Angry Planet - The Man Putin Hates For Shooting Down Fake News

Episode Date: September 8, 2017

The impunity of some of the world’s most frightening men is under threat from people stereotyped as geeks in basements around the world. In the 21st century, well-informed and observant social media addicts have extraordinary powers. Eliot Higgins started watching and reporting on war from the comfort of his living room in 2012. Five years later, he’s using his skills to help the International Criminal Court in The Hague to prosecute war criminals. It’s been a strange journey.This week on War College, Higgins walks us through how he built Bellingcat—a team of investigators who use open source-intelligence and social media to investigate a variety of subjects. They unearthed Russian lies about the shootdown of passenger flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, proved the existence of chemical attacks in Syria, and looked into financial crimes in England.Higgins is a self-taught open source intelligence expert who thinks anyone can learn to do what he does. Bellingcat doesn’t only investigate crimes, it also teaches its readers how to do the same. For Higgins, it’s a hobby that became a job and a mission. One that’s earned him the admiration of the international community and more than a few enemies.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. War College is now an independent production not associated with the Reuters News. Yeah, he's a commander in General Hafters, I guess you could call them an army, and he posted a series of videos where he was executing prisoners who were captured in military operations. Now, he was mainly claiming these were kind of ISIS and jihadis and that they'd gone for a proper judiciary process.

But, you know, one thing that's disturbing about these videos is it starts off being, you know, one person, and it starts ramping up until it's eventually rows of people in orange jumpsuits being executed. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello, welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. My co-host, Jason Fields, is on vacation in Ireland this week. Open source signals intelligence as a new and game-changing form of intelligence gathering that pulls information from social media, government releases, and publicly available satellite photography to paint a picture of conflict zones. Bellingcat is home to pioneers of the method, and this week on War College, we're talking to Elliot Higgins about his life and work chasing down rumors of chemical weapons. in dodging Russian propaganda attacks.

Elliot, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Elliot, can you tell us a little bit about what Bellingcat does and how they work? So Bellingat, I founded that in 2014, after I've been blogging for a couple of years under the name of Ram Moses, using open source information to investigate the conflict in Syria. I saw over that time there were a lot of people who had started using this kind of these investigation techniques. who weren't getting the same sort of attention I was. So I decided to launch a new site under a new name

where I could bring those people together and also produce kind of guides and case studies so other people could learn. During that time, we've done investigations on things like MH17, the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, and started expanding into different areas, for example, investigating corruption, kind of environmental and conservation issues as well.

So we're basically using open source investigation and trying to think of the different ways it can be used in different areas. What were you, what had you been blogging about before 2014? What were you interested in? I was looking at the conflict in Syria. So I'd started that off because in 2011, I was watching the conflict in Libya, just as a kind of just as news consumption. But I started seeing a lot of stuff coming through from Libya about what was happening on the ground

that wasn't really being picked up in the mainstream media. And I thought it was very interesting. And just from the perspective of seeing that there was all this detail that just wasn't being reported. And a lot of it seemed interesting. It was just kind of a bit frustrating for me. So when I launched my blog in 2012, the conflict in Libya had wound down a bit. And Syria was becoming kind of escalating as a conflict. And I was seeing the same sort of social media posts there.

So it was really began because I wanted to see how much information I could gather about what was happening in Syria just from open sources. just so I could understand what was going on. And what was your methodology? Like, especially kind of back then, what did you do? Did you just pull up Facebook or Twitter and go looking for videos and pictures and kind of start to piece things together? How does that work exactly? Well, one of the big moments for me was in early 2012, there was an event known as the Hula massacre, which was basically towns were attacked.

One place in particular was Hula, and there was a massacre there. And the one I noticed there is there were YouTube channels that were being used particularly by that town to upload videos. So there are three or four channels. And I kind of looked at this and I looked at some other channels that videos were being uploaded on. I realized that these channels were all kind of based either on a location or a certain group that was using the channel. So it would be in an arms group or a media center. So I started cataloging these. And every day I would go through these videos from these playlists that were newly uploaded and just see what there was there to see.

