Episode 339: Disinformation, Information Disorder, and Democratic Resilience in a Fragmented Media Environment with Natalie Martin and Eliot Higgins
In this episode of The International Risk Podcast, Dominic Bowen speaks with Natalie Martin and Eliot Higgins about the growing impact of disinformation, digital media, and information disorder on global security and democratic resilience. As the information environment becomes faster and progressively fragmented, the episode explores how trust in institutions is being challenged and how information itself is emerging as a contested space.
The discussion examines why disinformation is often misunderstood as simply “fake news” when in reality it forms part of a broader ecosystem of information disorder. Drawing on the framework developed by Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan, the conversation distinguishes between misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, illustrating how both false and truthful content can be used with malign intent. It also explores how social media platforms reward attention over accuracy, amplifying more extreme and emotionally charged narratives.
This episode highlights how deeper changes, such as declining trust in institutions and the erosion of traditional media models, have created fertile ground for conspiratorial and populist narratives. Rather than being the root cause, disinformation is presented as a symptom of wider political, economic, and institutional challenges that have weakened systems of verification, deliberation, and accountability within democratic societies.
Drawing on their joint research, Natalie Martin and Eliot Higgins discuss how open-source investigation is reshaping real-time verification, with methods such as geolocation and chronolocation increasingly adopted across the media landscape. Their recent work includes a piece for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which argues for equipping citizens, particularly young people, with skills to critically assess digital content, alongside a Demos report on epistemic insecurity, which explores how weakened institutional authority is altering how societies establish and validate knowledge.
Natalie Martin is an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham, where her research focuses on disinformation, journalism, and security.
Eliot Higgins is the founder of Bellingcat, an investigative organisation that has pioneered the use of open-source investigation techniques to uncover and verify information in conflict zones and complex information environments.
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Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and Europe’s leading expert on international risk and crisis management. As Head of Strategic Advisory and Partner at one of Europe’s leading risk management consulting firms, Dominic advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across the continent on how to prepare for uncertainty and act with intent. He has spent decades working in war zones, advising multinational companies, and supporting Europe’s business leaders. Dominic is the go-to business advisor for leaders navigating risk, crisis, and strategy; trusted for his clarity, calmness under pressure, and ability to turn volatility into competitive advantage. Dominic equips today’s business leaders with the insight and confidence to lead through disruption and deliver sustained strategic advantage.
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Transcript
00:00
Eliot Higgins
Disinformation isn’t the start of the problem, it’s part of the problem, but actually the problems are much, much deeper. Democracies have been hollowed out, people recognise that, and then they look for alternatives in these online spaces that reward the most outrageous, conspiratorial voices and then we wonder why things are going wrong and think we can just fact-check our way out of it.
00:21
Elisa Garbil
Welcome back to the International Risk Podcast, where we discuss the latest world news and significant events that impact businesses and organisations worldwide.
00:30
Dominic Bowen
Today’s episode is sponsored by Conducttr. They’re a crisis exercising software that’s built for corporates, consultants, humanitarian teams, and defence and security organisation. It lets you build exercises fast using its intuitive scenario editor and ready to make content. I’ve used Conducttr and I can testify that if you use PowerPoint or Excel still, well it’s time to start looking at Conducttr. If you want your teams to be genuinely ready for the next crisis, then Conducttr is certainly worth a look. And before we start today, I have a quick favour to ask you. If you listen to The International Risk Podcast and you find it useful, please follow and subscribe wherever you are watching and listening today. In return, my commitment to you is simple that every week we will keep raising the bar with better guests, sharper questions and more practical takeaways for you that you can use to make better decisions. And if there is someone you want on the show, tell me. We read all of your comments, and we act on them. Let’s get onto the show.
01:33
Dominic Bowen
In today’s episode of The International Risk Podcast, we’re going to dig into one of the biggest risks facing governments, businesses, and democracies today. It’s about how disordered information and how digital media are really reshaping what we trust. They’re reshaping our security and they’re also reshaping the public debate. Today I’m joined by Natalie Martin. She’s a former BBC News producer and she’s now an assistant professor at the University of Nottingham. She really is examining the intersection of journalism, disordered information, security and where they come together.
