One of the last claims made by Aierken Saimaiti, a self-confessed money launderer who was murdered in Istanbul last November, was that he sent millions of pounds to London for a powerful former Kyrgyz official. What happened to the money? Here’s where the evidence leads. By RFE/RL (KG), OCCRP (RU), Kloop (RU), and Bellingcat Before…
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has been investigating strikes in Afghanistan for the past five years. It has been a struggle. Issues from sheer danger on the ground to a near-total lack of transparency from the U.S. and Afghan armed forces have made the job difficult. There was a cache of 21 strikes in our…
An ongoing information operation is using a network of bots made up of newly created and stolen accounts to target a businessman, exiled from China, who has spoken critically of China’s response to COVID-19. Yet identifying the network has revealed a much larger operation amplifying content across multiple languages, platforms, countries, and topics, with links…
Since the first cases of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) were reported in China’s city of Wuhan in December 2019, the virus has spread throughout the world and — as of the writing of this article — infected over 1.5 million people, killing at least 94,000 of them. In a March 16 press conference, the Director…
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced social media companies to take a more active stance against disinformation. The most striking recent example came on March 31, when Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all banned videos from Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro. These videos featured Bolsonaro advising the use of an antimalarial, chloroquine, to treat the novel coronavirus. Charlie…
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…
On March 16th, 2020, virtually every major social media company released a joint statement on their efforts to curb the spread of disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. As of the writing of this article, the top comment on Facebook’s Twitter post of this statement is, itself, a piece of disinformation, furthering the conspiracy theory that…
Even by the low standards of Telegram, an online messaging service that is sometimes described as “a safe haven for pro-terror Nazis”, the Ukrainian-language Telegram channel devoted to praising the Christchurch shooter is an ugly spectacle. The channel, which we will not name as to not promote it, is full of vicious racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia…
Tear gas has been used in a number of incidents in recent months in Iraq, France, Chile, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Numerous allegations about tear gas have been made, and misinformation, half-truths, myth, and suppositions have been passed around on social media. Yet there is actually a wealth of information about tear gas available in…
In the previous part of this investigation, we showed how a batch of images published by Europol, Group ImageG13, was geolocated to a small coastal village in southwest Madagascar. Based on the evidence discussed, it was determined that ImageG13 was most likely produced between January 2002 and March 2004. Given the number of hotels and…