So I came across to begin with videos like the first video. of cluster bombs, the first brow bomb videos. And then as I kind of taught myself ways to verify the videos using techniques like geolocation, I kind of made more and more kind of in-depth analysis of these images and videos. Talk about that verification process, right? Because there's so much of what we see, especially here in the States, and presumably in England, where you are as well, on social media that's disinformation. So how do you vet something? I'll give you an example from the April 4th, Kanshe Koon chemical attack this year. The first thing we do is we search through all the social media channels that might be posting information about the attack.

Ideally, it's kind of the original channel. So, you know, for example, the YouTube channels used by local groups or Facebook pages or Twitter. And you find with Syria, there's usually a Facebook page, Twitter account and YouTube channel for the various kind of organizations who are out there. It's not like, you know, anywhere else in the world where you have Twitter and anywhere. one can get on Twitter and post straight away. It's limited internet access. So they're kind of a bit more systematic about how they use that, and we can actually use that to our advantage.

So we try and gather all the reports we can, all the kind of initial reactions to it, the first kind of posts about what's happened. And then we put them in order of time when they were posted. And among that, you'll see things like video showing the aftermath of the attack. You'll see people talking about what's happened. And you can then start, if you don't speak Arabic, you get someone to transcribe what people are saying.

And you look at what they are saying. You compare the various witness statements and claims and allegations to each other and to the other information you've collected. So over time, really what you're doing is collecting all this information, comparing it to each other. And then you start looking at things like, okay, can we figure out if these, you know, for example, with Karje Kuhn, we had 20 or 30 videos showing places where people were being treated. But at first, they look like they could be the same location,

but you can actually organize them by the different locations they're in. then you can start using satellite imagery to geolocate some of these videos to confirm exactly where these were recorded. So you start building layer and layer of information about what's happening and what people are claiming. And then you start kind of looking for clues for, you know, for example, the symptoms of what people are suffering from, very typical of what we've seen in previous sarin attacks. So that seemed to indicate it was a nerve agent of some sort compared to the chlorine attacks that have been happening repeatedly over the last couple of years. So you start kind of cross-referencing it against other material you have as well. In a case like that, ideally you'd have something like the remains of ammunition that could be identified.

But in the case of Karsha Kuhn, while there are remains, they couldn't be identified as a particular ammunition, and I don't believe they have yet. But that's kind of the process you would go through with one particular incident. What's your professional background? Before I started blogging, I was working in finance and administration roles. And then I basically just taught myself to do the verification process. and spent an awful lot of time looking at what was coming out of the conflict in Syria, and then what happened with MH17 and the conflict in Ukraine. That strikes me as a pretty big change.

Why did you do that? What drove you to start doing this? Well, I've always had an interest in, you know, kind of world events, and obviously Garab Spring was a big thing. And then I'm sort of personally who spent an awful lot of time on the Internet, so I started seeing a lot of stuff coming through social media. And it was just that it was ignored. And then when I started doing this work, a lot of people started taking notice of what I was doing.

And that kind of drove me on to do it more. And then it got to a point where I was basically in a position where I was looking for a job. And I thought, well, when I was trying doing, you know, this is something that's more full-time. So I crowdfunded my kind of initial year or so of work. And then supplemented that with, I started being asked to go to Acevets and talk about this and run workshops. And then, you know, eventually we've started raising France for people who are kind of funding this. And, you know, we've got like a Russian language version of Bellingt now. We're doing investigations into financial corruption in the UK.

And it's kind of really expanded into a whole bunch of different areas now. It's just a really interesting and exciting field to be part of, especially now. We're kind of working more with international organizations like the ICC and OHSHR to see how this open source investigation can be applied. to the work that they're doing. And there's a lot of, you know, very positive interest in this field. Your whole statement just there opened up like three more questions for me. Let's see if I can move down them. Let's talk about the ICC and the International Criminal Court, because you are now a tech advisor for them. Is that correct? Yeah, I'm on the IRAM Technology Advisory Board, and they've been very interested in open source information and social media for the past

a few years. And so this is part of what I've been talked to them about. In fact, they've recently just issued their first arrest war that was based off social media posts, videos posted by a Libyan armed group showing a series of executions. So that's very interesting. That's kind of the first big, big case where, you know, that has been used as core, as kind of core to what they're doing. So for them, you know, it opens up a lot of opportunities and, you know, possibilities to gather information. And they've asked me to kind of speak to quite a lot of the people there. We're talking about training some of their staff in doing more advanced investigation techniques as well. The arrest that was Mustafa Bussaf al-Werfali, was that correct?