We’re also joined by Eliot Higgins. He’s the founder of Bellingcat, whose open-source investigations have helped really redefine how truth can be uncovered and found, especially in this digital age that we live in today. I’m hoping that we can unpack what happens when information has become yet another battlefield that we have to work through today. Eliot and Natalie, welcome to The International Risk Podcast.
02:26
Eliot Higgins
Thanks for having us on.
02:26
Natalie Martin
Thank you very much.
02:28
Dominic Bowen
And where do we find you both today? Natalie, I’m assuming and hoping you’re near the university.
02:32
Natalie Martin
I’m in Nottingham and the sun is shining.
02:35
Dominic Bowen
Fantastic. Well, it’s that time of year, so I hope it keeps on shining.
02:38
Natalie Martin
Yeah, makes a change, I must admit.
02:40
Dominic Bowen
It certainly does. And Eliot, I know you travel a lot. Whereabouts in the world are you?
02:44
Eliot Higgins
I’m actually just down the road from Nottingham in Leicester.
02:47
Dominic Bowen
Nice, I hope the sun’s also made its way to Leicester.
02:49
Eliot
Just about.
02:50
Dominic Bowen
Now, Eliot, I know some of your recent work, and this is not necessarily new, but something that keeps coming up is about how you’re arguing that this information, it’s not just simply about false or misleading content, but it’s about this deeper breakdown. I think what concerns me more is about this deeper breakdown about how societies understand information and how they verify and whether they verify information. I mean, politicians, they’re reacting within hours, which is very, very fast. We see markets often reacting in minutes, sometimes they’re reacting with silence, sometimes they’re reacting with significant drops or changes in market prices.
But social media, that’s filling in the gaps within seconds, and we see that. We see that with toxic influences. We see that with influencers and we see that with people that have huge followings online. So when we see energy markets, when we see the conflict in Iraq have massive fluctuations, is it possible for journalists to still conduct open-source investigations to verify information accurately but fast enough to actually matter or, is a truth-based institution just too slow today?
03:55
Eliot Higgins
I think it’s a bit of both, really. We really need to understand that the whole information system that we’ve based our democracies around has changed dramatically over the last 15 years. We’ve moved from the 20th century model of this top-down, elite-controlled information system where they were responsible for verifying information, picking what was important enough for the public to see, excluding certain voices, and then that would reach the public as consumers of information, and that would happen over a temporal spacing as well. You’d have the papers printed every day, you’d have the news broadcast at certain times, you’d listen to the radio. That’s inverted and collapsed, really. So now we have a huge amount of information and not enough attention for any individual to actually look at all of this stuff.
We also have these platforms that are selecting information for us, helping us find our tribes online, and creating a bespoke information environment for everyone. As soon as an event happens, there’s almost a demand side issue from the public, from the consumer, to expect there to be information about anything that’s happening in the world.
But the social media platforms, they reward what gets attention, not what is truthful. That starts skewing stuff towards the most exaggerated claims, not the most truthful claims. That means there’s certain individuals who can build a bigger reputation just by publishing stuff that reinforces what people want to hear and believe anyway. That creates a very poisonous dynamic, I think, both in the information system and more broadly among democracy.
05:22
Dominic Bowen
And I think that information system, as I mentioned before, is what concerns me and Natalie, when we saw a girls’ school that was destroyed in Iran recently with just tragic consequences. We see Russia nearly every day attacking civilian infrastructure. We see how major crises are just flooded with information, and I think the environment we’re in today is information and all this reporting is no longer just the background noise to the actual events, it has become a bit of a battlefield. We’re at this point where disinformation isn’t just a communications problem that our communications teams or us as consumers need to worry about. I worry about its place in enabling escalation, supporting miscalculation and leading to strategic failure. We see when we’ve got people like Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s deputy and a bit of a pit bull who loves to talk about nuclear threats. When we’ve got a Trump administration that really appears to shoot from the hip, and then a bunch of other countries are somewhere in between. What concerns you most when it comes to disinformation and this fight for what’s being said and what the real truth is?
