was about a group of volunteer researchers who have been telling the world about the Kremlins disinformation campaigns.
So today we thought wed take a look at another grassroots organization, one that's worried about our changing relationship to truth.
It's the story of a regular british guy who decided to take the messiness that's the Internet and create a revolution in open source investigations.
I set up banning cat really as a place, just simply to have a place where I could show people how to do this and also give them a space where if they wanted to write an article and submit it, they could publish it under their own name.
And that was launched in July 2014 and three days later MH 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine.
Stay with us.
When it comes to AI, its hard to decipher whats real and whats just hype.