January 6, 2018
The Islamic Republic of Iran is witnessing the largest anti-government demonstrations since the 2009 presidential elections protests. Via social media, it is possible to get a sense what’s going on, for example by searching on Twitter for the most ubiquitous hashtags in English and Farsi: #IranProtests and #اعتراض_سراسری. Social media footage is a way to get…
November 13, 2017
You can read the original blogpost by Fiete Stegers, on which this article was based, here. Where exactly was a photo on Twitter taken? When was a Facebook video recorded? Is that image fake, or authentic? These are just some of the common questions you can face when verifying social media content. A few months ago, Julia…
October 17, 2017
By Aric Toler
Much of Bellingcat’s work requires intense research into particular events, which includes finding every possible photograph, video, and witness account that will help inform our analysis. Perhaps most notably, we exhaustively researched the events surrounding the shoot down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) over eastern Ukraine. The photographs and videos taking near the crash…
June 30, 2017
By Aric Toler
One of the most common issues for researchers and journalists is verifying user-generated video content, most often found on social networks and file sharing platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and so on. There is no silver bullet to verify every video, and it may be nearly impossible to verify some videos short of acquiring…
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