Eliot Higgins: How Bellingcat Hunts Down the Truth

0:00Hi everyone, I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, and today we have a very special episode. We are recording in front of a live audience of nearly 200 people. These are my colleagues at the Sovereign Wealth Fund. And we are joined by the very impressive Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, the world's leading open source investigative collective. Now, Elliot is not a spy, not a trained journalist. He's actually a college dropout who taught himself to investigate war crimes from his kitchen table in Leicester. He's unmasked Russian assassins, exposed chemical weapons used in Syria, helped identify Navalny's poisoner.

0:42And I've been really looking forward to this, Elliot. Warm welcome. Thanks for having me on. So just to start, what is Bellingcat? So Bellingcat does something called open source investigation. So that's using publicly available material to investigate a range of different topics. And really, over the last 15 years, what is publicly available material has just mushroomed to just a huge extent. It's stuff like social media posts, satellite imagery available through things like Google Maps or other services, all kinds of things like marine traffic data or air flight data that's also publicly available.

1:16So we take all that data and then we investigate different things. And that's included chemical weapons attacks in Syria, the downing of Malaysian airlines like MH17, more recently, a lot to do with America's bombing of Iran, ICE and DHS raids in the US as well. How do you decide what to focus in on? Well, early on, it's, I mean, the whole field of open source investigation was very much led by kind of obsessive nerds on the internet, just doing what was interesting to them. And really the big events were initially the Arab Spring in Syria, then the shooting down of MH17, then Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

1:56And so really, that's kind of was just a bunch of volunteers doing things that were interesting to them. But now we have teams who work on financial investigations, what we call online ideologies, which is quite broad, and conflict. So how many different hotspots are you looking at at each point in time? It varies, but it's like at the moment we're looking at, of course, what's happening in Iran, but we're also looking at the DRC and Sudan and other places where there's ongoing conflicts. Sometimes an investigation is a really multi-month process. Sometimes it's reacting really quickly to events that are happening on the ground in different contexts.

2:38Now, you live here in Leicester. You've got an organization in Holland, but you have a big network. Just how does it work? So we have the central Bellingcat organization, which has about 35 staff members, mostly researchers and trainers. We then have a community of volunteers who we train and we can direct that's about 200 people. There's also a Discord server where we have lots of people. It's kind of our community server that has about 43 ,000 people on it. And what's great about that is they kind of really have the values of Bellingcat, that it's really about the research first before they form an opinion about something.

3:14And that's something that's quite rare in online spaces. But also, they find stuff that we're not looking at, and then that becomes kind of part of our process as well. So what are the values? What would make me become one of your kind of, what should we say, reporters or helpers or investigators? You never prejudge a situation. Just because you feel something should be the truth doesn't mean it actually is the truth. So I think that's very important over contentious issues as well, where there tends to be two sides who just want to pick fights with each other on the internet. We're not interested in that.

3:44We want to look at the evidence first and draw our conclusions based off that evidence. But also it's about inclusion as well. It's saying it's not just about what we do at Bellingcat, but teaching other people these skills so they can do their own investigations and form their own communities. So community building with those values is something that's really a core part of what we do at Bellingcat. Now, we have just so much to learn from the methodology here. So let's just always think, you know, how can we use this? But let's just start with the beginning. 2012, you're sitting at your kitchen table and you're looking at YouTube clips from the Syrian war.

4:19What did you see? Yeah, so I would really like to say I had the kind of noble intention. First of all, why were you looking at YouTube clips from the Syrian war? Well, this is the thing. I wish I could say I had this noble intention to become a great human rights or journalist. No, I was arguing with people on the internet and I wanted to win the arguments. And all these videos coming from places like Libya and Syria and really in those kind of online communities, they were just being used as sticks to beat each over the head with. They weren't fact checking them. They were just saying, oh, this proves that I'm right and you're wrong.