06:25
Natalie Martin
Yeah, there’s two issues, really. The first thing is that, as Eliot said, there’s a lot more information which needs to be verified. So in mainstream or legacy newsrooms, they are dealing with a lot more information than they used to be. So you’re absolutely right. Time is of the essence, but you also have the situation where you have social media which is presenting information as if it were news, as if it had been verified and it hasn’t, so that’s the problem. There’s almost a lot of literal fake news out there and part of the issue is, and part of the security jeopardy is, that somehow we have to raise awareness that you have two different systems going on. You have old school journalism, which does usually try and fact check or verify, but then you have information which is presenting itself as if it were old school journalism, or perhaps people are just presuming that the same processes apply to it, but they don’t, but they can look very similar and that’s the problem.
07:23
Dominic Bowen
Yeah, I certainly think it is and Natalie, you’ll appreciate certainly with the university students starting off with a definition. So if you don’t mind if we go down that path for a little bit, because I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding and confusion between terms like misinformation, disinformation and of course this information disorder. So from your perspective, what really matters, from not necessarily an academic point of view, but our listeners today, what do they need to understand? What is the difference between those three and how does that manipulation translate into real-world risks?
07:53
Natalie Martin
Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because it is one of my personal bugbears. Disinformation tends to get used as a catch-all term, whereas really it’s a specific thing. This goes back to Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan’s definition, which was way back in 2017, of disordered information, which is actually three things. So you have disinformation, false information with a malign intent. Then you have misinformation, which is also false information but maybe inadvertently disseminated. So someone sharing something on Facebook or Twitter, but believing it to be true but not realising it isn’t. And then equally harmful, you have mal-information, which is true information which is spread with malign intent.
It’s important to make that distinction and that comes under the umbrella of disordered information which is also sometimes referred to as information disorder. But I think it’s important to stick to the Wardle and Derakhshan definition and make the distinction between what’s true and what’s false, but also acknowledge that both true and false information can have malign intent and can be used as part of the manipulation that we see. It’s very easy just to look at Russian claims, but a lot of the claims which need to be verified are Russian claims. We’ve also seen that in the last couple of weeks with Donald Trump, so the girls’ school in Iran, said it wasn’t an American Tomahawk missile, but there are good grounds to question that. But the problem is his comments will be reported very, very quickly. So it’s all about speed. It’s about volume. It’s a very, very complicated scenario, but there’s real jeopardy attached to it.
09:33
Dominic Bowen
And so, Natalie, I’d love to ask your opinion. I hope it’s okay to ask you this question, but listening to what you talked about then, and especially how we can use truthful, fact-based information, but use it and manipulate it in a way that is potentially not healthy, I wonder, when you listen to someone like Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokesperson, is she someone that impresses you or scares you? I mean, her ability to draw on information and to take nuances, especially when she’s taking nuances from the president. I think many people can listen to her and be impressed, not necessarily by what she’s saying, but how she uses the available information to the White House’s advantage.
10:09
Natalie Martin
Just to some extent, that is her job, isn’t it? I mean, she is just doing her job and White House press spokespeople have always spun things to the best advantage and that is their job. You can’t blame them for that. I think I’m probably more concerned about pliant journalists or politicians or even celebrities who are spreading obviously dubious information and presenting it as if it’s true.
So I’m actually more concerned about Trump than I would be about his spokesperson.
10:42
Dominic Bowen
Yeah, no, that makes sense and I think both you and Eliot have spoken about the media and how that’s transforming. Eliot, I’d love to hear your opinion because in my opinion, and actually a few recent guests we’ve had on The International Risk Podcast, we’ve spoken about how a lot of the media seems to be less reporting and more identity performance or about opinion pieces with these hotter takes and stronger tribes, as you mentioned before, and perhaps less patience or diligence around the nuance of many stories. I understand that some of this is the commercial model that rewards outrage over accuracy. I know the Reuters Institute has said that traditional news engagement is actually falling while at the same time video platforms like YouTube and other social media platforms are continuing to rise. I think the Global State of Press Freedom report talked about the difficult situation that the media is in today, which might be a bit of an understatement. So I wonder, Eliot, do you think that the biggest failure is bias or is it capture, is it intimidation or is it this slow replacement of reporting an opinion that’s actually dressed up as journalism?