Yes, that's correct. Describe the videos that he was posting online. Yeah, he's a commander in General Hatter's, I guess you could call them an army. And he posted a series of videos where he was executing prisoners who were captured in military operations. Now, he was mainly claiming these were kind of ISIS and jihadis and that they'd gone for a proper judiciary process. But one thing that's disturbing about these videos, is it starts off being, you know, one person, and it starts ramping up until it's eventually rows of people

in orange jumpsuits being executed. And the kind of discussions, you know, around that, what they were saying about that is they were trying to scare their enemies. So these were very brutal videos, and it got the attention of the ICC, and this is what's led to the arrest warrant. But there's clearly him in all the videos, and it's posted on their own kind of Facebook page.

So it's very blatant as well. What you're doing is kind of a news, tool for investigating war criminals. Yeah, and irony is I kind of got into this because of what was happening in Libya and then Syria kind of drew not only my attention, but the intention of pretty much everyone who's working on open source and conflicts. Well, it's now Libya where it seems there's the most scope for using this

injustice and accountability with groups like the ICC rather than Syria, which everyone is focused on. So we're hoping at Bellingat very soon to start focusing more Libya and looking at the open source information coming from there, seeing if there's more information we can gather about potential war crimes and other violations. Do you think that the work you're doing and I guess just social media in general is making it harder for the international community to ignore places like Libya? In the 90s, when we didn't have Facebook, horrible things were still going on all over the

world. There were still executions like this, but now we see them. Yeah, and I mean, my own work, I often encounter people who've worked in governments who have said, you know, even very early on in my early blogging days, they were using kind of my work and following my work to understand what's happening in a lot of these areas. And one thing I've come across a lot is when speaking to kind of policymakers is they kind of have lost faith in their own intelligence communities. You know, they get a one page explaining what's happening and they don't kind of really trust it. So when we can come to them with this open source information and say, you know, here's all the videos, here's the analysis we've done. They feel confident in that.

And I think that's the one thing that's really useful about open source investigation is you can really be completely transparent about where your information is coming from, what sort of analysis you've done on it, and how you've drawn your conclusions, step by step. And that's something that played into a lot with our work with the MH17 case, because as part of that, early on, we were actually approached by the, or I was approached by the Dutch police's joint investigation team. to be a witness. And one thing that I was interviewed

for several hours going through the work we've done. And one thing they said is they found it very useful that we kind of laid out all our sources and where we got our information from and how we came to our conclusions.

And it seems that our work had an influence on the joint investigations team's own approach to using social media as part of the case. And so it seems that, you know, the influence you've had there

is that they started using this and investigating this. I think eventually they even set up an entire kind of department within the investigation just to look at social media. It feels like it's taken people like you to pioneer this. You think it would have been a no-brainer for some of these government-led intelligence agencies to do this kind of work.

And I'm wondering if you've had how your relationships have been with government intelligence agencies. Are they usually that friendly as in the Dutch example, or have you ever had pushback? So generally what I found is they've been generally positive about the world. we've done. I mean, I've been told often they cite us in their reports as well, or just using the videos and images we've used in their own reports. So generally it's been very positive. I mean, it's not like I have the CIA knocking on my door asking me questions or anything like that. It's just, you know, occasionally we do an event and we'll bump into someone who, you know, has spoken to someone about our work or they may have been working for someone

else who they were using our work to inform what they were doing. But yeah, it's being generally very positive. And we've worked on various kind of projects where we've been, you know, working with local and national police on how to use this kind of stuff in their own work. You can actually see now the effects of that, for example, the recent Europol campaign Stop Child Abuse, Trace and Object, where they've basically crowdsourced the identity of objects that were taken from abuse images. And that's something we've kind of supported unofficially. And even a Reddit community has grown around it, where people have been trying to identify

all these objects. And it's been quite successful, so. But quite a lot of them have been identified. This feels like something that you can train anyone to do. Do you think that's accurate? I mean, the basics are simple. It's spot the difference, basically, but for grownups. So it's not hard to teach the basics.

