Besides viruses, what else is terribly contagious? Lies, of course. As the coronavirus pandemic engulfs the world, disinformation associated with the virus has taken on many forms. Whether it’s your uncle sending you a Tom Hanks meme at 4 a.m. or the current occupant of the White House lying about Barack Obama supposedly harming the…
A single checkpoint in Northeastern Syria recently became a flashpoint — and in our latest Bellingcat collaboration with Newsy, we show you how. U.S. troops have patrolled the Turkish-Syria border since 2017. This is a means of trying to keep tensions at bay between numerous local factions. This has particularly concerned Turkey — which is,…
In March of 2019, Facebook banned white nationalist and white separatist statements from its platform. White supremacism had been forbidden for some time, but last year’s Christchurch massacre seems to have convinced the social network that a more aggresively anti-racist approach was necessary. This ban is not comprehensive, and there are numerous holes in enforcement….
One of the newest chapters in the Venezuelan political saga involves a group of National Assembly lawmakers who were named in a report by the investigative news website Armando.Info alongside allegations that said lawmakers were involved in a corruption network. According to an investigation published by the website in December 2019, this group of lawmakers…
On Monday, January 20, the city of Richmond, Virginia will be host to a massive gathering of militias and individual gun owners, protesting against a series of proposed bills in the state legislature. This event started as the annual “Lobby Day” rally for the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL) but has quickly gotten out of…
In collaboration with the Autonomous Disinformation Research Network – @DisinfoResearch On Wednesday, November 6, 2019, leaked data from the defunct neo-Nazi forum, Iron March, emerged online, exposing the personal information of more than 1,200 members, including the locations of their IP addresses and, in some cases, their real names. Already, activists sifting through the database…
In collaboration with Colombia’s La Liga Contra el Silencio and Cerosetenta, Newsy and Bellingcat reconstructed the shooting of Dilan Cruz, an 18-year-old student who was hit in the head with a bean bag round at a protest in Bogota on November 23, 2019. Cruz died from his injuries in hospital two days later. Using a…
In this collaborative report with Newsy, we detail how a number of American active-duty servicemen were members of the Iron March forum, an online gathering place for violent neo-Nazis and white supremacists. You can find more information about this massive data leak, including how to acquire, access, and analyze the information, in our recent guide,…
Ukraine’s President conferred with, and the Prime Minister of Ukraine partied with, known far-right figures as leaders of the country’s veterans. Additionally, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, William Taylor, rubbed shoulders with a far-right figure embraced by Ukraine’s veterans ministry. We explain why these events happened. The heads of Ukraine’s new government, led by…
On March 13, 2019, two young men entered their former high school in the small city of Suzano in São Paulo, Brazil. The first one in, Guilherme Taucci, age 17, immediately opened fire with a .38 revolver. Luiz Castro, 25, followed him inside. So began the eighth massacre in Brazilian schools since 2002. Five students…