11:46
Eliot Higgins
Yeah, I think there’s several things happening at the same time. And I mean, first of all, the incentive structures that the online platforms produce in terms of what makes engaging news is kind of warping the kind of way people encounter news in the first place. I think sometimes, when you’re talking about the news and the media, people sometimes forget that a lot of people don’t pick up newspapers anymore. They aren’t turning on the TV news at 6 or 10. They’re getting it purely through social media feeds. That means there are then Tucker Carlson’s of the world, who are seeing the data that they are getting from their audiences when they talk about certain topics, which guests get the most views.
And that’s feedback to them and that incentivizes them to produce certain kinds of content in a certain way. You also see this for more news influencer type people, people who aren’t really journalists, but they have an audience that they are trusted by.
Trust then becomes a really big part of this. And we’re certainly seeing, I think, in the US, certain media organisations looking at that and saying this is the way we have to do news now, that we have to have these personalities who people trust rather than the kind of brand of our kind of news organization being the thing that’s trusted. I think that’s again a reflection of how the kind of role of institutions in terms of their role in kind of being the verifiers of information, the gatekeepers of information, have now collapsed into a public space where members of the public aren’t just recipients of information, they are the distributors and they also are the producers of this information. That means that the information isn’t being filtered in the way it used to be. But the problem is now that there’s no constraint on what people can say. I think that’s often framed as, oh, well, that’s freedom of speech. But the thing is, real liberty requires constraint on power, and power loves removing constraint in the name of freedom. But that actually just gives the powerful a way to kind of control what’s being said. And we’re seeing that happening very, very clearly in the U.S. at the moment.
13:37
Dominic Bowen
Yeah, I think that bad outcomes is something I’d like to explore with you. I also thought it was interesting you talked about newspapers. I was in Copenhagen yesterday and I was at the Copenhagen airport. I thought, oh, this is a very modern, very large international airport and I was looking forward to getting a copy of the Financial Times and the New York Times papers I can’t easily get in Stockholm. And I thought, oh, this will be great. Two big broadsheets but they didn’t sell them. I thought that was quite interesting that six, twelve, eighteen months ago you could definitely get those newspapers but they’re even harder to get your hands on even if you want to. But you talked about the bad outcomes and so I’d love to hear what you mean and what is the shift that we’re talking about and Natalie, I can see you nodding for those of our listeners that are just listening to the podcast today. But why is disinformation, why is this information space that we’re talking about, why is it a structural risk to democracies? And we know, and speak about this a lot on The International Risk Podcast, how over the last 20 years there’s been a consistent decline in democracy around the world. But why is this not just as simple as fake news? Why is this actually a structural problem to our political system?
14:36
Eliot Higgins
Well, I think one thing we get wrong a lot of the time is when we’re talking about disinformation, we see that as a cause. I think that’s more an outcome and a symptom of a much, much deeper issue that is facing democracy at the moment. The fact is, we often have these discussions about how people have lost trust in institutions, but we never really explore what that means. Why have people lost trust in institutions? What was that trust built on in the first place? I recently published something with Natalie on Demos on the verification, deliberation, and accountability framework that we developed. So the idea is there that democracy can be seen as having three core functions. One is verification, how do we know what’s true? And in the 20th century, we had institutions who had that role and responsibility. We had legal processes, we had media and editorial controls. We then have deliberation. How do we then debate that stuff? How do you do that in a way that includes voices in a functioning democracy? And that happens in parliaments and similar spaces. Then finally, accountability. How do you hold power to account?
But the problem is people, in moments of crisis, they recognize the hollowness or the weakness of the democratic systems they’re part of. And I think we talk about over the last 20 years, we’ve lost trust, but that’s not just something that’s happened because of the internet. We’ve had the invasion of Iraq, which I think was a huge, huge shock to a lot of people in terms of their understanding of democracy. People felt betrayed, they felt lied to by the government and that’s something that sticks with people for a long time. We then have the 2008 financial crisis where lots of people lose their houses, but bankers still get their bonuses. Again and again, we have these huge economic, cultural, social shocks happening where people recognise that actually our democracies in the West aren’t really doing a good job of doing democracy.