4:48But I just wanted to know what was going on in these places. So I realized you could use satellite imagery to figure out where stuff was filmed. And we call this geolocation. It's a core skill now. But at that point, it was just me winning arguments on the internet. But I just really thought, well, this is kind of deepening my understanding of what's actually happening in these conflicts. And I started posting about it on Twitter and then doing a blog. So I had more places to write with no intention of anyone ever taking me that seriously. But eventually, they did. But what did you see? So in Syria, I didn't speak any Arabic.

5:22So I was really looking at the content of the videos. And a lot of it showed unexploded munitions, eventually the aftermath of chemical weapon attacks. And I systematically tracked all the videos coming out of Syria because they basically use YouTube as their main distribution platform. And those channels are usually run by media centers or arms groups. So you could actually have a catalog of all these channels and check them every single day. And no one else had figured out you could do that. So every day I would just go through hundreds of videos from Syria looking for stuff that was new or unusual, really focusing on IDing weapons in particular.

5:59Then you started Bellingcat and that the Malaysian airline was shot down. Just how did that case develop? So I was blogging on a really awful looking blogspot website. I thought I needed a more professional website and a better name. So I launched Bellingcat in July 2014 and three days later MH17 was shot down. So you have this kind of real mass movement on social media of people digging through stuff, trying to figure things out. And Bellingcat kind of became the kind of center point of a lot of that. So I was publishing articles and then slowly building up a small team of kind of volunteer researchers who every day were digging through every bit of information about MH17 and searching for stuff.

6:40And that led us to finding all kinds of stuff that no one else anywhere had found, like the origin of the missile launcher, where it had launched from and other details like that. So in the book, they go into the story in great detail, and you can see how they're building that case. Now, the Russian minister of defense weren't particularly pleased with you. Yeah, so we've had kind of an escalating campaign against us coming from Russia, really started in 2015. We have places like Russia Today and Sputnik News writing critical articles of us. That led to them trying to hack our emails, our website.

7:13Most recently, there's been six Bulgarians who were jailed because they were spying on one of my colleagues for two years. and that was linked to the Russian FSB. So there's really been an escalation over the years of how they've responded to our work. Now we continued poisoning in the UK. What was that? Yeah, so when the Scripple poisoning happened, we couldn't really do much in the initial moment. But when the identities of the poisoners were released, there was a Russian news site that got the flight manifest of the flight and their passport numbers were just a few digits apart, which was very suspicious.

7:49So one of my former colleagues, Christo Grozov, he's very good at using the kind of what you call the kind of gray market of data in Russia. In Russia, basically all government data is for sale, if you know the right people to speak to. So we got their passport registration. Is that only in Russia? Is that everywhere? It's mainly in Russia in our experience. There might be other places, but Russia is particularly bad for that because, you know, the snake rocks from the head. You know, it's everyone's corrupt. So we were buying things like the registration forms of passports and discovering they had the Russian MOD's phone number stamped on these guys' passport forms.

8:23And using government databases of house registrations and car registrations to kind of unpick their identity. And eventually that allowed us to find the real identity of these suspects. And so what happened? So part of it is we were the first people to show that these two guys who had just been on Russia today saying they were tourists visiting Salisbury Cathedral and, you know, talking about the 123 meter spire. As they were on TV, we were getting the data showing that they were Russian spies and we were able to publish straight away. And that had a huge impact. We had like nearly every UK newspaper had our work on their front page the following day.

9:02And that really kind of led us then to the poisoning of Alexei Navalny as well, because we discovered the network of chemical weapons scientists who are producing these chemical weapons where they worked. And we were able to buy their phone records from people in Russia and see them phoning up FSB agents just before they're going to poison him. So we could track the FSB agents as well, because the phone records aren't just who you've called. It's every single cell phone tower you connect to, which can then be mapped out. You can actually follow people as they're moving around Europe and Russia, you know, minute by minute.

