Truth, it's often said, is the first casualty of war. But Eliot Higgins wants to ensure truth will at least go down fighting. For the past decade, Higgins has been exposing the lies and dishonest activities of governments, using open sources and social media for investigations.
It's largely because of Higgins that we know about the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and who shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014. His investigative website, Bellingcat, exposed the agents who poisoned Russian dissident Sergei Skripal in 2018, and those behind the attempted assassination of Russia's opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. Almost daily in 2022, Bellingcat debunks Russian claims about the Ukrainian conflict.
A one-man blog
Based in the Netherlands, Bellingcat now has 25 employees. But it all started a decade ago, on a couch in Leicester, England, with an Asus laptop and an internet connection. At the time, Higgins was an unemployed data entry clerk. He was, as he says, "terribly nerdy".
Higgins was an obsessed gamer, playing "World of Warcraft" for 36 hours at a time. After getting married, he gave it up, spending his free time instead following the events of the Arab Spring online. This series of anti-government protests and armed rebellions spread across the Arab world in the early 2010s.
Higgins was particularly interested in Libya, and the struggle to overthrow the dictator Muammar Gaddafi. He realized there was a "wealth of information" available on the internet that wasn't being picked up by mainstream media. He used videos released on YouTube to check the claims of the combatants. He matched the videos with satellite images from Google Maps to discover what was happening, and disproved one of the Gaddafi regime's major strategic claims. He recorded his findings in a blog called Brown Moses.
The blog's small but loyal following eventually included members of the US Defense Department, the State Department, the UN, the UK Foreign Commonwealth Office, Turkey's National Intelligence Organization, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The New York Times, The Guardian and countless think tanks.
In October 2012, the day before Gaddafi was killed, Higgins became a father. For the next six months, his greatest daily challenge was dealing with his newborn daughter. By the time he returned to his research, six months later, more than half a million videos had been posted online during the Syrian conflict. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Facebook and Twitter accounts existed, many belonging to armed opposition groups and local civilian media collectives.
The birth of Bellingcat
Social media was crucial for people inside Syria to communicate with the outside world, but it had been largely ignored by the mainstream media. Higgins realized that viewing all the posts, photos and videos could reveal detailed accounts of events. These could be used to fact-check claims, providing clues far beyond what camera operators had intended to show. Higgins began analysing new content, particularly focusing on the weapons being used.
"I'm often asked if the sort of work I do is going to replace traditional reporting. I always say that it's not about replacing anything but making the most of a new resource … and using it to enhance traditional reporting," Higgins said at the time.
Higgins sorted through 450 YouTube channels from Syria every evening. The list included uploaded film material from activists, rebel brigades and Islamist groups, supporters of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, and state TV film. Although he doesn't speak Arabic, Higgins was one of the first to report on the use of barrel bombs and cluster bombs. The Syrian government denied using them.
When he showed that Croatian weapons were being used by Syrian rebels, The New York Times took the information and exposed an arms-smuggling operation run by Saudi Arabia, with the knowledge of the US government. It was then that Higgins's name became internationally known.
A series of interviews in mainstream media followed, questions were raised in the British Parliament and his work became frequently cited by human rights groups. His growing fame meant Higgins could run a Kickstarter campaign for his one-man blog. In 2014, it turned into the investigative journalist site Bellingcat.
Digital Sherlocks
Since then, Bellingcat has become a thorn in the side of authoritarian governments everywhere. But as Higgins explains in his book, We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People (2021), it was the investigation into the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 that made the website's name.
In July 2014, MH17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down over eastern Ukraine. All 283 passengers and 15 crew on board were killed. The incident occurred during the war in Donbas over an area controlled by pro-Russian rebels. The rebels and the Russian Federation denied involvement.
Bellingcat established that the plane had been hit by a Russian Buk missile and produced evidence that the shooters belonged to the Russian military. Bellingcat's findings were later confirmed by the Dutch-led MH17 investigation. Higgins and his collaborators had discovered more about the atrocity than any news organization or foreign government - and they did it with little more than their laptops, smartphones, YouTube and Google Maps.
Breaking the news
It's not surprising that Bellingcat has attracted attention from governments. In his early days, Higgins occasionally received friendly visits from the local police, but Bellingcat also angered Moscow. Higgins says that he never eats food prepared by room service while travelling, to be on the safe side.
In 2021, Russia named Bellingcat a "foreign agent" as part of a crackdown on journalists and media organizations. "Bellingcat has been deemed such a threat to Russia that we've been declared a foreign agent," said Higgins. "I guess this is the Russian Nobel Prize?" In mid-March 2022, shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia blocked the Bellingcat website, along with 31 other online resources.
After a group of white supremacists were photographed beating a young black man at a "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina, Bellingcat searched social media profiles and public videos to identify the assailants. It has also conducted investigations into the underground animal trade in Dubai, the pollution of Iraq's Shatt al-Arab River, escalating police violence in Colombia and the US connection to Venezuela's "narco-planes".
These cases - including investigations that have both confirmed and debunked a wide variety of conflict-zone videos - have proven controversial and embarrassing to those being investigated.
Making a clear case
It's said we now live in a post-truth world. This is when objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Politicians and elected officials have realized this and taken to discrediting once-respected journalistic sources. "Fake news" has become the cry of those attempting not to be held accountable.
Scepticism is healthy when it comes to reading anything online, but in this environment of "alternative facts", online open-source verification is becoming increasingly necessary.
"We're always going to have tyrants and autocrats saying that anything that disagrees with what they want the world to be is fake news," Higgins says. "But we can take all this evidence, piece it together, use a range of independent sources and actually make a very clear case."
In 2018, a documentary on Bellingcat was released. It was described as "a refreshing portrait of citizen journalism in the digital age". The Hollywood Reporter said the film was a "fascinating yet sobering reminder of a time when the idea that facts exist wasn't so thoroughly contested. It's frankly a relief to hear someone explain how we got here, how the culture of ‘fake news' came to rule the day and then provide a clear example of how one group of people is standing up against it."
Higgins says of his approach that it's no substitute for traditional war reporting, but it can help tell the story. "This can't replace journalists on the ground," he says. "They take amazing risks and do an incredible job. But this work can direct them."