Eliot Higgins: Algorithms don’t drive the truth

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau Putin and the apartment bombs Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts From the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games To the European Athletics Championships The 2026 sporting calendar is packed full of big events Keep up with all the action with More Than The Score The podcast that goes beyond the score sheet Join expert BBC sports journalists every Monday to Friday For interviews with sports stars, big talking points and the stories behind the headlines.

1:07More Than The Score from the BBC World Service. Listen now, search for More Than The Score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:20Hello, I'm BBC presenter Amol Rajan and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC. People shaping our world from all over the world. There have been so many disagreements between me and my family. Putting on a show, that is what it means to be Lady Gaga. Only the things that you can't solve with government and private sector is where you bring philanthropy in. There's no place in the world where women are equal. Every generation, every generation has to fight to maintain democracy. For this interview, I met Elliot Higgins, founder of the open source investigative organisation Bellingcat at New Broadcasting House, the BBC's headquarters in London.

2:06Founded in 2014, Bellingcat is an independent investigative collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists from all over the world. The organisation pioneered the use of open source research methods, which involve analysing publicly available data that can be accessed and used without any special permissions or restrictions. They've investigated a variety of subjects of public interest, including the shooting down of flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine to police violence in Colombia and the illegal wildlife trade in the UAE. Their work is regularly referenced by international media and has been cited by several courts and investigative missions over the past decade.

2:51Higgins argues that the need for organisations like Bellingcat has never been greater, as conspiracy theories continue to flood the internet and a growing number of people avoid mainstream news outlets altogether. He believes this is partly down to a lack of trust in institutions, which is subsequently leading to a crisis in democracies all over the world. What we have is an alternative system of information that is a peer-to-peer, mainly to many system and where verification took place in institutions now it takes place in us because we are the distributors of that information even interacting with that information for a second more than another piece of information informs an algorithm that serves us more content and that results as being splintered into different kind of realities that we all get served different types of content but it's content that reinforces what we already believe in many cases, because that's what drives engagement, not the truth.

3:49Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Elliot Higgins. Can we just start with the basics for people who don't know about your remarkable work? What is Bellingcat? So Bellingcat is an investigative organisation that uses open source evidence and information. So really, since the launch of the iPhone and the spread of social media, we've got a lot more information available online and that includes information from conflict zones for example which can be used to actually understand those conflicts if analysed correctly and that's really where we specialise our work both on conflicts and a range of other topics now You spend a lot of time down as it were wormholes encountering different types of information, some of it true, much of it untrue and much of the untrue stuff, the disinformation being pumped out by very powerful governments or non-state actors How worried are you about the impact of disinformation on public trust?

4:43Well, I think we need to, first of all, stop thinking about it as an external factor that affects our poor innocent public and confuses them about stuff. Really, what you're seeing is a system of, you know, grifters, of state actors, of people who really believe this stuff, true believers. And if we keep on treating this as an issue of external influence, then I think we're actually missing a much, much deeper issue, which is I think people feel less empowered in democracies, that they start recognising the kind of wholeness of the democracies that they live in. A good example, Iraq in 2003, where the media and the government misled the public.

5:23The public recognised that. They protested about what was happening. Nothing happened because of those protests. We ended up going to war and there was no real accountability for the people who brought us to war. The public recognises that and they lose faith in those institutions so they seek alternatives and the problem is i think that we've kind of stripped out over the last 40 years the systems and the spaces that are required for people to come together and start forming what are known as counterpublics as a way to kind of communicate their unhappiness and instead they find alternative systems online where the algorithm recommends content that reinforces what they already believe and they get drawn into online systems of discourse that are more about in-group and out-group dynamics than trying to find the truth about the subject because they've been disempowered and they don't really have other options.

6:14I mean, it's either disengaged or get drawn into disinformation in all these little sub-communities. What do you mean by in-group and out-group dynamics? Well, it's kind of like what we're seeing in the US at the moment. I have this model where I describe free states of democracy where you have functional democracy, hollow democracy, and disordered democracy. And this, for me, relies on three core functions of democracy. If you look at the philosophy around these topics over years, centuries, you can really see three things emerge again and again and again. The first is verification. How do we know what's true?

6:47What systems, processes, and institutions exist in our democracy to find as close as we can get to the truth as possible? And we can have a postmodernist discussion about that. But postmodernist, premodernist, or modernist, whatever you like, we'll come back to it here. So it's, first of all, the idea that we can at least as a society verify something and that's an ideal and we rarely actually ever meet that in a pure form but it is an ideal then there's deliberation that we have spaces where we can come together from a wide group of voices and discuss these issues and with verification we can at least have an idea of what's probably true and then accountability that at the end of these processes things happen that deliberation is accounted attached to accountability and when there's wrongdoing the powerful can be held to an account if you look over at the US, you see those functions failing time and time again.