9:36And that's what we did with their data because Russia is so hideously corrupt in that way. And then he called them up. Yeah, he called them up. So we had this filmmaker with us who was just filming interesting things we were doing. And we thought, wouldn't it be fun to call these people up now we've got their phone numbers? and we thought it would be like over in 10 minutes they'd all hang up or you know swear us or something and that happened for the first three or four calls but then and the varney was the guy calling them up so then we tried we um spoofed the phone number of the fsb called one of the guys up and the varney pretended to be a kind of an officer assessing the assassination attempt it's worth tracking down the video and watching the whole thing it's in the documentary we did, but the full video is an hour long.

10:25And he got the guy to give him a blow by blow account of exactly how the poisoning had done. They basically got to his hotel room, you put poison on the seam of his underpants. And then when he put them on and went to the airport, it activated and started to nearly kill him. But he just gave us a blow by blow description of then how he, when they recovered Navani and he was injured, they got his clothes and then cleaned his kind of underpants really carefully to get rid of the poison they'd used in the assassination. And we recorded the whole thing and then that became our documentary. But we'd actually, Putin on the Friday after we did that phone call, had just given a big speech about, you know, I have nothing to do with this, this is all untrue.

11:09And then on the Monday, we were able to reveal this hour-long video of one of his spies explaining exactly how he did the poisoning. Amazing. Do you check your underpants every day? I mean, I would advise everyone does that every day. I mean, joking apart. I mean, you're a high value target, right? Well, I mean, it's something we have to take seriously. So it's like at the moment, I have West Midlands or East Midlands counterterrorism police pay me the occasional visit to let me know what's going on in their world, which is always a bit disconcerting. You do have to be kind of a lot more security aware and aware of when something weird happens is you kind of think about is that just general weirdness or is that a weirdness that's particularly focused on on me it's like we had one guy after a big event we did in the netherlands a couple of the team were walking around and this guy was following them around taking photos of them so they managed to snap a photo of him thinking this guy's dodgy maybe a spy and they they spent weeks trying to figure out who this guy was it was just a fan.

12:09He was just too shy to go up and say hello. So he's just taking photos from a distance, which is, yeah. We contacted him and said, hey, by the way, probably best not to do that in the future. Yeah, well, the people taking photos today are fans too. The difference between now and 2012 in terms of what's available online, in terms of material, what's the magnitude of change? Well, I think one real change is the access we now have to satellite imagery. So back in 2012, you were very reliant on things like Google Earth and Google Maps. Now for a monthly fee, we use Planet Labs, where we can not only get daily imagery of various sites, but we can actually task satellites to specific locations.

12:50So it's all very James Bond, but if there's this area we're interested in, we can put in a tasking request and get satellite imagery of that in the next few days, which for our kind of work, when you're trying to vary price stuff as quickly as possible, is incredibly useful. each kind of conflict or situation has a kind of different kind of characteristics around how social media is used. So if Syria, you know Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were where most stuff was being posted with the conflicts in Ukraine, especially since 2022, Telegram was the kind of big website. It constantly changes if you're looking into criminal activity, you might find a lot on TikTok, for example.

13:27There's lots of people who do crimes and post them on TikTok and then do that for months and months and months until someone like us comes across it and unpicks the whole thing. So yeah, it's more, you constantly have to learn, you have to see how different situations evolve, how technology is being used, and look for opportunities. And you know, there are, like with Iran, the internet was shut down there for a very long time in the early parts of the current conflict. And that meant we had to use other techniques to analyze satellite data, for example, because there was no satellite data either.

14:00So we used a system that uses infrared satellite imagery and compares the differences to them using a very complex probe I can't possibly explain. But that allows us to see a kind of heat map of where damage is occurring across Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East at a time when there was no visual satellite imagery of that kind of stuff. Supposedly Israel hacked into normal surveillance camera all over Iran, right, to check out where the leaders were. Do you hack into systems like that too? No, and we try to avoid crimes whenever possible. What does that mean, try to avoid? Well, for example, sometimes, I mean, pretty much everything we do is a criminal offence in Russia at the moment, mainly because we did it and then they made it a criminal offence to do it.

