From misinformation to resilience: teaching open-source investigation for a better future
Given these challenges, we must develop a proactive counter-strategy: equipping news consumers with the tools of open-source investigation (OSI) to critically assess and verify information themselves. This approach, rooted in the methodologies pioneered by Bellingcat, aims to empower citizens, foster a more resilient information space, and strengthen democracy.
The challenge of “weaponised” information is not new, but the digital age has drastically amplified its impact. The rise of social media, while democratising access to information, has also made it easier than ever for bad actors to spread false narratives, create distrust, and shape public discourse. Mainstream media, while often a source of reliable information, struggles to reach social media audiences and is itself viewed with suspicion by some, further exacerbating the problem.
To combat information disorder, it is critical to first understand its components:
- Misinformation: False information created and disseminated because it’s believed to be true.
- Disinformation: False information deliberately created and disseminated with the intent to deceive and cause harm.
- Malinformation: True information shared with the intent to cause harm, for example, moving private information into the public sphere.
These different forms of information are spread through a variety of actors:
Official Government/Political/State Actors. This includes everything from social media posts of politicians to official government reports and statements:
Proxy Government/Political/State Actors. This includes overt actors, such as state media, as cover actors, such as the Internet Research Agency.
Self-Interested Actors: Those driven by the benefits of spreading disordered information, outside of politics, for their own personal gain. This can include building a subscriber base, gathering donations, or just building their online following.
True Believers: Those who believe the information they’re creating and sharing is true, despite it not being the case.
Since 2016 the focus of counter-disinformation work has often been state actors attempting to influence Western democracies, but the reality is True Believers play a much bigger role in information disorder than I believe has been fully recognised. These are the individuals and communities who see themselves as noble truth-seekers, themselves fighting against false information spread by various authorities bent on deceiving the public. This can be on a wide range of topics, from Covid conspiracies to Flat Earthers, but it’s possible to observe three factors that creates a True Believer.
The first is a sense of distrust in some form of authority. Where this distrust originates can vary, even within individual communities, but it’s the seed that is developed by the second factor, some form of crisis that drives the individual to seek alternative sources of information (aka, “doing your own research”), the final factor in the creation of a True Believer. This leads individuals to communities that reinforce their beliefs and sense of distrust, providing them with all the information they need to justify their opinions, and identify those organisations and individuals they believe are the enemy. This process is assisted by search engine and social media algorithms that serve content to individuals designed around their interests, without making any judgement on whether or not that information is accurate. This leads to individuals being drawn into information bubbles that only act to reinforce and radicalise their beliefs, with the bubbles becoming the lens through which they perceive the world.
Traditional approaches to combatting disinformation like fact-checking and platform regulation have proven to be insufficient. While there is some value in fact-checking, the True Believers whose minds we would hope to change with evidence are highly resistant to these efforts as they see them as coming from the other side, and therefore easily dismiss it before they really engage with it. A government backed counter-disinformation campaign has little to no impact on individuals who have already decided the government is the enemy.
We’re also faced with the challenge presented by a shift in the way people consume information. Over the past decade we’ve increasingly moved away from the top down, gatekeeped information model where news editors and governments have control over what information the public has access to on a daily basis to a peer-to-peer model where information spreads through algorithmically curated social media feeds, and users can be part of both the creation and distribution of the content. This impacts younger generations in particular, and we need to build our response to information disorder around that reality. Teaching young people to fact-check headlines isn’t effective when the majority of the information they consume comes from short form video content from outside of the traditional media.
We must also consider the sense of disempowerment felt by many people, and how that drives them to online communities that create an illusion of empowerment by surrounding individuals with people who agree with them, and who find empowerment through attacking people they consider to be enemies of their cause online.
To achieve this, I believe we need to examine how we educate young people, not just in terms of social media and media literacy, but developing their critical thinking skills across a range of topics. Finland and Estonia have led the way in building their education systems around this, starting with primary education. But I believe in our current political and social climate it’s not enough to tell young people the truth is important, and that it’s not enough to teach them how to find the truth, because the truth without consequences just creates another bubble in a sea of bubbles, and drives that same sort of cynicism that makes people more vulnerable to disordered information.
What I believe is essential is showing young people that the truth has the power to change things for the better, to lead to accountability, and that they aren’t just passive members of democracies waiting to vote every 4 or 5 years in the hope something might change. I was particularly inspired by the work of The Student View in the UK, who have been going to schools to teach young people how to do investigative journalism and teaming them up with journalists to work on issues they care about. One example I was particularly impressed with are students in Bradford who were taught how to do freedom of information requests, and used that to get information from their local police about high speed police chases in their local area which they found disturbing, discovery it was one of the highest rates in the UK, creating local and national coverage of the issue, resulting in a change of behaviour from the local police.
Our work at Bellingcat has focused on developing secondary education material, but working with universities to develop course material and create cross-disciplinary investigative hubs where students can not only apply the skills they’ve been taught to issues that they’re interested in, but also connect to the local schools, NGOs and media to investigate topics that impact the whole local community, not just the student population. We’ve started this work already with Utrecht University, and are already working with other universities to start developing the course material and creating their own hubs.
As these hubs develop we also have the opportunity to create collaborations between hubs on a national and international level. Lessons learnt from investigations at one hub can be propagated across the whole network, and applied to similar issues in different locations. The involvement of computer science departments also creates the opportunities to develop tools for investigators that can be quickly shared across the entire network, creating further value for the participants in the creation of the tool and those participants using the tools.
All of this will take time, and sometimes it might seem like things are happening a bit too slowly and a bit too late, but I believe that to meet the challenges of the social media era we need to start thinking more radically about solutions, and use the incredible technologies now available to billions of people across the world to invigorate our democracies and push back against the chaos of disordered information.
By Eliot Higgins
Eliot Higgins is the founder of Bellingcat and the Brown Moses Blog