In 2011, Eliot Higgins was doing admin support at a company and, by his own account, spending far too much time arguing on the internet. With no journalism training and no institutional backing, he taught himself to geolocate conflict videos, crowdfunded his blog, and built Bellingcat from scratch. Today the investigative collective he founded in 2014 is behind landmark work on the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the Skripal poisoning. It has about 35 staff, a Discord community of roughly 47,000, and a growing network of university investigation hubs. In a conversation with Marie Ringler of Ashoka, he explains how a hobby became an institution, and why he thinks the fight against disinformation has been aimed at the wrong target.

Marie Ringler: You’ve said you had no background in any of this, just a lot of time online. What first pulled you in?

Eliot Higgins: I was frustrated by online discourse, because it was always about selecting images or information to prove that you’re right and everyone else is wrong, and everyone finding their tribe. I just wanted to know what was actually going on. For the first time, conflicts in Tahrir Square, Libya and Syria were being reported not just by the international press but by people on the ground. The media wasn’t paying attention to that, because it was hard to verify and they’d been burnt before. So I asked: can you actually prove where these videos were filmed? I realized you could use satellite imagery on Google Maps and Google Earth. We now call that geolocation, but at the time it was more like “Spot the Difference.”

Ringler: The BBC and ITN turned you down. How did you keep going after that?

Higgins: They rejected me because I had no journalism qualifications, so I crowdfunded my blog for a year. It used the first Blogspot template I saw, so it looked awful. By then there was a big increase in interest and more people trying to do this, but I was still really the only website doing it regularly. So I came up with Bellingcat as a place where people could come together to learn open source investigation and publish it. I launched in July 2014, and three days later the Malaysia Airline flight MH17 was shot down.

Ringler: Looking back at MH17, was there a moment when it sank in that your work could actually lead to justice?

Higgins: It’s always been very incremental. There was never a big leap. With MH17, it wasn’t “we’re going to bring Russia to justice.” It was “here’s the open source stuff, let’s dig into it.” But within a few months, the official criminal investigation approached me to sit down as a witness and go through all the work. Really, I realized later, it was a free training session. When Russia really started going after us, I thought: a state is taking notice and they’re really annoyed, so we must be having an impact.

Ringler: Bellingcat often gets described as a journalism organization. Does that feel like the right fit to you?

Higgins: I think we just fit neatly into that category for some people. At the same time, I was working with Amnesty and Human Rights Watch on using this evidence in legal processes, with people developing tools and technology, and eventually with the International Criminal Court. There’s no “king” of open source investigation who decides what everyone’s doing. It’s about spreading those skills far and wide.

Ringler: You talk a lot about spreading these skills widely. Who do you picture doing this work, and where do they fit in?

Higgins: Everyone, because the role of verification used to be something the public trusted institutions to do on their behalf. As that trust has been lost, it has fallen into the lap of the public. We’re now not just recipients of information but distributors and creators of it. That’s a fundamental shift. If you have a mobile phone, you’re part of the process. We see Bellingcat as a node connecting to other organizations, and the question is how you create more nodes. So we’re working with universities to create courses and investigative hubs where students decide what they investigate and we supply the skills. In the long term, we want a network of universities connected nationally and internationally, but also locally to NGOs, civil society and media. With the collapse of local media, that becomes increasingly important.

Ringler: So much money and energy has gone into fighting disinformation. Why do you think it hasn’t worked the way people hoped?

Higgins: Disinformation has been treated as a supply-side issue: bad information is created by bad actors, so get rid of it and society will magically fix itself. That clearly hasn’t worked, because it underplayed the demand side. People seek out information after losing trust in institutions. Think of women whose pain is dismissed by doctors. They find alternative health communities that offer answers, some of which work, and then the other answers that the community offers become more acceptable. The seeking will always happen. The question is where they go. I think it’s really a crisis of accountability. Look at how Western governments responded to Russian war crimes in Ukraine, then at Israel and Gaza. Evidence of the same quality is ignored or lessened. That hypocrisy becomes visible, and it turns people against institutions.

Ringler: It’s tempting to want to take on these closed, loyalty-driven groups directly. How do you think about them?

Higgins: Counter-disinformation tried to destroy bad information, and it only created more, because people felt targeted for sharing what they believed was reality. We have to accept there will always be a subset who think Bellingcat is the CIA. If you argue with that, you’re always going to lose, because they aren’t operating on the same approach to reality. Instead you ask: how do you create functional verification, deliberation and accountability in your particular environment? When disordered versions capture institutions, it’s about loyalty tests, not evidence, and now the in-group has power to cause real harm.

Ringler: “Democratic resilience” seems to be the new phrase in policy circles. What would you want policymakers to understand about it?

Higgins: I don’t think they really understand what it means. The EU’s European Democracy Shield website doesn’t have a definition. It’s treated either as how quickly democracy bounces back from accidental authoritarianism, which is nonsense, or as foreign manipulation 2.0. The systems of democracy have changed at a fundamental level. If we think we can go back to institutions saying “trust us” and everyone saying “okay,” that’s nonsense. And if we teach people that truth matters and nothing happens, that drives the cynicism that says the government’s not listening, so let’s tear it down.

Ringler: Is there a smaller story, away from the headline cases, that reminds you why you do this?

Higgins: There was an oil spill off Trinidad and Tobago. Most people weren’t interested. But a few members of our Discord community started digging in, using the methodologies we developed for tracking ships. They identified who was responsible. That led to local reporting, then various agencies picked it up, and eventually an international marine insurance body reached out to us for the information to make a payout for the cleanup. That was ordinary members of the public getting involved. Sometimes it’s the big stories, but sometimes it’s about giving as many people as possible a way to connect to this kind of investigating. This leads to a better kind of world for all of us.

Eliot Higgins is an Ashoka Fellow .

Marie Ringler is a Leadership Group Member of Ashoka.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.