How Citizen Journalists Solved the Mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17

At a moment when social media is being used to spread disinformation and influence elections around the world, one online group is doing the opposite: sifting through open source material on the internet to get at the truth—in war zones and elsewhere. The group, Bellingcat, has conducted investigations focusing on a range of issues, from the Syrian civil war to Russia’s poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal. It is now working on a probe of the war in Yemen.

On First Person this week, Bellingcat’s founder, Eliot Higgins, describes how he and his colleagues conducted their very first investigation nearly five years ago, into the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 over Ukraine.