Sometimes, a critical mindset and a close look at the context of an image or post are often all it takes to discover whether a piece of content is genuine.
Verification is key to a lot of the work we do at Bellingcat.
You can read some of our previous work on the subject and how we have identified misinformation and disinformation via the following links
You can also find a bunch of interesting tools that can help debunk misinfo and disinfo in the Bellingcat Toolkit via this link docs.google.com/document/d/1Bf…
Other useful sources for learning about verification include The Verification Handbook verificationhandbook.com
@planet We ran a poll of four options (suggested by readers) and initially planned to capture only the winner. This turned out to be the Al Watiyah Airbase in Libya.
@planet However, we liked the runners-up so much that we captured them too. These were Jiangnan Shipyard in China, the La Palma Volcano and Diego Garcia.
@BcatMonitoring Founded by Vladislav Pozdnyakov — a man convicted of inciting hatred against women in 2018 — Male State’s tens of thousands of followers have been at the forefront of a backlash against gender equality in Russia, winning a fair share of headlines.
@BcatMonitoring In the past several months, they’ve harassed and threatened retailers who use Black models in their advertisements.
We note the decision of the Russian justice ministry to name Bellingcat as a foreign agent. This puts us in the same company as many of Russia's remaining prominent independent media outlets and human rights NGOs.
However, unlike the majority of other "foreign agents", Bellingcat has neither a legal nor physical presence in Russia. We are a foundation registered in the Netherlands without staff in Russia.
The goal of designating Bellingcat is likely an attempt to limit the opportunities of Russian media to cite our investigations and circulate our findings to their audiences, further limiting freedom of the press in Russia
Last night, Bellingcat’s investigation with CNN into the poisoning of Alexey @Navalny won two Emmy awards, the first for Outstanding Investigative Report in a Newscast
The second Emmy award was for Outstanding Research: News. A huge thank you to @clarissaward and her team at CNN for helping to bring this story to a wider audience in such an engaging way
CNN’s reporting can be seen here, including the moment where @clarissaward doorsteps one of the FSB team members involved with Navalny’s poisoning identified by Bellingcat’s research.
UK authorities have just announced Denis Sergeev, who travelled to the UK under the alias Sergey Fedotov, has been charged as the third suspect in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal. Bellingcat first revealed Sergeev's involvement in the poisoning two and a half year ago.
Denis Sergeev, travelling under his alias Sergey Vyacheslavovich Fedotov became a person of interest in our investigation after Russian news outlet Fontanka discovered he had travelled around the same time as the Skripal suspects using a similar passport number.
The GRU’s habit of creating passports for fake identities in batches at the same passport office made it easier to find fake personas, and led us to connecting the Sergey Fedotov alias to a previous suspected nerve agent poisoning in Bulgaria in 2015 bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…