14:46So, for example, the Russian soldiers used to post loads on social media about where they were, what they were up to, their friends. and we used that to reconstruct exactly where they were on MH17. But then the Russian government passed a law to ban soldiers from doing that ever again, partly because of what we were doing in terms of that. But it's also like the stuff we were doing with the Navalny and Scripon investigations. We wouldn't buy data anymore because that's become, that's kind of a grey area we felt even when we were doing it. But it's kind of a choice of, you know, we knew where the data was and if we ignored it, then people were literally being killed with chemical weapons And we found that there were multiple people who were killed like that that hadn't even really made it to the media.

15:28So there was that kind of complex, ethical conversation we had around that. What's the weirdest source of data you've used ever? This wasn't one of our investigations, but I think it definitely ticks the weird box. So several years ago, there was a Instagram post that was being shared on social media. It had been copied and pasted. And it was supposedly from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's social media account. And it showed a pair of women's legs in the bath. It's like a saucy photo. Now, very quickly, the WikiFeet community, which is the foot fetish community, who rakes people's feet, immediately said, that's not her feet.

16:10We know what her feet look like. It's actually this person's feet. And they found the original photograph of it. So but in all of this work, if you go back to the rendition flights that were happening in the early 2000s, it was plane spotters who found that network. So people with really, really specific interests and hobbies can actually be a really useful source of information. You just have to know what kind of people out there and how to interact with them safely, I guess. So nerds are good? Nerds and perverts, yes.

16:46We have the odd nerd too. We love him. What's the most shocking piece of disinformation that you've seen ever? Oh, God. I mean, it's so, so constant. It's like there's an ongoing campaign from Russia at the moment. It's called various things. One of them is the Russian Doll Campaign because what they've been doing is making fake videos of news sites, including myself. And they made a 3D animated kind of PlayStation 2 graphics avatar of me to do some of the videos. Another thing they did in that campaign, so a typical video would be like, you know, the Armenian president is a drug addict. Not that anyone would even bother interacting with that post, but they just churned dozens of these out every single week.

17:29And they emailed them to us directly so we engaged with them, which we don't. But they included jigsaw pieces in some of these posts. So it'd be the fake news video and a jigsaw piece. And they were all numbered. So I started piecing them together over a period of weeks and weeks. And what it was, it was a jigsaw puzzle of my face on a pile of poo with Belling Shit Elliot Shittings as the logo. Sorry, my language. But they had included this in their disinformation as a kind of weird, personalised message to me. But things, I like doing jigsaws. So for me, this is just fun. And then I had something I could post on social media as well.

18:12So it was like, just keep doing it. They actually started a third jigsaw puzzle. There were two, and they did a third one. And I think I had posted so much about the second one they did, they actually got told to stop doing it, which I was very disappointed about because it looked good. What are we up against in terms of number of people? What kind of the resources, let's say, in Russia to conduct those gun-on campaigns? What are we up against here? Well, I mean, it's kind of what we're looking at as a kind of development of the Internet Research Agency, which really kind of dominated the kind of 2016 scene.

18:42That was linked to people who have now been killed by the Russian government, so now it's being run by another oligarch. But they're dealing with hundreds of people who are doing this. The thing with disinformation, though, we tend to treat it as a kind of foreign actor issue, but a lot of disinformation and misinformation comes from online communities who generally believe they're creating good, useful information, but also have kind of grifters in that community and sometimes Russian or foreign interference that's kind of amplifying those communities. But for disinformation to work, you need people who want to engage with it.

