SUMMARY
- Founded in the UK, Bellingcat is an “open source investigations” organization that got its start with funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
- NED is an international NGO created by the U.S. government in the 1980s to perform influence operations previously carried out by the CIA.
- Bellingcat has been a major supporter of efforts to censor online content using the pretext of “combating disinformation.”
- In recent remarks at the Cambridge Disinformation Summit, Bellingcat CEO Elliot Higgins conceded some of the censorship industry’s failed approaches, including “fact checking,” while plotting new strategies to control and influence online content.
- Higgins predicted violent clashes between U.S. student protesters and the police “in the next four years,” outlining his goal of a a global network of university computer labs to pool technological resources in support of favored online narratives such as police violence.
Bellingcat CEO Elliot Higgins conceded some of the failings of the censorship industry in a talk at the Cambridge Disinformation Summit in the UK at the end of April, singling out the vast web of “fact checkers” as an approach to controlling online content that has failed. Meta announced it would end the fact-checking program on its platform earlier this year, planning a move to an X-style community notes system.
In his remarks, Higgins said fact-checkers failed because they don’t “create discourse.”
We cannot create hundreds of fact-checking websites because those fact-checking websites don’t actually engage in discourse and we have to create discourse, I think, in my opinion. So, Bellingcat has had a lot of experience dealing with this kind of thing in the past. And, I think from that we can draw some conclusions and some interventions that I think will work.
Higgins did not say he wanted to abandon efforts to control the flow of disfavored information online. The British media CEO identified several structural factors in the flow of online content that he said need to be addressed, including core functions of social media platforms such as the monetization of engagement. He went on to blame human biases and “fear-based thinking” for unspecified recent developments in America.
So we have these structural and technological drivers. So this is stuff like the way the algorithm works that people now have online platforms that reward monetization for engagement, that traditional gatekeepers, the newspapers have for example, have really failed to adapt to these new technological changes and that the information ecosystem itself is fragmenting. We then have psychological and social drivers. So we have biases and motivated reasoning. We have identity and community reinforcement, doctrine enforcement and purity testing. Just look over at America at the moment and see that in action and crisis catalyst and fear-based thinking. And then we have the political and economic drivers. So there’s the weaponization by state and political actors and stuff like astroturfing, covert influence campaigns, the failure of policy and the law and polarization and media fragmentation.
Bellingcat has been a significant recipient of NGO funding, notably the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a quasi-autonomous NGO founded by the United States in 1983. NED has granted over $115,000 to Bellingcat since 2017.
One of the shadowiest arms of U.S. soft power, most NED funding never comes to light, since the NGO exempted itself from the usual transparency requirements for U.S. funded organizations. According to its own founder, NED’s core mission has been to perform the same regime-change and foreign influence operations that were once the purview of the CIA. The New York Times described NED’s role as “influencing domestic politics abroad” and “do[ing] n the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades.”
Bellingcat has been directly involved in the EU’s censorship regime, aiming to detect disfavored online speech that can be analyzed and targeted for censorship as part of the EU’s “digital observatories,” the state-level network of monitoring stations to enforce the bloc’s Digital Services Act. The DSA, which goes into effect in July, empowers the EU to fine tech companies 6 percent of their annual global revenue if they fail to comply with its demands to censor “misinformation” or “hate speech.” Members of the censorship industry hope the DSA can be used to restore the power of online censors around the world, including in the U.S.
Higgins has served as a fellow at the Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research (DFR) Lab, which started under the NED CEO and President Damon Williams during Williams’ prior role as VP of the Atlantic Council. The DFR lab specialized in online censorship, and was part of the four organizations that made up 2020’s Election Integrity Partnership, the DHS-created coalition that led online censorship during that election. Francis Fukuyama, a prominent censorship supporter, has served as a council member of the NED Forum for International Studies, also works on Bellingcat’s international advisory board.
Higgins has referred to Elon Musk as an “absolute disaster” for X, formerly Twitter. Musk has said Bellingcat “specializes in psychological operations.”
Weaponizing Computer Science
Higgins also floated the idea of combining the resources of university computer science labs around the world for political ends, citing pro-Palestinian protesters on university campuses and potential “police violence” against protesters in the U.S. as examples. Higgins hopes to form a network of university computer science departments to power high-tech online investigations, to support the left-wing protesters against the police. Higgins said these efforts are already in motion.
Technology that’s developed by computer science departments can be used throughout the entire network rather than it being stuck in one location. Say there’s a protest at a US university and the police start getting violent, which may happen in the next four years, rather than it just being up to those students to figure out what’s happening, the entire network can engage because that process is quite straightforward. And that’s actually something we’ve already done in Utrecht University with the open source Global Justice Investigation Lab. So we went in there, we developed course material, we set up the investigation lab. We did this in partnership with other organizations such as Amnesty and Air Wars and their first major investigation.
So their first major investigation was about police violence that targeted protestors at a pro-Palestinian protest. It showed that there were students who were targeted by excessive force, by the police. It created national media attention. It forced the police to respond, forced the university to respond because they were the ones who called the police in the first place. But this is something we’re currently working on with Birmingham, Nottingham, and Sterling University to expand. We’re hoping in the 25-26 school year to start implementing the first version of this in those universities.
Higgins did not say if there was a countering-disinformation element to his vision of a global university computer science blob. However, the Global Justice Investigation Lab that he referenced as an example counts the combating of “misinformation and fake news” as core to its mission.
Previously, university “disinformation research” centers that promoted online censorship have come together in coalitions, such as 2020’s Election Integrity Partnership, which included the Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. Presenting themselves to the public as “researchers,” this coalition built switchboarding technology to help state actors fast-track censorship requests to major tech companies.
Higgins’ vision seems to be broader: creating alliances of computer science labs whose mission includes the combating of misinformation, but also support other, ideologically related goals such as supporting left-wing street protesters against the police.
