BellingcatNew to open source research? Want to know where to begin? Here’s a useful thread for beginners… 🧵
Start by identifying what you might be good at. If you love solving puzzles, geolocation challenges might be perfect for you. Do you speak another language? Perhaps you know a lot about the military or finance? Discover your specialist field by evaluating your existing skill set.
Find your community! Creating lists on Twitter of, or making an effort to follow on any social media, key researchers in the field you’re interested in can be really helpful to find new tools or techniques. Malachy Browne from the NYT has a great publicly available list of over 200 open source researchers on Twitter: https://twitter.com/i/lists/839124356638904320
We also have a community of open source researchers from different experience levels in our discord server. It’s free and easy to join via this link here: https://discord.gg/bellingcat
Don’t forget to introduce yourself upon joining!
Don’t forget to introduce yourself upon joining!
We asked our discord community, what are the open source research tools you couldn’t live without. The most common answers were Google search and Google Earth Pro. Free and easy to use, these are often the tools we use first in any type of research.
We used Google Earth Pro, along with other satellite imagery tools, in our most recent research, mapping instances of building damage in the Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border clashes. See that investigation here: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2023/05/25/mapping-the-aftermath-of-the-kyrgyzstan-tajikistan-border-clashes/
There’s a lot of different tools out there to discover and choose from and we have a collection of resource guides here detailing how to use many of them: https://www.bellingcat.com/category/resources/
Within the guides are also instructions on how to use Bellingcat’s own tools, created by our Investigative Tech Team.
You can find a collection of these tools on our github: https://github.com/bellingcat
You can find a collection of these tools on our github: https://github.com/bellingcat
Finally, practice! It's important to practice your skills. If getting better at geolocation is your first focus, join our Twitch stream each week and put your skills to the test in our weekly Geoguessr tournament. https://m.twitch.tv/bellingcat_live
Hey open source research community, what would your advice or tips for beginners be?
Kluthulhu' XOR 1=1--@Bellingcat Honestly? OSINT yourself.
Has little to no legal/ethical issues and doubles as a great exercise in undersranding your digital footprint.
Has little to no legal/ethical issues and doubles as a great exercise in undersranding your digital footprint.