19:14And this is why a lot of this recent Russian disinformation doesn't work. They did a huge campaign around Armenia, hundreds of videos, fakes, all sorts. It got no engagement because not really that many people who speak English on social media really care about what's happening in Armenian politics. So it got no genuine uplift. When you start these investigations, how do you make sure, do you have like a hypothesis and you test it? Or how do you work? How do you make sure that you aren't biased in your research? Yeah, I mean, it depends on the starting point and the scale of something. So with Alex Presby and Rennie Goods shootings in Minnesota, there straight away you had videos that were being shared and dissected on social media.

19:55So in that case, what we were trying to do is get information out quickly that looked at certain key claims, which we could say, yes, this is true or not. So Alex Presby was disarmed and then shot. And that became a point of contention. but we released a video that kind of synchronized multiple videos to show the moment he was disarmed and then shot in one complete sequence rather than the fragments that were out there. So that's when you kind of have to respond quickly because there is a discourse and you know the government's going to lie about it too. But in other cases, it could be a lot more, you know, gather a huge amount of information, start looking at what patterns it's showing you, try to verify as much of that information as possible.

20:35So we're looking at kind of Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon very, very recently. And that was a huge data set we're looking at rather than kind of individual videos and focusing on just one particular instance. So there's just it's a matter of scale and what question we're trying to answer. You mentioned the importance of speed in the Minnesota case. Just why is speed so important? Why is it so important to get the truth out before false perceptions have kind of established themselves? Because generally once people feel they know the truth about subjects, they'll not change their mind about it. And in those moments when there's, you know, just a few hours where there's a really vigorous discourse online and you know that there's going to be a government that's going to come out with a version of events that's probably not going to match reality, trying to get as much information into that discourse is important.

21:27because people take those kind of objects you create and then spread them across multiple websites where all this discourse is occurring. So you don't have to distribute it just as like a single node. You kind of can rely on other people to pick that up and take it elsewhere. When it's something that's kind of longer term, kind of deeper investigation, you don't have that kind of engagement happening. So you have to really approach that in a different way, both in how you investigate it, but also then how you distribute that information. How do you reach the audiences who want to see it? So how far do you need to be now?

21:59Let's say there is a shooting, which is bad. How quickly do you need to be out there with the narrative? Well, I mean, I think you've got at best two or three hours in many cases, if it's something like those shootings in Minnesota. Something that took a little bit longer, but still kind of influenced the discourse. We look at the Iranian school bombing where the girls were killed. We found a video of Tomahawk missiles striking close to that building, but not on it. But we got that information out there probably within about 48 hours of the airstrikes happening. And then Donald Trump was being asked about, you know, why is there a video of Tomahawk missiles by journalists who had seen our work, nowhere reliable, and then could actually ask that question knowing that, you know, that is a fact, not just something that they've kind of read on the Internet and rumored.

22:49And then Donald Trump responded by saying, well, the Iranians have Tomahawk missiles as well, which is completely ridiculous. But he was forced into that position because we could present verifiable evidence. How much more are governments lying now compared to 10 years ago? I mean, it depends on the government, I think. I didn't want to be specific. Certain governments that are kind of to the west of this country, they are lying. The thing is, it's authoritarian capture, ultimately, because then it becomes about loyalty tests. It doesn't come about the truth. It becomes about how you demonstrate your loyalty to the in-group, and then how you can define the out-group by their refusal to toe the line.

23:30So this is really what we're seeing in the US, this authoritarian capture of various institutions, the presidency, the bending of the knee of various organizations, where the truth is no longer important. It's all about those loyalty tests. How do you think this will develop? So a lot of my work at the moment looks at issues around disinformation and democratic theory and kind of how we've got to where we are at the moment. I think the one thing that really worries me about that work, and I've spent a long time doing this, is that the way we've kind of set up our society and information system now has changed completely.

24:04We've gone from this information system that was top-down, elite-controlled, and also normalized because of that. We had institutions, the media, who, you know, they kind of controlled the flow of information to the public to a large extent. And the public were recipients of information. And in that relationship, the public had to trust those institutions to produce verifiable information, that they could be deliberated on it procedurally through courts, through parliaments, and then people would be held to account for wrongdoing. And that was the public, the kind of social contract we had with those institutions.