7:34I mean, certainly you wouldn't say there's accountability for the powerful in the US at the moment. The space for deliberation is very much about are you MAGA or are you not MAGA? It's that kind of in-group and out-group dynamic where it's like, well, every piece of information, that process of verification, deliberation, and accountability in those disordered ecosystems are about reinforcing that group identity. And if you also look at the kind of deliberation aspect of this as well, that's really about a kind of performance of deliberation where whatever you say, wherever you go, the answer will always come back to what reinforces the in-group dynamic.

8:08And that anyone who strays from that path, who starts questioning what the in-group is saying, even if they are part of the in-group, gets attacked as either disloyal or an enemy of the group. This is why you always see the MAGA movement attacking the mainstream media. They're trying to undermine, in the eyes of its in-group, the reliability of these out-group actors. because they're seen as the enemy. They need to be attacked and undermined. And that's one of the fundamental dynamics of populism. It's the masses versus the elite, and people such as Donald Trump say they speak for the masses against the elite.

8:41It then causes them problems when they become the elite, and they find that they've been stoking conspiracies, for instance, around Jeffrey Epstein, which turned out not to be entirely true. Can I suggest two counter-thoughts to what you say, which is sometimes, is it not the case that the mainstream media has failed, has missed big stories, or has covered things up in a way that justifies the populist narrative. One is Hunter Biden's laptop. A lot of people would say, I'm sure you spend a lot of time thinking about this, especially with your knowledge of laptops. Some people would say that the true story about Hunter Biden's laptop, which was, you know, in some weird attic in Delaware, I think, was essentially covered up by the mainstream media, didn't give it sufficient attention.

9:23And some people would say, these aren't conspiracies. They were dismissed as conspiracies at the time, but it turned out to be true. And it's a failure of mainstream media and journalism, which actually means that we need to talk about this stuff more and we shouldn't be keeping it silent. What do you say to that? No, absolutely. I mean, when this mainstream media is seen as failing in the eyes of the public, even if that's not entirely fair, then they lose trust in that institution. In the, I would say, the 20th century information model that we've all kind of, many of us have grown up with at least.

9:55I'm sorry, 2025, yeah, not all of us. We've got some very young listeners, I can tell you, Elliot. So we have this top-down information system where institutions would be the ones who are collecting information, verifying it through whatever process they may use. And again, there was no perfect system and there were certainly many flaws. There were gatekeepers. Yeah, there were gatekeepers who then the public received that information. So they had trust in those institutions to send them reliable information. And that trust has kind of waxed and waned over the years. I mean, if you look at the post-World War I period, there was a huge lack of trust in the media and the government across the West.

10:32But countries took actions to actually fix that. The voting rights were expanded. The BBC was founded and launched in that period. They took action to build public trust in those institutions and those systems. What we have now, though, is an alternative system of information that is a peer-to-peer, mainly-to-many system. and where verification took place in institutions, now it takes place in us because we are the distributors of that information. Even interacting with that information for a second more than another piece of information informs an algorithm that serves us more content based off various calculations it's making about someone like Elliot Higgins would like to see.

11:13And that results as being splintered into different kind of realities that we all get served different types of content, but it's content that reinforces what we already believe in many cases or upsets us about something that we can be upset by because that's what drives engagement, not the truth.

11:33You're listening to The Interview from the BBC World Service, people shaping our world from all over the world. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed. Hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

12:15From the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games to the European Athletics Championships. The 2026 sporting calendar is packed full of big events. Keep up with all the action with More Than The Score, the podcast that goes beyond the score sheet. Join expert BBC sports journalists every Monday to Friday for interviews with sports stars, big talking points and the stories behind the headlines. More Than The Score from the BBC World Service. Listen now, search for More Than The Score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

13:15really all around the world, people who are obsessed with data and investigation. And Higgins sees himself not so much as a sort of editor in chief, but as a sort of convener of this network. And he's an unusual fellow in many ways. He's a kind of former admin guy from Leicester in central England. He didn't have any sort of a background in journalism or formal training, but he sees himself as being in the vanguard, not just of a new kind of journalism, but a new kind of advocacy and activism. He wants his investigations to be used in law courts and in education and to help inform the citizenry.

13:51Okay, let's return to my conversation with Elliot Higgins of Bellingcat. If you're here, and it's a privilege to talk to you in this context, if you're here because you're a advocate of democracy, but you're also here because you're an advocate of open source journalism, or investigation rather, isn't there a tension between the two? Wasn't it easier to to cohere and glue a society when a few people did control information and therefore you had high trust in public institutions. I mean, is it actually possible in an era of many-to-many networked conversation and information to have high trust in institutions, which is surely a precursor to the democracy that you so obviously support?