I usually find the main thing that people need is just the kind of persistency and obsessiveness to dig through a lot of material. But one thing I say, you don't have to spend your entire life doing this like I have. You can contribute in smaller ways. So one project we worked on was verifying Russian airstrike videos from Syria. They posted these gun camera videos on their YouTube channel, the Russian Ministry of Defense, claiming they were bombing ISIS. And there's a lot of allegations that they weren't bombing ISIS. So what happened there, there was a community on Twitter that kind of grew up,

only less than a dozen people who started using Google Earth imagery to geolocate all these videos. We kind of then used that as a data set that we then could kind of draw, conclusions from, we could clearly show that by comparing the Google satellite imagery to the imagery from the Russian Ministry of Defense, that they were lying in many of the cases about where they were bombing. So we discovered in the first 30 videos they posted online claiming to be ISIS targets. Only one of them was actually in ISIS territory. And that was according to their own maps of ISIS territory. So purely using, you know, verifying Russian information, using Russian sources, we could show that they were not telling the truth.

All right, we've been dancing around the Russia thing just a little bit, and I want to kind of dive into it now, because I think it's an important part of your story. Can you explain your relationship with RT and Russia? I would say it's probably on the bad side of this. So because we've done a lot of work that's critical of Russia, and we've shown frequently that Russia has lied in public, I'll give you a good example of that. Just after MH17 was shot, the Russian Ministry of Defense gave a long press conference. conference, kind of presenting their evidence of what happened on the day. And we were able to prove using open source investigation that these were just all untrue. They'd just lied about it.

They had presented satellite imagery. They'd doctored. They had lied about the flight path of them H17, all these different details. And basically since then, they've really not liked us. So we were targeted by the same hackers that targeted DNC and pedestrian emails, fancy bear. they tried to fish our passwords for our email accounts, but we fortunately recognize they were really obvious phishing emails. So that wasn't too much of a problem.

We didn't even realize until about a year and a half later, until the actual DNC hacks happened, because more than the security companies who worked on those leaks, published more on the emails that were used for the fishing, and it was identical to the ones we received, down to the spelling mistakes. And then we consulted with them and discovered it was actually the same group

we did it. So we've had the cyber attacks, we've had a website hacked, we've had lots of negative press in places like Russia today and Sputnikin and Russian media. The Russian Ministry of Defense and Foreign Ministry basically called as liars. When the Russian foreign ministry did that, I asked them for their evidence and they sent me a eight-pageer of plagiarized blog posts as their reply as their evidence. So I asked them next time they shouldn't send me plagiarized blog posts. They should at least cite their sources if they're going to copy stuff off the internet. So yeah, I mean, generally it's being day haters. And you've had RT reporters show up at your house and your office kind of unannounced before trying to do a gotcha, correct?

Yeah, so basically one day, it was just before the, I think the second anniversary of MX17, I think. I had a message from a, I would call them a journalist, a person who basically said they would like to interview me. They were in Leicester, which is my hometown, and they were filming something about the Doali celebrations they have in Leicester, even though they weren't in professional. three weeks, which was my first clue, something was up. And he said he was a freelance reporter and just wanted to record something. But I recognised him as someone who'd done a hit piece on the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights a couple of weeks before for Russia today. And I was busy anyway. So I said, if you want an interview, you can interview me kind of next week when I'm in London. And I was out of the office and busy anyway. But then I started getting calls first from my accountant to say someone from a journalist

had been there filming, asking where I was, which was bizarre. because they're just like an independent accountancy firm with lots of clients. So when the secretary said, I don't know who he is, they were like, oh, isn't that's weird that she doesn't know who he is, even though it's not. Then they went to my office, and I wasn't there, which they knew, and they tried to make out it as weird that I wasn't at my office. And then they went to my old home where I didn't live, but my brother does and my mother was visiting. And they doorsteps her, and then they kind of edited it down to make it all look very suspicious and weird. And they spoke to people on the street saying, oh, wasn't it strange this person? isn't here and they're going, oh yes, it's very strange.

