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@eliothiggins.bsky.social Profile picture
@eliothiggins.bsky.social
@EliotHiggins
Founder and creative director of @Bellingcat. Now on Bluesky and no longer posting here @eliothiggins.bsky.social
62 subscribers
Nov 4 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
It's been brought to my attention that there's videos published on social media claiming I've made various statements about the US election, related to election integrity. These are part of a Russian disinformation campaign, and the quotes are fabricated, but it's nice to know the Russians hold the value of my opinions in such high regard. I've previously discussed other videos in this campaign in the below thread:
Oct 22 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
🧵 1/7: The European Court of Human Rights has ruled in favor of Russian NGOs and media groups (including @Bellingcat), declaring Russia's "foreign agent" legislation a violation of fundamental human rights. The court found that the law imposes undue restrictions on freedom of expression & association. 2/7: The law requires NGOs & individuals receiving foreign funds to register as “foreign agents,” facing stigma, harsh reporting requirements, and severe penalties. This label implies foreign control—without proof—and misleads the public
Oct 15 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
It's currently 9:11am, this post has 3 views, and no retweets or likes on an account with 75 followers. Let's see how long it takes for it to get several hundred retweets, and a few tens of thousands of views. Image In the last 15 minutes, that tweet just gained 15.7k views, 187 likes, with no retweets. Two other tweets with similarly fake stores, posted around the same time, with similar profiles, have also suddenly gain a couple of hundred likes and around the same amount of views. This is, in real time, how a Russian disinformation campaign is using Twitter to promote its fake stories.Image
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Sep 25 • 22 tweets • 6 min read
A new fake Bellingcat story, from a fake video claiming to be from Fox News. What's interesting about this one is I viewed the tweet 10 minutes ago, and it had 5 views, and suddenly it jumped to 12.5k, then 16.2k views in less than 5 minutes, with zero retweets or likes. Image To me this suggests there's a bot network being used to boost views of tweets used in this disinformation campaign.
Sep 10 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
It's clear this is a coordinated attack from pro-Orban media which they really don't want being noticed outside of Hungary, but what they don't seem to realise is I'm now going to use what they did at every presentation I do on disinformation to audiences across the world. What's notable is the accusations made against Bellingcat were all taken (uncredited) from an article publishing by MintPress claiming we've loads of intelligence agents working for us, which even the original MintPress article fails to prove.
Sep 5 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
State actors see alternative media ecosystems as a vehicle for promoting their agendas, and take advantage of that by not just covertly funding them, but also giving them access to their officials and platforming them at places like the UN. A recent example of that is Jackson Hinkle going to Eastern Ukraine, then getting invited to the UN by Russia to speak at a press conference, and that footage being used by state media as evidence of "experts" rejecting the "mainstream narratives" on Ukraine.
Sep 2 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
🧵 Important investigation by @mariannaspring on how social media algorithms push harmful content to young users. This connects closely to my research on online radicalisation. Let me explain how. What happened to Cai in this article is a clear example of how online radicalisation often begins. It starts with seemingly harmless content and quickly escalates because algorithms prioritize engagement over user safety.
Aug 26 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
Thread on a disinformation campaign involving celebrities. Last week, the Bellingcat contact email received this message, directing us to look at a videos, titled "Olympics Has Fallen 2", voiced by @elonmusk himself. So we dug into it, because it was fishy as hell. Image Firstly, Olympics Has Fallen 1 was a fake Netflix documentary, using an AI generated @TomCruise voice over, which sought to undermine the Olympics and France's hosting of the Olympics, suspected to be linked to Russian proxies cyberscoop.com/russia-tom-cru…
Aug 24 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Just read Greg Palast's piece on RFK Jr. and it’s a clear example of how personal trauma and distrust in authorities can lead someone down the path of disinformation and conspiracy theories. This isn’t just an isolated case, it’s a pattern we see again and again. In my work at Bellingcat, we’ve seen how the erosion of trust in mainstream sources often pushes individuals to seek alternative narratives. For RFK Jr., this loss of trust seems to have opened the door to a range of conspiracy theories.
Jul 9 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
For some reason, @elonmusk's X is now claiming the link to this article about Russia bombing a children's hospital is unsafe, because apparently it has "been identified by X or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe". Unsafe to who, Putin? 🤔
Image Seeing @elonmusk already thinks Bellingcat is a "psy-op" you have to wonder if this is deliberate censorship from the so proclaimed free speech absolutist. Based on his recent behaviour I guess that only counts when you're a far right grifter posting CSAM.