14:32I look back to the 20th century model just to understand why we had those shared narratives, why democracy seemed less splinters. In this country, you had only two channels until the, you know, whatever it was, the 60s. In America, if you wanted to know about the Vietnam War, millions of people tuned in to hear what Walter Cronkite, this, you know, totemic figure, had to say about it. Now, they've got the internet. Well, yeah, it's whoever, whichever is the most engaging influencer that you come across in your TikTok feed or in your YouTube feed. But for me, this is why education is so important, these critical thinking skills in school, because everyone becomes that point of distribution now.

15:08So you are making judgments about should I share this thing? And how are we educating young people to do that at the moment? We really are in a really systematic way. And this is becoming something that I think is actually quite a major crisis with democracy. Because we kind of think, well, you know, young people, they'll, you know, once they hit 18, they'll pick up a newspaper, turn on the news. You know, that suddenly they're going to switch back to this system that we are comfortable with. Very naive. Yeah. And it's dangerous if we think about that. So we need to look at these information systems that exist, at the way we interact with them and say, OK, how do we actually improve this?

15:43And, you know, I like to think that Baleakar has at least demonstrated one way that you can do that. But I'm sure there's plenty more as well. What just spell out what is the crisis in democracy that you're concerned about? There's a hollowness in general, which is if you have the Iraq war, you have the financial crisis, people feel disempowered. They don't feel an agency to be able to eventually sort of ultimately affect their circumstances. is when it comes to young people what is the crisis of democracy i think it's that they don't see the avenues to actually be empowered in a way that actually changes things in a functional way so instead they go to these online spaces where it's really about upsetting other people enough to drive them off the internet or even drive them out of their jobs which is a form of empowerment but it's often linked to discourse that is not based in reality because it's being reinforced by algorithms that serve people what they want to see and there's so many people in the world You'll always have some subset of people who are going to push false information, either because they believe it fully themselves or because they're grifters or they're state actors.

16:41And when that comes together and the algorithm is this kind of secret sauce that brings it all together, you have people drawn into those ecosystems, those bubbles. And it means we can't ever agree on anything because we're constantly being told we're right and that everyone outside of our group must be wrong because you've constantly been told by everyone in the group how smart you are for agreeing with them. Isn't the kind of difficulty, not that we shouldn't do anything about it, isn't the difficulty with what you're talking about that democracy depends on a demos and a demos depends on some idea of the public, public square, which the Internet has decimated.

17:18and if the public square were key national events delivered to by a national broadcaster to take the british example and certain kind of common institutions which are now facing a crisis of trust if we're all living in these little kind of bubbles that you're talking about maybe the very idea of the public has declined to such an extent that democracy becomes impossible well yeah this is what really concerns me that um if you look at the way counterpublics in the 60s and 70s for example, formed, the feminism movement, the civil rights movement, that happened in physical spaces that people came together and met in.

17:55And it sounds always silly to say this, but actually having physical spaces is important. The problem is those kind of spaces were often social and community spaces that from the 80s onwards weren't seen as being good for the market. I think neoliberalism has played a really, really large part in this because it's giving us the idea that we are all individuals, that we need to be given as much freedom, basically to be economic actors as possible rather than democratic actors. And that self-realisation is the ultimate goal, self-fulfilment and the ability to live your best life. You be you, babe.

18:28That idea that the supreme goal of politics and of life is to do as you wish. And that politics really becomes about managing those kind of technocratic rules that define what the market does. That they need to do these things like austerity without any public deliberation because that's what has to happen. So within that democracy, you see the hollowness of it because the deliberation is replaced by technocratic decision-making. The verification is often hollowed out as well because ultimately what's going to happen is even if everyone knows what the truth is, the government's just going to do what the technocrats say anyway.

19:03And that's not to say we're living in a purely technocratic democracy, but when you have more and more elements of that taking over these democratic functions and people recognise that, especially in moments of crisis, they see that wholeness. I think this is when they either kind of give up or they look for alternative spaces and the internet has given them those alternative spaces. But the way those spaces are organised are very, very unhealthy for democracy. What you're talking about is actually a very sudden loss of trust in public institutions, really in a couple of decades. And what you're also advocating is rebuilding it.