So it's basically just this hit piece they put together, but it kind of shows you the lengths they're willing to go to. And in fact, in 2016, the joint investigation team had a press conference. And just before that, it was about MH17, and they were going to basically reveal what they're finding. So Russia today was covering it. And they basically just did a two-minute hit piece on me, where they literally took footage of me doing presentations

and edited it down to make me look like I was saying stuff. I wasn't. I was being really vague about stuff when I wasn't. So that's now subject of an off-com TV regulator complaint in the UK. So I'm just seeing how that will go. But yeah, they're pretty aggressive about that. All right. So you're kind of someone that's been on the front lines of fighting this Russian disinformation campaign. It's personal for you. They've made it personal. How do we, as just news consumers parse through what's real and what's fake

as we're moving as we're moving through our daily lives. It's a challenge because, you know, no one wants to be a full-time fat checker unless they're really into it. But your general reader doesn't want to be doing that. I think it's really just down to coming to, you know,

having new sources you trust. And, you know, if you're on amazing news.combe.j.p. UK you know just it's you know trust you know

mainstream news sources because there is this kind of split now where you know I see this all the time where this kind of alternative media is kind of taking over in some people's mind but a lot of this alternative media is just

as it's just rubbish and I'm not even talking info wars I mean there's sites that some people consider mainstream that are rubbish but then again you have sites like the mail online that print any old rubbish

just as long as they get clicks from it so it's kind of just a matter of using your judgment. Newspapers aren't going to be right 100% of the time, but there are sites that are going to be wrong a hell of a lot of time, even by purpose or by accident. And those are the ones you've got to just use your judgment

about what your news consumption is. And you don't trust sites like Sputnik in Russia today to give you a balanced view on what's happening in Russia and, you know, with the MH17 case in Syria. It's a very difficult question to answer. It was interesting to see that Facebook is now saying that they're going to do something about the advertising revenue from Facebook pages that post a lot of fake fake stories based on the judgment of their fact checkers they've been cooperating with.

So there are attempts to deal with this and I think there does have to be. But it's very, very tricky because when you start talking about effectively censorship, you start having to think about countries like Turkey and China and Russia where that goes far beyond what we in the West would consider a reasonable about, amount of censorship. If you could give everybody in the public, the reading public, one thing from your toolkit, one thing from the open source intelligence toolkit, what would you impress upon them? The most, the easiest thing I would say is just do a reverse image search on something if you think it looks too good to be true. I mean, with a browser like Chrome, it's literally, right-click, reverse image search. Only yesterday I saw the traditional flood image of a shark's

moving through a street being shared as being Houston. And, you know, it's one of these images that's just been around forever. And you can find very easily if you just do very simple search, but still people were sharing it. Journalists were sharing it. So that's like one of the most basic things that anyone can do. Do you think that we're a little bit tech illiterate? Maybe that's the wrong word.

Maybe social media illiterate. It's such a new thing that we're still kind of trying to parse how to use it. Yeah, I think as well there's been a massive development in how, social media is being used in the last five years, especially through what's happened with the Arab Spring. You know, 10 years ago, we had iPhones launched and the introduction of social media platforms and then apps to access those even, you know,

in an easier way and to share images and photos. And, you know, we kind of just expect back people to know how to use this. And then we're surprised when fake information gets shared and we have, you know, white nationalists all over the internet. I personally think that this kind of understanding of how the internet works and how it's used in social media and open source information is something that should be taught when kids are at school, not something you hope they learn as they grow up because there's a whole lot of load of issues around how the internet is being used, you know, abuse grooming, all kinds of issues like that, plus the kind of, you know, how do you know what's fake, how do you know what's true? Can you verify it stuff? You know, what tools are out there to use? I think that's something that, you know, everyone should be learning at an earlier age and they are now. But, you know, this is going to be something that's difficult to do because, you know, most teachers are teaching now, even if they're early 20s, they still would have been at school kind of at a time where this kind of technology smartphones was only just appearing.

