OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING:

[A]s Russia floods Telegram, TikTok, and its own state-controlled media with stories of Ukrainian aggression, people on the internet are using open source intelligence tools that have proliferated in recent years to debunk Russia's claims. Internet sleuths are debunking the Kremlin's disinformation and justification for war in real time.

Amid all this, Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat are collecting the data, fact checking it, archiving footage, and amplifying the messages online. Higgins and Bellingcat are old hands at this. They've been tracking conflict online and sifting through the morass of multiple sources and bad information for eight years now.

They've gotten good at it. "It used to be days or weeks until we had fact checks," Higgins told Motherboard over the phone. "Now we're getting it within an hour. That helps with the rapid news cycle. The question of whether these will be authentic or not is being answered very quickly. We didn't have that back in 2014."

Higgins told Motherboard that eight years of building a group of people dedicated to sorting through images and videos of war on the internet had sped up how quickly people can learn the truth behind what they see online. "There's already a network and community," he said. "We've existed for a long time and are familiar with open-source investigation.

According to Higgins, a lot of the disinformation out of Russia has been easy to debunk. On Feb. 18, the heads of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics announced emergency evacuations of their breakaway republics, citing sudden Ukrainian aggression. Metadata in the videos revealed they'd been filmed two days earlier, suggesting the emergency evacuation had been planned in advance.

"They basically manufactured a refugee crisis so they could put them in camps across the Russian border, so they could then be filmed by Russian state media to show evidence of this refugee crisis that they were claiming is part of this genocide that is going on," Higgins said.

Tweet   @brothersjudd