24:39That's now collapsed into a peer-to-peer, many-to-many information system where institutions are competing for attention with the public in systems that rewards engagement over the truth. And those platforms like X, for example, that monetize their social media process rewards basically engagement more than anything. So what that leads to is a system where populist authoritarian and conspiratorial ideas perform really well because they don't need the procedural certainty behind it. You just say, this is true. And people nod their head because they're prepared to believe that in a way. And the whole click-based behavior.

25:17Yeah, it's just all about, you know, what engages people rather than what's truthful. And we see this often around conflicts where there's a lot of public engagement. You know, the situation in Gaza produced a lot of fake information because people just wanted to get the clicks and monetize the engagement that they were getting on platforms like X. One of the bigger questions on democracy, democracy? I mean, you talk about verification, deliberation, accountability. Could you just explain briefly the concept? Yes. So you can understand democracy as having three core functions when it works well.

25:50That's verification. How do we know what's true? Deliberation. How do we decide what we do on that? And then accountability is how we hold the powerful to account. And when that functions, it restrains power. But what we tend to see more in our democracies is a kind of performative version of that, where it's not really about holding the powerful to account or real verification. It's about getting elected. It's about building a coalition of voters who'll be enough to get you in. But that then slides into a form of simulated democracy, which becomes disordered, where verification is now about a pre-decided set of truths.

26:25And if you go outside of that, you become attacked by the in-group. Deliberation is also about really identifying who's loyal rather than identifying what to do on this information. And accountability is always targeted outwards from the in-group. And you can look over to the US and see that happening very, very clearly every single day. And so what can democracies do to counteract this? Well, unfortunately, it's a big issue. And it requires a lot of involvement with lots of different sectors. I speak to policymakers, government, people working in civil society about these issues. And there's a recognition there's a huge problem.

27:00The problem we've got is really since 2016, it has been defined as an issue of foreign interference, of disinformation. And that if somehow we can get rid of that false information, society will fix itself and democracy will flourish again. Problem is that's complete nonsense. It treats disinformation and the problems it causes as a kind of supply side issue. But if only we get rid of the supply, then all these problems will fix itself. But really that's driven when people feel a sense of betrayal, of distrust in those institutions, and they look for alternative sources in these online spaces where engagement is rewarded over accuracy.

27:39So even though they might be trying to seek this truth, they're going into environments which are not designed for truth-seeking. They're designed for engagement. So people get drawn towards more conspiratorial ways of thinking. And again, authoritarianism, populism and conspiracy theories perform extremely well. And slow procedural verification through institutions, the media, through Bellingcat, doesn't perform as well in those environments. Do you think any of this is important for us as a long-term investor? Well, I think when reality becomes contested, I mean, does anyone work on anything to do with Iran at the moment?

28:14And do you know what the hell's going on? Because day to day, the story of what's happening changes. So without being able to rely on what could be truthful and what's not, then it's very hard to make any real tactical strategic decisions about things. And this is where open source investigation is so valuable. I mean, we train people in all kinds of different sectors. I mean, we've trained investment firms, journalists, all kinds of people to do this kind of work. But if you take the Iran conflict as an example, how much information flow is there now from each side? I mean, how do you think they compare?

28:51Because we've got so little from one side and so much from the other. There's lots of information. It's just very poor quality information that you can't trust. So you then have to use other ways of figuring out what's going on. And this is why at BallinCat, when we've been looking at RAM, there is a limit on satellite imagery and social media information that has been useful in the past. But there are other ways to look at what's going on there. How is AI changing all of this? I think AI gives people a permission structure to deny reality. So if they see a picture they don't like or a video, they can just say, well, that's AI.

