Checkdesk - Global Editors Network

On July 17, 2014 Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine.

Citizen journalist group Bellingcat decides to use Checkdesk to investigate the incident.

[Eliot Higgins, founder - Bellingcat Media]

With the downing of MH17 over Ukraine

there were already a lot of claims

and counter-claims being made very early on,

so it was very important to immediately start

trying to verify these claims.

So what we had were claims coming from

the Russian government that a Ukranian SU25 jet

was used to shoot it down.

Then we had claims from the Ukrainian government

and the Western powers that it was a missile launcher

that was supposedly in the area.

And what was quite unusual with this was

that you had lots of video evidence.

So you had all kinds of video showing

the remains of the aircraft. You have photographs

of the remains of the aircraft, and you also

have images of the missile launcher itself.

So it's very important to verify what was true

and what wasn't.

It certainly seems from my perspective

that there's a vast amount of

user generated content being produced.

There's been a huge amount from Syria.

There's estimated to be half a million videos

from Syria alone. Then you look at Egypt,

and events like the Boston Marathon bombing.

This all needs verification, this all needs checking.

When you're working with user generated content,

you have to question what you're seeing.

There are so many opportunities for

fake information to be shared,

checking if it's real or not is very, very important.

Checkdesk has been very useful for us,

because we've been able to verify content,

and we've been able to do it collaboratively

with other people.

When we're verifying user generated content,

it's very important to be very clear and transparent.

What's great about Checkdesk is it allows us

to show every step we've taken along the way.

It's a very easy interface to use: Anyone can use it.

With our recent work on tracking vehicles in Ukraine,

we had various Russian and Ukranian-language

communities come to us and start submitting

stuff to Checkdesk.

Anyone can use it, people can join in easily.

We found it very useful for bringing together

communities from different platforms

into one location.

So for us, it's been very, very helpful.

And it helps build stronger communities to investigate

this kind of material.