19:38And I just want to acknowledge that what you're talking about it's going to take a huge amount of effort but it's also going to take a huge amount of time rebuilding trust faith hope in local or national institutions is the work of many many years isn't it yeah absolutely i mean the way i approach this is that this is what i'll be doing until i'm done doing things because it is such a huge topic i mean the work of bellingcat overlaps with this a lot for example we're going into universities helping them set up course material and investigative hubs for students to engage with their own investigations and connect them to local communities.

20:12There's work being done by other organisations about empowering communities or building co-creational media models so that local people and local media can work together. And it's really about looking for those opportunities, mapping them out, and seeing how we can support them. It's about building networks. It's not about deciding what the new institutional gatekeeper is going to be. it's building up from the grassroots and looking for those opportunities um and i i think without that we will be faced with a major problem of trust in institutions that's only going to get worse and we will see the rise of more kind of trump-like figures across europe and the rest of the world you talked about verification vda verification deliberation and accountability as being three sort of pillars of democracy can we just go through what you have seen since you set up Bellingcat, what, 12 years ago now?

21:00Yep. What have you seen about the impact of the internet, which has changed a lot in that time in social media, on those three things? So what has the internet done and what could it do for verification? We are all responsible for verifying the information that we see and choose to share. So verification has been individualised rather than, so it's gone from institutions to individuals. Yeah. And that we're all these points of distribution now, that we're not just sharing information, We're feeding an algorithm that kind of draws people even more deeply into these systems. And the problem is, if we're just sharing stuff that's emotionally engaging, then they're going to be seeing stuff that's emotionally engaging rather than true as well.

21:38I don't think there's ever going to be a pure version of the Internet where everyone's fact checking everything they see. I think I agree with you on that. But if we can just reduce some of that harm, it would be useful. What I want to avoid as well is where we have to resort to censorship or control as much as possible. But that means individuals have to have a responsibility to the community that they're part of on these platforms. What has the internet done and what could it do for deliberation? The idea of a public space, civilised conversation. I like to think Balancat is a way to kind of demonstrate how that can be done.

22:12That we do open source investigation where, you know, there's a verification part of that. But the evidence we use is open and public and we explain the methodologies that we use. And that means anyone can come along and become part of the kind of investigation, the conversation around that. We've built spaces with about 40 ,000 members where we have those discussions around these things. And we do have stuff that emerges from there that are topics that I don't think would have been investigated otherwise. So one was an oil spill off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago that our community came together and they just started looking for things like marine traffic websites, satellite imagery to figure out which boat was responsible for it.

22:50And they figured that out. And that led to not only publication on the Bellingcat website, but more reporting both through Bellingcat and locally. We were able to identify the vessel involved, track it back to its port of origin and then where it was being hidden at the moment. and we had the UN Marine Insurance Agency come in and ask us for information on it because they didn't have that information. And that all came from that community. And I want more opportunities for that to happen in different communities. The reason local media has died is because local newspapers are not as convenient as Facebook.

23:21Yeah. And a lot which is precious has been lost. Local court reporting, a sense of community, accountability of local councils who spend huge amounts of money. I mean, in real practical terms, Isn't it the case that if you want a thriving local media, people have to pay for it? Yeah, absolutely. One of the proposals was for there to be a tax on social media companies to help support local public interest media. Whether or not they'll actually do that, I think it might be more down to how angry Donald Trump gets about it. I feel like that's one of those ideas I heard about eight years ago. If you were to work out how open source investigations could actually help with local media, you would need local media to have a functioning business model, perhaps through Substack.

23:59It could be through podcasts. It could be through corporate partnerships, whatever. some sort of income revenue stream, ideally from a paying audience. And then open source investigation would allow them to just do really good stuff, for instance, on local councils. And you want to partner with them on that. Yeah, I think as well, it would allow for me, it's like looking at universities is how do we stop them becoming just diploma factories and turn them into something that actually serves a public good. And I think this is an opportunity to do that and also equip students with really useful skills and connections that they can carry forward with them, but also understand what it means to be part of a local community.

24:33That is something I think we've really lost because these spaces have gone away, that we've become more individuals who are online, finding people who agree with us on the internet no matter where they're from, and that becomes our community. Now we're doing work with universities, that's been really, really satisfying because actually seeing people working together in those spaces, creating a hub for people from a range of different disciplines, you know, from kind of more conflict-focused stuff all the way through art and design, Bringing those together to think about these problems in new ways, for me, is really exciting to see.

25:08Thank you for listening to The Interview from the BBC World Service. You'll find more in-depth conversations on The Interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts, including episodes with US President Donald Trump, Belarusian opposition activist Sergei Tikhanovsky, and the Irish historian Catherine Corliss. Until the next time, bye for now.

25:37If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. From the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games to the European Athletics Championships. The 2026 sporting calendar is packed full of big events.