29:22And that's the kind of end of their engagement with that particular object. It also allows people to kind of make cases for stuff that's not really true. It's kind of, you see so often people will engage with an AI image. They know it's AI, but it supports something that they think is true. So it's this kind of truthiness of the imagery comes across rather than it being factual. I mean, one example of that is there was a far right UK rapper who was entirely AI generated. The music, the face, everything was fake. But lots of people engaged with it because it was content that they wanted to see and that they thought other people should see as well.

30:01In terms of actual open source investigation, I haven't really seen AI really add much to actual processes so far. You can do stuff like vibe coding sometimes to like scrape a website that's being awkward, but there's nothing that's really like Completely changing the game around open source investigation. I think that's a bit surprising Do you think it will happen when you get more kind of agents in place? It might do I mean I use AI a lot for various experiments and stuff like that so you know just recently I've for years wanted to scrape all the Syria documents of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons website, because that's my thing I'm into.

30:43That's another thing, don't worry about it. But I just basically went to Claude and said, how should I do this? And it wrote me a Python script, and within 10 minutes it had done a job that I'd been putting off for eight years. So that can be really, really useful for just kind of experimenting and poking around. We've tried to get AIs to do geolocation, and they have a mixed set of results, I think it's fair to say. But they can also provide context clues that you might miss. Like it might identify a certain type of tree that's only going to grow in a certain range of hills in some country. And then you're like, OK, I know where to look now.

31:18You've, of course, got to double check that's actually true. But it can provide extra clues. And geolocation is a game you play with your son, I gather. Yeah. Tell me about the game. I mean, how do you play a geolocation game? Well, I'll just find some photo. And he'll kind of try and find it on, you know, nothing like a war crime. But it's just a fun thing to do. We're actually saying that there's a game that's based off geolocation that's being released soon. And we'll probably do a live stream of that for our fundraising. So it's kind of weird. Like there's this guy called Rainbolt who does this thing called GeoGuessr.

31:50So GeoGuessr, it gives you an image. And then you click on a map of where you think it could be in the world. And he's like the world expert in it. He'll look at a picture, immediately click, and then be within like 100 meters of where the picture is taken. He can see all the context clues immediately. But yeah, he often gets photos from people saying like, here's a family member, where could he be? And they'll find it in like five minutes. Cool. Now, you've been spending a lot of your life trying to find the truth, right? Which is in a way what you do. What's driving you here? Well, I mean, it was, as I said, when I started, it was arguing with people on the internet, to be honest.

32:27But over the years, it became really clear how important this information was in a lot of different contexts. Like with MH17, immediately the Russian government were lying and producing fake evidence. But we could say that was fake evidence because we could do open source investigation to examine it and verify if it was true or not. It turned out it wasn't true. With Syria and chemical weapons use, which I spent a lot of time on, there's a huge amount of disinformation and propaganda about that coming from online communities and the Russian government. And again, there's always going to be things that are contested.

33:02But usually when there's that contestation happening, it's just two people or two communities arguing with each other about what they think should be correct, rather than doing analysis. So we're trying to build communities around those values and ideas that you do the investigation, you verify information, and then you have your opinion. You don't have your opinion and then fit the investigation around that is often kind of what happens around that discourse. What are the personal costs to you as a person? I mean, not monetary, but just as a human being. Well, I mean, there is the security aspects of it because there's certain places I won't travel to at the moment.

33:39Obviously, Russia's off the table forever. I would have thought so. But I can't travel to the US at the moment because there's this conspiracy theory called the censorship industrial complex, which presents the idea that the Biden administration and academics and journalists basically colluded to, you know, do various things. And Balingcat kind of got tied up in that. Just we'd kind of had nothing to do with it, but people don't like Balingcat in certain communities. So we got kind of named with everyone else. And there's people in the State Department who've been looking up communications between myself, Balingcat and the State Department to prove their case.