Jun 7 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
🧵 I think what's key to answering this question is recognising that how we encounter and consume information has changed dramatically over the last 15 years, and this has particularly impacted Gen Z and Gen Alpha We’ve shifted from a top-down, gatekeeped model of information consumption (for example getting our news from newspapers and TV news), to a more peer-to-peer relationship with information thanks to social media.
Jun 6 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Reposting this to make the point clearer, this is a real image that is being dismissed as AI because of a crap AI detection website that doesn't actually work, because AI gives people a permission structure to deny reality. A video of the incident is here aljazeera.com/program/newsfe…

Image It's not the first time I've seen someone do this with Israel and Gaza. Bad AI detection tools are used to deny reality, but ultimately people who don't want to believe something is true will just dismiss it as AI generated anyway.
Jun 2 • 14 tweets • 7 min read
🧵 I've been digging into this, and it's pretty clear that part of this campaign against Graham Phillips is driven by an article on a fake news website that appears to be run by John Mark Dougan himself. I'm not sure where this all started, but the first time the spat appears to have gone public is this post by Graham Phillips about John Mark Dougan, stating "Dougan is accused of having 'gone rogue', and suspected of having taken money from western agencies." t.me/grahamwphillip…Image
Apr 3 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Several weeks ago the FvD's @PvanHouwelingen submitted questions to the Ministry of Justice based on reporting by @AndereKrant and @TheGrayzoneNews. Last week those answers were received, but neither Pepijn nor the two publications cited have reported on them. Let's find out why. Image Just before Christmas the @AndereKrant and @TheGrayzoneNews published false claims that Bellingcat had submitted an article to the Dutch National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV) ahead of publication to allegedly ‘attack journalists’. Image
Mar 5 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
The new OECD report is one of the better examples of an intergovernmental report on dealing with disinformation, and actually gets it's not just about factchecking, but also creating a cycle that includes transparency and accountability. oecd.org/publications/f…
Image I believe that the current issues we face with disinformation are symptoms of a broader social and cultural shift that has occurred over the last 15 years, and Bellingcat and open source investigation is also part of the same shift.
Mar 1 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Anyone who has followed George Galloway knows his head consists entirely of tankie brain worms, having taken a denialist position on a wide range of war crimes and atrocities in Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere, because he sees the victims as being on the side of "imperialists" So look forward to some tired tankie bullshit being repeated in Parliament on the rare days he bothers to turn up.
Feb 17 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
I've seen two major disinformation themes around Navalny's death, one is misrepresenting already false claims, shown left, the other is repeating a story based on fabricated videos and documents alleging an affair. The second one we recently unpicked in the Bellingcat Discord.
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Image The allegations were based on a video featuring a woman claiming to have worked for Yulia Navalnaya, but there's no evidence she ever worked for Navalnaya, and the video was posted on a social media account that was instantly deleted, and never crawled by a search engine.
Jan 16 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Graham Phillips lost his legal case against UK sanctions on him. The judge said "He has not shown any journalistic responsibility or ethics. His actions directly support Russia in its policies or actions that destabilise Ukraine." Post reaction gifs below:
independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/… First may I say "lol", and follow that up with "lmao".
Dec 16, 2023 • 46 tweets • 8 min read
I’ve written this piece for the FT about the challenges we face globally with disinformation and the urgent need of a systematic approach to address the root causes of the creation and spread of disinformation, and the positive opportunities that offers. I believe that among many of the policymakers and practitioners who have attempted to address disinformation there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the causes of disinformation, which has undermined our ability to deal with it effectively.
Dec 11, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The Community Notes on Musk's original tweet and the reply have both now been removed. Says everything about Musk and this platform.
Image Here's the notes that were removed, which includes one that's Twitter's own statements about Community Notes. Image
Nov 19, 2023 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
I've spent my weekend fiddling with , which has a supernatural ability to make songs out of prompts. The latest update has massively improved its ability to make songs from short prompts.I asked it to make a song about Bellingcat, & I think it's awesome(?) Suno.ai
It has a simple prompt based system, but more features have been promised. In the meantime you can still make positive affirmation songs about cake: