Ross Burley is co-founder and executive director of the Centre for Information Resilience, a nonprofit exposing war crimes and countering disinformation using open source.
This month, our investigators at the Centre for Information Alliance verified the 15,000th entry in the “Eyes on Russia” map — a free resource that allows anyone to track what’s going on in the war in Ukraine.
And each one of these 15,000 entries represents hours, sometimes even days, of painstaking work by analysts, as they’ve been verifying and geolocating snapshots of a conflict that’s been raging since February 2022.
More importantly, however, each of these entries represents a unique human story. Stories of unimaginable loss, suffering and heartbreak among Ukrainian families. Stories of soldiers stoically and courageously defending their homeland in battle, of civilians struggling to come to terms with losing their homes and family members, and communities left to observe their own destruction.
Unfortunately, there’s also a misperception that open-source investigations like these — commonly, though mistakenly, known as “OSINT” — are rapid affairs, with analysts working like newsrooms, churning out geolocation coordinates and offering a near instant arbitration of the truth.
Nothing could be further from reality.
Rather, open-source investigations are often agonizingly slow. The truth demands patience, and single events can take weeks, if not months, to verify. Most of the time, it’s simply not possible to discern an accurate picture of what, where and how an event happened — and, crucially, who was responsible — in the time frames audiences demand, particularly on social media. And when we cannot discern the “who,” objective truth remains tantalizingly out of reach.
Yet, since tech mogul Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), a growing army of online amateurs — often posing as “OSINT” experts and ignoring protocols around transparency, safeguarding and rigor — have been monetizing conflict and suffering, all in the name of clicks.
And many of these accounts, previously focused on Ukraine, have now moved on to the next “show in town” — Gaza.
But while their shoddy efforts are satiating the thirst for instant information, when it comes to both conflicts, the truth is being left behind. Most of these accounts simply ignore the complexities of conflict, and their ignorance, deliberate or not, often exacerbates the spread of both misinformation and disinformation, further entrenching lies.
The OSINT accounts Musk promoted at the outset of the war in Gaza are prime examples of this, often sharing inaccurate, misleading and divisive posts posing as verified truth.
Indeed, the truth is now at risk of becoming yet another casualty in Israel and Gaza. The horrific explosion at the al-Ahli Arab Hospital is a case in point, as some news outlets and journalists, in the rush to be first, seemingly published the narrative created by Hamas that the explosion was the direct result of an Israeli airstrike.
It was clear that the army of OSINT amateurs had an effect here, pushing the airstrike narrative along with thousands of aggregator accounts. And while several outlets and individuals have since conducted credible investigations into the explosion to hint toward one explanation or another, it’s just not that simple.
Attribution — identifying the “who” — is the hardest task in open source. And without considerable time and resources, it’s often impossible to truly, objectively verify the parties responsible.
For example, an investigation we conducted into several cluster munition incidents in Ukraine took three analysts over three months to complete — that’s just 22 map entries. Meanwhile, Russia and pro-Russian online accounts denied the use of cluster munitions on civilian targets for nearly four months, blaming Ukrainian “Nazis” and spreading disinformation.
It’s difficult to watch. Every instinct one has wants to rebut such claims and correct the record. But until all the facts are in hand, until the analysis is complete, wading into the information battlefield without verified data can be counterproductive.
Some will claim that open source will solve all the uncertainties we’ll face over the coming days and weeks in Gaza. It won’t. Open source has been invaluable in countering disinformation and exposing war crimes, but it also has limitations.
The 15,000 verified entries in our Ukraine map have taken us almost two years to complete. And this is a hard lesson for Gaza: If we’re to protect and nurture the truth, we must prepare ourselves to be patient and methodical in finding it.
Source : Politico