34:16But they don't exist. So that just makes them think there's a big cover-up around this stuff now. So basically you have to, I'm sorry, Elon Musk. Yeah, so Elon Musk called us a psyop. So we know this, yeah, the US administration definitely knows who we are. And we've been very critical of them, published embarrassing investigations. And I don't want to take the risk of, you know, turning up at an airport in America and then being off to a nice detention center for some reason. So you basically have to stay in Leicester. Well, I can travel a bit outside of it if I'm lucky. How do you fund, how does Bellingham fund itself?

34:52Yeah, so when I started, I crowdfunded using Kickstarter. But then as we've grown, there's been foundational funders like the Open Society Foundations, Family Foundations. We raise about 30 % of our income from workshops. We have small donations. But one of the things that's happened recently that's been a real shock to the whole kind of sector has been the USAID funding cuts. About 25 to 40 % of the global funding for the kind of investigative journalism NGOs was lost overnight because of those USAID funding cuts. So even though Bellingcat didn't take any of USAID funding money, the whole funding environment is a nightmare now.

35:34So you have to kind of really rely now on kind of small donors, high net worth individuals, because the foundations are now under a huge amount of pressure to basically save a lot of organizations that are going under. And especially in the global south, where a lot of that funding was coming from USAID, a lot of these small media NGOs who are doing really high-quality investigative journalism just shut down overnight because of it. So when you look at the world, are you an optimist or pessimist? I would say I'm a cynical optimist is the best way to think of it. The thing is, in my work, I've seen what you can do.

36:11This, you know, getting not just what we do at Bellingcat, but showing other people these skills, be they, you know, journalists in lots of organizations we've trained. I mean, we've probably trained several thousand journalists and activists in open source investigation. But also the online communities that have seen our work and learn how to do open source investigation just by the way we kind of include all the details in our articles, do case studies. and then they find stuff themselves that is really, really impactful and does actually make a difference. That's something that gives me hope.

36:43The difficult part is doing that at scale. How do we get as many people involved for that as possible, especially now we live in this environment where, you know, the attention is really the name of the game, not the truth. And that's really kind of poisoned the information environment for a lot of people. And is that a temporary thing? Are we just temporarily in a bad spot when it comes to lies and truth and democracies? or is this just a step on, you know, is this just going to continue and get worse? I think the situation we're in now in the moment fuels those kind of worst aspects and is the default state unless we actually take real action against it.

37:18It's been interesting to look at Keir Starmer's recent kind of the reporting on what he's been saying about online safety, you know, 16-year-olds being banned from social media. I think there needs to be more around education in terms of building critical thinking skills in young people. So a lot of our work at the moment is working with things like Cambridge University Press and Assessment, the National Institute of Teaching, about developing those critical thinking skills and teacher training material. And for students, we work with universities to build investigative hubs and open source training materials so students can do their own investigations and build their own communities around that.

37:55So you have to proactively build this stuff. A lot of people, you know, look back at the kind of interwar periods where, you know, there's the rise of fascism. And they think that democracy just kind of fixed itself and figured it out. And, you know, Nazi Germany was an outlier. But that took real action to build democratic systems to actually make people feel they could trust those institutions again after World War I. And nowadays, it's just kind of like, well, you know, people figure it out for themselves because democracy is the default. And that's really not the case. So last question, Elliot.

38:30What would be your advice to young people who would want to try to make this a better place? Well, that's a very big question. I think they need to really consider when they share information, when they look at something and they think, maybe I should do that. They need to think about what impact that does have. It's like, I was talking, my daughter's 14, and a lot of her friends use a lot of social media. We really try not to let her use that much social media. But they'll mimic trends they're seeing. And some of those trends are really about making stuff up because it'll get engagement. And it's kind of actually talking to people about what impact that actually has.

39:07And that has a big impact on society if everyone's just telling lies for engagement. And that's just the basics we need to start with. Yeah. Very big thank you to you. Thank you. Thanks for everything you're doing. And thank you.

39:27Thank you.