I think this is the one thing we have to appreciate, that disinformation isn’t the start of the problem. It’s part of the problem. But actually, the problems are much, much deeper. The fact is that democracies have been hollowed out. People recognize that. And then they look for alternatives in these online spaces that reward the most outrageous, conspiratorial, populist voices and then we wonder why things are going wrong. We think that we could just fact check our way out of it. But it’s much, much deeper than that.
16:46
Dominic Bowen
And Natalie, I’d love to hear from you. I mean, we see Russia’s war in Ukraine. It’s a real live reminder about how authoritarian powers will use force, but they’ll use force not just physically, but also against in the information space. And we’ve seen that clearly in Russia. But again, it worries me much more when we see that in democracies. The classic example is Trump administration officials saying that they want to see David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount, take over CNN so that the news can be more appropriate. And I think things like that are quite concerning when you’ve got an incumbent party wanting to force or encourage the sale of a major, one of the world’s largest news outlets, to be bought by someone who’s potentially seen as inside their pocket.
So there’s plenty of examples from the US, but are you seeing this in Europe? Are you seeing this in other environments, where in democracies, the media is under this political, financial and technological pressure to behave in a way that perhaps we would say might be considered inappropriate?
17:41
Natalie Martin
Indeed, yes. I mean, as Eliot says, you have these wider political and economic structural issues which are going on, which then make us more vulnerable to weaponised information. There are actors out there who are willing to weaponise information. One of them is Russia, but there are many others. So it’s not just a foreign policy issue, it is a domestic issue as well and sometimes there’s an overlap between those. So domestic actors who are using weaponised information sometimes have foreign influences upon them. So we shouldn’t just see this as something which happens elsewhere to be reported on. This is something which is happening here, which is which is affecting our democracy as well. And say here, I mean the United States. I mean, if you take Eliot’s VDA structure, I mean the United States is probably, I think you would agree, Eliot, an example of you know simulated democracy at this point. Yes, certainly very hollowed out. There are a lot of pressures on it from weaponised information because it’s been made vulnerable by the events of the last 25 years or so.
But it’s also a domestic issue. It’s about what’s going on in UK politics at the moment and the various complicated machinations of that. A lot of it revolves around information, but I agree you shouldn’t just take information or disinformation in isolation, you have to see it in context. It doesn’t work unless the structural conditions have made us vulnerable to it.
19:13
Dominic Bowen
I’d love to hear about some of the policy responses, Natalie, but just first I’ll remind our listeners, for those that prefer to watch their podcasts, The International Risk Podcast is always available on YouTube. So please do go to YouTube and search for The International Risk Podcast and please do subscribe to our content. If you like it, please also like it and share it with a friend. That really is critical for our success.
But Natalie, I’d love to hear about some of the policy responses. So far, they’ve focused on things like fact checking and content moderation of varying levels of quality and platform regulation, again, with varying levels of efficacy. Based on your research and based on what you’re seeing, are these approaches sufficient? Are they falling short? What do we need to do to move forward in an environment where we can actually feel safe for our children? Now, of course, Australia has banned children under the age of 16 getting on social media. I’d love it if they implemented similar laws in in Europe and America. But notwithstanding that, what else needs to be done to try and encourage a more accurate form of media?
20:10
Natalie Martin
The problem you have is that a large part of the issue is social media and transnational digital platforms. I can talk to what journalism as an industry in the UK has done in response to these issues, because I’ve done some research on that. What I found was that, prior to the COVID outbreak, newsrooms in the UK, these national newsrooms, tended to view disinformation as disinformation, not as disordered information, but also as something which happened elsewhere. Whereas COVID made them realise that it is something which happens here, and also they themselves are vulnerable to disinformation. So there was a lot of stuff going around during COVID about you can’t trust mainstream media, Bill Gates is trying to vaccinate you with a microchip and all of that kind of stuff, which really brought it home to them that not only was disinformation a risk to their viewers and listeners and readers, it was actually an existential threat to the news media itself.