Now we've got a generation growing up where they've had smartphones their entire, you know, kind of young lives. 15 they've had iPhones. So, you know, it's been a real massive change. And I think it's really a kind of a quiet revolution that's happened. But most people have just kind of not even realized it's happening around them. And it has happened and it has changed things dramatically. Has Bellingad ever gotten anything wrong? Not wrong. We've made the, I think the one thing that I do regret is a couple of years ago,

ISIS had a social media campaign where they actually. encourage their followers to take photographs in European cities holding a piece of paper with basically a hashtag on and you know ISIS is everywhere type stuff and the whole idea was to generate this idea of kind of fear that ISIS was everywhere. So I basically crowdsourced on Twitter. I asked people if they could geolocate them and very quickly people did. It was this very kind of positive campaign where it went from this all scary ISIS is everywhere to ISIS followers and Europe are idiots because they give away their positions on social media. That was a good positive campaign and then a year or so later we were looking to the Berlin market attacks and we were looking

at the social media profiles of the people who followed the attacker and one profile several months prior had posted several photographs of an assault rifle and one photograph of a kind of European countryside scene and we spent weeks trying to figure out where this was just to be kind of thorough and we couldn't figure it out so we um I basically went on Twitter and said could anyone does anyone know this location? It was posted on the page of an ISIS supervisor and that's all I put and unfortunately a right-wing

blog in Holland posted the photograph and had identified it as a holiday camp in Holland but they strongly implied in their post that this was a sign of an imminent attack by ISIS and that resulted in the police having to go out there

the manager knocking on everyone's door to make sure there weren't any ISIS members hiding in any of the chelets. And just this one little thing turned into this kind of minor incident in Holland. So that was kind of frustrating and annoying. I think the biggest problem we face, though, is that, you know, we have a whole army of people who are either Russian kind of trolls or sympathetic to kind of various outlooks that really attack us for every single thing they can possibly imagine is wrong with our work or what they perceive is wrong with our work. So we've kind of become very cautious about how much information we put out and, you know, how certain we are before we publish something. So that kind of protects us to a certain extent.

But, you know, when you use social media a lot like I do, it does get to the point where you just have a flood of people just criticizing you all the time for any perceived problem they have with you, even if it's completely ridiculous. All right, I've got two more questions for you. The first to follow up on what you were just talking about, there's a real danger today. in social media for there to be like kind of an outrage critical mass. So you have to be very careful as you were just saying about what you kind of, what you kind of post and how many people you bring into the investigation, right? So when something like that Holland thing happens, do you feel a certain level of responsibility for that?

I do. I mean, it kind of depends, though. I mean, sometimes it's like with the Europol thing, with this kind of stop child abuse campaign, one thing that worries me there, and I think I'm not sure if they've considered that, is the kind of vicarious trauma aspect of it. Because one thing I found a lot in the work that we do is you kind of can train yourself to watch a horrible image to a certain extent. You kind of prepare yourself for it mentally. It's not like you have to spend 10 minutes doing it.

It's just something you get used to. What catches you out are the things that you kind of don't expect to see and it creates associations in your mind. So when I was doing the MH17 investigation, one thing I was doing is look. looking through the wreckage of MH17, looking for signs of damage that could come from shrapnel, just to have an idea of what had happened to it, and this was very early days. But there was a toy rabbit in the wreckage that was the same type given to my daughter when she was born. And that kind of subconscious association is what really affected me. Now, what you're doing with the Europol investigation is you've got all these different children's toys and clothes that are from abuse images.

and you know they're from abuse images. So even subconsciously, you're making these connections between, you know, a girl's swimming costume and, you know, this horrific abuse that these images are probably showing, but you don't like to see the full images. So my concern there is you start doing these kind of campaigns without fully understanding the potential effects of vicarious trauma. So, I mean, that's just one example, but there's various pitfalls like that. You kind of have to be aware with doing this, you know, making information to public.

