Eliot Higgins’ recent interview with the Financial Times highlights one of the great battles of our time: The fight for the truth. We are, he says, on ‘the precipice of misinformation’. Truth is under assault from all angles. However, as his success with Bellingcat shows, even in an age of misinformation, truth still has a fighting chance.
Bellingcat’s achievements have been remarkable. They exposed Syria’s use of chemical weapons, revealed Russia’s involvement in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and the downing of MH17. Using a team of volunteers and open source tools, they have shone a light on parts of the world the powerful would prefer remained dark. They have become, in their own words, an ‘intelligence agency for the people.’
His approach is not one the mainstream follow or even understand. He discovered that some of the world’s biggest secrets exist on the internet in plain sight.
It started when he was immersed in discussion forums in 2011 discussing Arab Spring. He began picking up on details everyone was missing. “I was one of the first people who realised that you could look at videos and Google Earth, and figure out where they were filmed,” he told the FT. He worked out what weapons were being used and who controlled which image.
In doing so he undercut the media who couldn’t get their heads around his online investigative techniques. “You might as well be talking in Star Trek style gobbledegook,” he said.
Age of misinformation
Nevertheless, Bellingcat’s model should serve as a lesson for the mainstream media. It comes into a world which is, as he says, ‘on the precipice of misinformation’. It’s everywhere and at times seems unstoppable. Almost 70% of Republicans don’t think the election was free and fair, a testament to the web of lies and misinformation woven around the Trump campaign.
It created an alternative reality in which truth was fluid and facts were considered enemies of the state. Trump even went so far as to tell his supporters not to believe what they were seeing and reading.
Trump is probably the most visible example, but misinformation is being used by governments around the world. The conventional media seems unable or unwilling to do anything about it. Lies go unchallenged, anonymous statements from ‘government sources’ are pumped into the public domain without scrutiny. In its search for impartiality, the news often amplified conspiracy theories in the name of balance. Experts found themselves sharing an equal platform with cranks.
Some have been more eager than others. For years, Fox News served as a megaphone for Trump’s alternative reality. It reinforced lie after lie and helped him weave his alternative reality around his supporters. It was only with the election, when reality became too difficult for even Fox to ignore that it crumbled and called the election for Donald Trump.
The reaction of Trump’s supporters was predictably unhinged. The subsequent scenes at the Capitol were shocking, but they shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
The internet is often blamed for this. Social media has spread fake news like a pandemic. Doubt is everywhere and nobody trusts what they see and hear. Trust in the media has plummeted and whenever people here a fact they don’t like, they scream ‘fake news’.
However, the internet can also be part of the solution. In December opposition leader Alexei Navalny posted a video in which he explained how Russian agents had poisoned him with Novichok. He even identified the agents involved and tricked one into admitting how he had smeared the poison on his underpants in another online video.
Russia denied the allegations, claiming that if they had wanted to kill him, they would have done it properly. However, the internet allowed Navalny to put the truth very publicly into the open. It was a major embarrassment for Putin. At the same time, his government had been exposed as criminal and incompetent.
A fresh vision of journalism
None of this comes from the mainstream. It is down to independents such as Higgins, using the power of the internet to bring people to account.
It’s a vision of journalism which is accountable, verifiable and honest and it’s something a number of organisations are also starting to promote. The newly launched Voice.com uses the blockchain and a human verified sign-up procedure to purge the bots from its platform.
Every piece of content is attributed to a real human being. Where content is controversial, the community can democratically police it.
A host of independent media outlets are also springing up including Byline Times, Double Down News and us here at Bywire. This is creating a vibrant alternative source of news which is free from government or corporate control. It answers only to its readers and the people involved in its communities. It brings journalism back to the people and gives facts a fighting chance.
This is what Higgins has been doing ever since he began and it’s one reason why the media has struggled to understand him and what he does. When he began building a profile, they saw him as an interesting oddity. He was often wrongly cast as an unemployed parent tapping out his ‘journalism’ from his own home.
In fact, he was working in admin, doing the work from home thing before it became fashionable. Bellingcat was, and remains, entirely not for profit.
His success has taken the mainstream media by surprise. He has often seen his work adopted by intelligence services and sometimes even passed off as their own. However, the media seems not to have learned its lessons. They are stuck in the old ways, ignoring scoops even when they are right under their noses.
The failure of the mainstream means independent media is more vital than ever before. Even so, against the corporate power controlling media these days, independents can often feel outmatched. The answer is to come together, to pool resources, and create an organisation with the weight and power to take on the mainstream.
That’s what we’re doing at Bywire. At a time when corporate influence has never been stronger in our media, independents such as Higgins have never been more important.
(Written by Tom Cropper and Michael O'Sullivan)