And their response to that has been to bring in more fact-checking, but also more of Eliot’s staff, more of the open-source investigation. You’ve had a lot of news outlets adopting open-source investigations since 2020. BBC Verify, Financial Times have a unit, Guardian has a unit, Sky News has a unit. Whereas prior to that, they had been fairly slow or late adopters of these techniques, but it kind of brought it home to them. Whether that is a solution, it’s possibly a solution to the existential threat to news outlets. Whether it’s a solution to the societal threat, probably not.
21:50
Dominic Bowen
And Eliot, you’ve been doing this for a long time now. You started on the Syria crisis and, through your work at Bellingcat, you’ve really helped pioneer the use of open-source intelligence in verifying events and challenging disinformation, including your VDA framework and structuring how digital evidence is collected and then how it’s analysed.
Can you talk to us about this and how has this ability to analyse publicly available information and data actually change the balance between the powerful and those that are trying to understand events, and how has this even changed over the last couple of years?
21:24
Eliot Higgins
Yeah, it’s certainly been a big change over the last five or six years in terms of the adoption by institutions and especially mainstream media of open-source investigation. As Natalie said, there’s been a large number of news organisations who are now doing this work. I think that became most apparent with the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia, where there was a lot of really good open-source investigation being done by a lot of outlets, and we’re seeing that time and time again with Gaza, now with Iran. So that’s a positive that this more transparent way of investigation is being done. I think though there is still the challenge of getting out there at speed. We recently did investigations into the Renee Good shooting and the Alex Pretti shootings in Minnesota and one thing we did there is, as we were doing our investigation, stuff was being posted online, we were finding it. We were producing and verifying objects. We would take a couple of the videos, sync them together and show the moment clearly where Alex Pretti was disarmed and then shot and show the sequence of that very clearly.
That would then be shared on social media within a couple of hours of the shooting happening before the narratives have really formed and crystallised. That would actually inform the ongoing discourse that was happening online. People would take that video, repost it.
So that actually really influenced, I think the discourse that was happening around it, both in the kind of more traditional public spaces, but in those institutional spaces where lots of journalists followed the work of Bellingcat.
That really influences the discourse around these topics. You have to be able to quickly get information out there because it really is engaging with the discourses that’s happening, especially when you’re dealing with countries who are going to lie. It used to be Russia lying all the time. Now we’re dealing with the US lying all the time, but it’s the same thing in a different hat. So we can spread these ideas and these techniques and something that’s been really useful for us is you know getting out there, training these news organisations to do this work so there’s that kind of institutional infrastructure that might only do it itself but can also you know understand it when they see it as well and know the difference between good open-source investigation and bad open-source investigation and how to check it themselves.
That is a place where when there are these breaking incidents, you have lots of people bringing stuff together, discussing it, trying to analyse it themselves and that allows us to really process stuff a lot quicker than a traditional newsroom would be able to. So being dynamic and working with the information environment is important.
24:44
Dominic Bowen
Talking about learning to navigate that space, for those of us that are consumers of information, I wonder how realistic it is to expect the wider public, particularly younger audiences, to develop these investigative skills. Now, I need to because of my work, I’m speaking to CEOs and board members and government agencies every day, and they’re asking my opinion about analysts about events that are occurring and potential outcomes that that might come of that. So I deliberately make an effort. I listen to news from the far left, from the center, from the far right. It’s actually a little bit amusing when I listen to the same story said three different times from different news outlets to listen to the nuances and the words and what they leave out of stories and what they put in. It’s a quite an enjoyable activity every morning.
Notwithstanding that, most people don’t have the time and most people don’t want to listen to the far left and the far right and the centre media and try and come up with a balanced view. So, how realistic is it and what can we be doing to support people to develop these investigative skills on a personal level? And what does that mean for things like media literacy? I mean, Natalie, I assume this is something you speak to your students a lot about. What success are you having and how realistic is it?
