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Eliot Higgins Profile picture
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Mar 11 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Geolocating images and videos from Ukraine can help Bellingcat greatly in our work to collect, geolocate, and archive content for future accountability processes. Bellingcat has written a beginners guide in geolocation so anyone can get involved bellingcat.com/resources/2021…
I'd encourage people to use a hashtag like #geolocation, but I'm not the boss of you are anything, we'll most likely find it anyway, and it saves us hours of work per video, meaning we can add them to the archive in minutes, not after half a days work.
I'd love to do it in a more organised way, like on some clever web platform, but we don't really have the time or resources to build it or implement someone else's version of it, and it's a lot of time and energy if no-one uses it.
I genuinely believe anyone can do #geolocation, so I'd encourage everyone to give it a go one time, and you might find a way to contribute to accountability in Ukraine.

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More from @EliotHiggins

Eliot Higgins Profile picture
Mar 12
It would be really great if once @Maxar or @planet get their first clear satellite images of Mariupol after the clouds clear that imagery could be available immediately on @googleearth so the open source community can rapidly assess the scale of destruction in the city.
There's very limited imagery coming from Mariupol, so it's difficult to assess the level of destruction in the city, so satellite imagery will play a key role in that. Getting it quickly and in a way that helps assist analysis would be immensely helpful for everyone.
Amnesty did excellent work using a crowdsourcing model to scour satellite imagery of Raqqa and document the scale of destruction, and it's something that could easily be repeated with Ukraine with the right backing amnesty.org.uk/press-releases…
Read 6 tweets
Eliot Higgins Profile picture
Mar 11
Given the Russian MoD's long track record for lying about aerial and satellite imagery it's worth taking this with a sea worth of salt.
So how would we verify or debunk this claim? Well @mod_russia has lied about the location of aerial footage before, so we need to first geolocate it. Here's an example of them lying about the location of aerial imagery from Syria bellingcat.com/news/mena/2015…
The Russian MoD makes some pretty specific claims, without really explaining how they can make them based on grainy drone footage. So after geolocation we can look for imagery from the same day at the same location. Maybe local authorities posted on social media about it.
Read 7 tweets
Eliot Higgins Profile picture
Mar 9
Since 2018 Russian officials have claimed over 60 false flag chemical attacks are being prepared by Syrian opposition groups and their allies, with zero of them actually happening. Russia says shit like this all the time, all it means is they're shameless liars.
One thing you have to understand is Russian officials lie constantly, but there's rarely any grand strategy behind it, they're just winging it, and you're only noticing them now because, unlike Syria, this is a conflict a lot of people are engaged.
So when you see a Russian official lying, it's not some clever ploy, its just they're so full to the brim with shit it spilling out their mouths. It looks gross, but you're only noticing because you're actually looking this time round.
Read 4 tweets
Eliot Higgins Profile picture
Mar 7
This is a good piece, but there's one big piece of the jigsaw that I think a lot of people covering the role of the open source community in the coverage of Ukraine are missing...
I've been doing open source investigation for over a decade now, starting with arguing with people on Internet forums about the Arab Spring to collecting evidence of war crimes in Ukraine for international accountability purposes, and things have changed dramatically.
Back then, the community was just a handful of people from places like Storyful, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and me and my blog, and no-one outside of that group had a clue what open source investigation or things like geolocation was.
Read 14 tweets
Eliot Higgins Profile picture
Mar 5
Many of you will have spent the week viewing massive amounts of potentially traumatic imagery. Bellingcat published a guide on minimising harm from viewing such imagery bellingcat.com/resources/how-…
Vicarious trauma is a serious issue for researchers working on open source imagery from conflict. Self care is important, and with a conflict with a constant flow of intense, graphic imagery it's sometimes difficult to switch off, but please give yourself a day off.
I've never seen so much of the accountability community mobilise around any topic, particularly around open source material, so that horrific video you're watching is going to be found and preserved, its not down to you to share it and make the world aware.
Read 9 tweets
Eliot Higgins Profile picture
Mar 3
Bellingcat and partners are currently working long hours to get our collection, verification and archiving process running efficiently for content coming from Ukraine for future use in accountability processes. Once that's sorted expect a lot more website content.
We're already getting through a lot of content, but we want our process working as efficiently as possible so we can expand our work and feed it into our own investigations.
Thanks to everyone who has donated to Bellingcat, that's going to support our Ukraine work, and also thanks to everyone geolocating images on Twitter, that saves us a lot for time and means we can update our database of geolocated imagery a lot more rapidly.
Read 4 tweets

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