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New York / DPA
It’s a challenge for war reporters to get information as conflicts rage in remote parts of the world, making it hard or even impossible for civilians to get there and file news reports.
Another dilemma is the opposite predicament – having too much information. Conflicts like the Syrian war have produced a flood of YouTube videos, tweets and Facebook posts, offering rare insights if sifted into focus.
But the sheer volume of offerings can be overwhelming. Now, though, new tools have been developed that can help journalists.
“Played back to back, all of the videos of the Syrian war will last longer than the conflict itself,” says a video of Jigsaw, a Google technology incubator. Recordings are uploaded by rebels, activists and civilians, the IS extremist movement, the Syrian government and other groups. This conflict is the first to be so thoroughly documented and shared through social media, with a search of ‘Syria’ on YouTube throwing up almost 4.9 million results.
To enable journalists and analysts to negotiate and effectively use the amount of clips on YouTube, which is also a Google subsidiary, Jigsaw developed the Montage web application.
This allows users to tag videos with specific information like the date, location and content details for individual recordings. Using these tags, videos can be collated and sorted to be retrieved later and also shared in projects.
British investigative journalist Eliot Higgins is one of many converts to this application. Higgins does his research mainly using freely accessible sources, after his rather chance emergence as an expert in the role of armaments in conflicts.
Four years ago he knew next to nothing about weapons, had never been in a war zone, and had no experience as a reporter, he says. While reading coverage of the Syrian conflict he became interested in what kinds of weapons were in use there, but very little about this was being reported.
However, there were plenty of combat videos on YouTube that he could study while researching further online and comparing weapons in the videos with information on the net, before writing up his findings.
Higgins’ blog, Brown Moses, went on to become one of the most important global sources of information about the war. Today he and other bloggers and journalists publish articles about Syria, Ukraine and Libya via the collaborative Bellingcat online platform.
His team, for example, wrote reports placing responsibility for the 2014 shooting down of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine onto Russian military forces, based, among other things, on photos from social networks.
“A big challenge is being able to deal with the volume of information,” says Higgins.
Every day about 100 to 300 videos of the Syrian conflict are uploaded to YouTube. Before, to collect and categorize these he had to copy the individual links into a table beforehand, which was laborious and unclear. The Jigsaw Montage tool speeds up and simplifies the process, he says.
The application would also have been a huge help to gather all the available reporting on the gas attacks in the Syrian region of Al-Ghuta in August 2013, says the researcher. Several hundred videos were uploaded and the situation was confusing, with many reports contradicting each other. The tool still only works with YouTube videos, which restricts the scope of projects. According to Higgins, a wealth of information about the conflict in eastern Ukraine is posted on the VK.com network, a Russian equivalent of Facebook.
As well as this application there are other tools that simplify searching on the net: Echosec allows a geographic search for social media entries with coordinates. You can also search for posts on Facebook and Twitter within a given area, while Google Earth allows access to satellite images. And Checkdesk allows users to verify each other’s tweets, Facebook posts and other information.
The Bellingcat reporters have used combinations of these to track the movement of military vehicles from Russia to Ukraine, as Moscow still denies sending troops or equipment to help separatists fighting the government.
But as Frederik Richter of the German non-profit investigative newsroom Correctiv reminds, “It’s for good reason that people say ‘the first victim of the war is the truth’.” This also applies to open-source data and information from social media. In the case of armed conflicts, these forums can get manipulated by any party and verifying them is difficult.