25:47
Natalie Martin
It’s easy to teach third-year undergraduate students open-source investigation skills because they are keen and they understand the reason for it. I agree, it’s a bigger challenge to think about teaching these skills to the wider public and expecting them to take them up. However, I think there is definitely a need for them to be aware that the skills are needed, even if they don’t have the skills themselves. So they have to be made aware, somehow, that the news that they see on social media hasn’t been through the same system of checking and verification as the news they see on the BBC. That’s essential.
I think that is possible and there possibly is a slight tilt in how these things are working because of BBC Verify and the other units, it is becoming more front of house. So what they’ve done is bring backroom processes and make them transparent, to put them on screen, which is good as long as we haven’t gone too far down the road of distrusting all liberal institutions because that’s when you have a real problem.
That is a different scenario and Eliot’s probably better informed about that than me. But in the yeah UK, I think we do. We must make people aware that whilst there is a lot of good information on social media, it’s not verified in the same way as mainstream media is. It’s really important distinction to make.
27:13
Eliot Higgins
I think something that’s important there as well is that we need to understand that, as I said before, we have this 20th century model though there was these top-down elite controlled structures where it meant if you wanted to become someone who was influential in terms of the discourse, that usually meant a career path. You go through school, learnt certain topics, you went to university, you got a job as a journalist or as a political aide, and you worked your way up the ranks until you were in your 30s and you might be publishing articles or trying to get elected to Parliament. Now you just pick up your phone and you’re part of the discourse.
You aren’t taught your responsibilities to other people in terms of how you interact with information, what it means when you’re sharing stuff. I think that’s something that has to be really ingrained in people. The UK’s curriculum advice has just been published by the government that says that they want more media literacy skills and really that’s not just about how do you fact check a headline and you know how do you tell the difference between a good tweet and a bad tweet, it has to be a lot deeper than that. Also they have to understand their responsibility in a modern democracy towards each other.
I feel we need to move towards more that way of thinking. How do you make everyone participate in democracy when they’re actually already participating in democracy, just with no training or understanding that they’re even doing it? But we have to figure out how do to involve people in the democratic process
in a way that’s healthy for democracy, that creates that substantial form of verification, deliberation and accountability. Because again, if we want true liberty, it’s not about giving everyone everything they want and stripping away all the rules, which the Trumps and Farages and Musks of the world would love to see. It’s about saying, how do you create constraints on power? And that still requires those institutions to actually do those substantial accountability roles that I really feel have been hollowed out over the last several decades.
28:59
Dominic Bowen
And Natalie, you’ve been involved also in developing this and you’ve been developing one of the UK’s first university modules focused on open-source investigation. So what are you teaching students? What are the top three or four skills that you’re teaching them to actually do in practice? And how does this change the way that they engage with information and the media?
29:17
Natalie Martin
The students, we’ve run this once so far, the next time will be in the autumn of this year. And the students have 11 weeks, they have a fairly heavy grounding in theory, intelligence theory and security theory and then they have three or four weeks of training on open-source investigation, facilitated by Bellingcat. That’s geolocation, chronolocation, reverse image searching and then a few tips and tricks like flight tracking and other things that good open-source investigators use and the students were very good at it because a lot of them are digitally native; they understand this stuff and most of them can do quite a lot of it anyway. I don’t know if you have daughters, if you have teenage daughters, they are particularly good at using open-source investigation to check out their friends and their potential boyfriends. Actually, it was really marked that in the class, the girls were really good at this stuff. And they said, we do this all the time. So they understand, they really get the fact that the media has changed and not everything’s verified. They were easy to teach. The difficult bit is getting the message out to a wider audience. That’s much more difficult, but you have to start somewhere.
30:30
Dominic Bowen
Yeah, for sure, you do have to start somewhere. And Eliot, talking about starting somewhere, when you look back at Bellingcat’s work, it certainly has an impressive history, is there one investigation or is there is there one piece of work that you’re particularly proud of?
30:43
Eliot Higgins
This is going to sound strange with the things we’ve done like MH17 and Navalny and all these pretty big world changing stories. But actually one I always come back to is, during the COVID lockdown, I was contacted by an organization called Dog Lost, which is an organization that helps people find their lost dogs. During the lockdown, because there was a high demand for pets, there was a lot of pet theft going on. They contacted me because they had CCTV footage of one of these cars driving away and the number plate was very blurry in it and hard to see. They asked if we could help and I thought, well, maybe we can. So I contacted someone I’d been working with, a guy called Timmy Allen. He had actually joined an investigation into the murder of a Russian journalist in Ukraine called Pavel Sheremet, used a machine learning software he had developed himself to decipher blurry number plates because that was one of the things that came up in this investigation. So he could actually apply that same piece of machine learning to this blurry dognapping number plate. It gave us a couple of different possibilities. And we were able to match one using an MOT database to the same make of model in the car in the video. They then passed that on to the police.
They went there, the dog was in the garden, and within 24 hours, the dog had been returned to the people.
But the reason I like that, I know it’s not like a world-changing thing, but it shows that open-source investigation can be applied to at wholly different levels. It can be a huge international investigation. It can be something that’s really personal about someone’s stolen dog, but using techniques that we use to hunt down the murder of a journalist. It really shows that anyone can be involved with this. That’s why such a big part of our work is training people to do this, making these skills available, building communities, doing work with universities and getting as much of these skills out there as possible, because it’s not just about what Bellingcat can do, it’s what the people have these skills can do by themselves and as part of communities.
32:37
Dominic Bowen
Oh, look, that’s a great story, Eliot. As a dog lover, I’m very happy to hear that that dog got back to its home. So thank you for sharing that. I think that’s a great story. I think that’s a really important point. These skills are useful at multiple levels. And Natalie, I wonder when you look around the world, what are the international risks that do concern you the most?
32:55
Natalie Martin
What concerns me is the fact that we have increasing amounts of unverified information and decreasing capacity in the mainstream media to verify it because not only has the recent technological advance meant that we now have more information, it has also undermined the business model of mainstream news to some extent and so a lot of newsrooms are stretched both at national level and at local level. So there’s not as many people in the newsroom as there used to be when I used to work in one, for example, which means that you have more information out there which can be used quite clearly, can be weaponised to influence political events and that might be the narrative about what’s going on in Iran or Ukraine, but it can also be the narrative about what’s going on, in the UK and in UK politics. You don’t have to think too hard to see some examples of that in the UK over the last couple of years, all the flags that have appeared, the Southport attacks, there was a lot of weaponised information being circulated about that with obvious political intent and a lot of it was utterly false but it still had a political influence. So it worries me domestically as well as internationally.
34:09
Dominic Bowen
Thanks for explaining that Natalie, and Eliot, it’s a question we ask all of our guests on The International Risk Podcast, so what are the international risks that concern you?
34:18
Eliot Higgins
Well, I think my real fear is that the current information environment tends to reward communities that are conspiratorial, populist, and authoritarian in nature because they offer certainty. They don’t have to fact-check stuff. They just say it, and it’s out there, and people believe it. It gives a sense of belonging. And those communities are also highly compatible with each other. So on the international stage, it means we’ll see more things like the kind of formation of the MAGA movement around these populist, conspiratorial and authoritarian ideas. We’re seeing that with reform in the UK where they’re flirting a lot with conspiratorial ideas. If you look at populist movements across the world at the moment, there are those same elements that are emerging. And our entire information system is basically really fruitful for those kinds of idea
organisations to form and to cooperate and to find each other, and we are just not doing anything whatsoever to really deal with this.
35:09
Dominic Bowen
Thanks very much for explaining that. And thank you very much, Natalie and Eliot, for coming on The International Risk Podcast today.
35:15
Natalie Martin
You’re welcome. Thank you.
33:15
Eliot Higgins
Thanks for having us.
35:17
Dominic Bowen
Well, that was a great conversation with Natalie Martin from the University of Nottingham and Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat. I really appreciated the conversation and hearing their thoughts today. Today’s episode was produced and coordinated by Ella Burden. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening. We will speak again in the next couple of days.
35:35
Elisa Garbil
Thank you for listening to this episode of The International Risk Podcast. For more interviews and articles visit theinternationalriskpodcast.com. Follow us on LinkedIn, BlueSky and Instagram for the latest updates and to ask your questions to our host Dominic Bowen. See you next time.