But we had also the example of the Reddit campaign to find the Boston Marathon bombers that identify the wrong people. So I think it's useful, you know, at the kind of top of these kind of crowdsourced, open source investigations, is to have someone kind of checking stuff and making these kind of decisions about what's valid, what should go out there, what shouldn't. Last question. So here in the States, a popular media narrative is that Russian trolls used disinformation in Facebook. and fake news to help sway the election, right? Yeah. As someone who's been on the receiving end of Moscow propaganda and kind of knows it inside and out

and has been dealing with them for years before our election, what's your take on that? Do you think there's any kind of truth to that? I think there is to an extent, but I think what often happens is people see people who disagree with them or have a stance that they can't imagine anyone holding, and they just say, oh, you must be a Russian troll, you must be fake. I've spent, you know, a long time kind of covering Syria and I've seen this interesting progression

where there were a lot of people who were very pro-assad who basically hated me for the work I was doing. And, you know, they're kind of a community online. And then when MH17 was shot down and we started doing work on Russia, there's a kind of rushing pro-puting community who kind of became very apparent around MH17 and around what was happening in Ukraine. then Russia started bombing Syria and the kind of pro-acid pro-putin MH17 troopers kind of came together. And within that, you've got lots of people like the kind of Alex Jones fans and stuff like that. Then with basically what happened with Brexit and then Trump, there was a lot of crossover between those communities and these pre-existing communities. And you've just seen over the last five years these different communities, the kind of Venn diagram of these communities, kind of becoming tighter and tighter.

And I think some people see that And they can't believe people will be Pro-acid, pro-Trump, pro-putin, pro-Brexit, and be a real person. And they've seen, oh, this must be a Russian troll. But there are people out there like that. They are people who generally believe that stuff.

And as insane as it is to hold all those positions to us, it happens all the time. And there's a whole community of websites and people around that. So I think often the influence of Russian trolls can be over-s just because people aren't aware that these kind of communities have existed for a long time before even, you know, the presidential elections. They're just people with bizarre and extreme opinions on terrible people. That would be fair to say.

It's easier to dismiss the people who disagree with you as, as boogeymen instead of reckoning with their humanity and realizing that they've, you know, been consuming some unpleasant information. Yeah, I mean, I mean, personally, I just got to the point where I recognize these people as soon as they send me a message on Twitter, so I just block everyone. You quite quickly realize that, you know, this is a kind of echo chamber, though. This kind of Venn diagram that's kind of pulled together, has created this echo chamber. Things like Bright Bark and Info Wars and now this kind of rise of the white nationalism in America, it is also kind of tied to these communities as well. But it's not kind of a, it's kind of like, There are a lot of these kind of alternative communities who have this kind of conspiracy kind of focus.

The kind of ideas they share and the way they share these ideas are always very similar. And because, you know, the work of Belenicat has used kind of open source information a lot, they basically have a lot to, you know, it's almost as if we started writing about 9-11, you know, 16 years ago, except we went like basically saying, yeah, it was two airliners that did it. We have all this video footage. They come along and they still have the whole crazy notions about control. explosions and stuff. Whilst it's in a way the same

kind of communities. There's this thread that has run through conspiracy theories going communities going back decades that also draws in kind of these pro-acid, pro-Trump, pro-putin kind of white nationalist crowds as well. So that

is something that's always existed. It might have been kind of amplified, probably less influence and more amplified by kind of these Russian kind of troll things. But in my personal experience, the Russian trolls have been generally more annoying than effective. Well, that's good to know. Elliot Higgins from Bellingat. Thank you so much for coming on War College.

It's no problem. Thank you. Thank you for listening to War College. I've been your host, Matthew Gall. Again, Jason Fields is on vacation in Ireland this week, taking a much-deserved break. We're back next week with more stories from behind the front lines. If you like what you heard on the show, please follow us on Twitter or visit us on Facebook. at Facebook.com forward slash war college podcast. You can find us on iTunes where we ask that you please rate us. We're also on Stitcher, on ACAST, and wherever else find podcasts are distributed.