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The Arab Spring raised what was to become the most serious news question of the digital age: verification. How to say if this stuff was true? How to know what you were looking at?

I was asking myself this same question at my admin job in Leicester, where I spent downtime at my desk viewing live-streaming video, filmed from a hotel window over Tahrir Square. The police pushed back protesters, then the police were themselves repelled, creating an odd theatre: crowds rolling out, crowds rolling in, tear gas fogging the scene, rocks soaring through the air, water cannons spraying.

Long before, I had considered becoming a journalist, perhaps even covering stories like this from the ground. But I had not thrived at college and dropped out, taking a series of office jobs that left me unsatisfied. From afar, I watched politicians and celebrities and journalists as if they were another breed. I found no place in the larger world, and had no prospect of ever having an impact. Instead, I took refuge in online video games, which I played with obsessive devotion, organising large groups of players spread across various countries. But when 9/11 happened, my interests shifted. News was happening so fast, and papers were so slow. I wanted to know more, and discovered an online message board, Something Awful, that was full of argument and insight on almost any topic imaginable. I gained a new obsession: current affairs. By 2011, the most compelling part of my day came each morning, when I arrived far too early at the office. Alone at my computer, I scoured the internet for the latest updates on the Arab Spring.

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DISARMING THE TRAPS

Robert Evans grew up in Oklahoma and Texas around the turn of the millennium, raised in a conservative Christian family whose values he imbibed. During an abortive stint at college, he drifted far from his childhood politics and closer to his childhood passion: the internet. He dabbled in tech journalism, then wrote irreverent newsy pieces for Cracked.com, and did conflict reporting from Ukraine, Iraq and Syria. When he discovered Bellingcat, he became fascinated with this new form of reporting. Soon, he was pitching me articles on an area of his expertise: the far-right online. Robert did not offer technically stunning geolocations or measurements of shadowlines to tell the time. He parsed what fascists actually said to each other on social media. His goal was to explain how a subculture of young men became radicalised on message boards, and to warn the news media against informational traps set by extremist trolls. Robert’s explanatory investigations were to become the most read Bellingcat pieces to date.
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Thirty years later, white supremacy gained indirect traction through the Gamergate controversy of 2014, when a faction of male videogamers complained that elites in the industry were favouring women and progressives. This degenerated into harassment of female game developers, prompting 4chan to ban the subject. 4channers who were obsessed with the subject transferred to an even more extreme chat site, 8chan. Robert first visited 8chan around this time, and was taken aback by its misogyny, its doxxing and the ‘raids’ conducted by its members. As a teenager, Robert had frequented Something Awful, where he and fellow youths launched ‘raids’ – online swarms – against those they deemed worthy of punishment, such as a company that hosted paedophile websites. Adolescents who were otherwise virtually powerless in their everyday lives found themselves impacting the world when they united on the internet; it was addictive. But Gamergate diverged from what Robert knew of online raids, applying the same harassment but to intimidate women who had simply spoken out.

Trash Ops posted:

F Stop Fitzgerald posted:

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However, we wanted something besides the phone numbers of police officers and lawyers. We wanted decision-makers to heed the information available online. I can never forget the woeful debate in parliament over whether to intervene militarily in Syria, when British legislators knew almost nothing of the reams of evidence that any citizen could access. Powerbrokers needed to know of the Bellingcat method, and I saw a way to spread the word.

Maks Czuperski, a young staffer at the Atlantic Council, the influential Washington-based think tank, knew of my work on Syria and Russia, and asked me if Bellingcat would embark on a joint project with them. This, I realised, could provide the boost that we wanted, showing the powerful figures who circulated around the Atlantic Council that we were more than online amateurs. Our first collaboration was a major report in May 2015, ‘Hiding in Plain Sight: Putin’s War in Ukraine’, about Russia’s direct military involvement in eastern Ukraine. The work made waves, and soon I was travelling the globe explaining these findings and what exactly Bellingcat did. I spoke at the Ukrainian parliament, in a journalism conference in Norway, the European Parliament in Brussels, to officials of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, in Silicon Valley. As someone from a humble background who had dropped out of college, I had never found myself in such circles. While they learned of Bellingcat, I learned how their world worked.

Two other major Atlantic Council reports followed: ‘Distract Deceive Destroy: Putin at War in Syria’ (2016), and ‘Breaking Aleppo’ (2017), about the Assad regime’s devastation of the city. Another consequence of my period as a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council was our creation of the Digital Forensic Research Lab, today a leading incubator of open-source innovation, with its annual ‘Digital Sherlocks’ summit bringing together online sleuths from around the world.

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Trash Ops posted:

Trash Ops posted:

Trash Ops posted:

a Loving Dog posted:

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exmarx posted:

exmarx posted: