"Teaching Media Literacy" with Giancarlo Fiorella

[Music] You are listening to a Bellincat Discord service stage talk titled "Teaching Media Literacy with John Carlo Fiorella". This week the director of research and training at Bellincat took to the stage. John Carlo has been leading Bellincat education efforts and has recently completed a project teaching media literacy skills in the UK schools. In the Discord stage talk John Carlo shared the origins of training at Bellincat. Why Bellincat puts such an emphasis on education and how listeners can get involved with our public workshops. We also spoke about why media literacy is so important with the growing concern of disinformation and fake news impacting reporting and world events. You can find links to the student view project in the description for this podcast. The talk was hosted by me Charlotte Mar on Thursday the 50th February in the Bellincat Discord server. [Music] Okay. All right. Okay I think we should start. So hello all, welcome. This week's speaker needs no introduction. But in case you're new to Bellincat, John Carlo Fiorella is director of research and training at Bellincat. A talented researcher in his own right, you may have a come across his helpful guide to maintaining mental hygiene as a researcher, kept in your mental health, whilst online, or he may have led a workshop or held election you attended. You may even have been graced with John Carlo's presence on the Discord many a time as he is a key driver of the community and values community input deeply on here. He also oversees all of our educational efforts and it's this strand that we're going to be talking about today. We've recently partnered with the student view, Demos and PhDSEE. He, Association in the UK, to deliver media literacy training to teachers from UK schools. In the talk today, John Carlo will speak on that project, why it came about and what Bellincat strives for in this area in the future. As he talks, please put all your questions in the chat and I'll ask them as we move into the Q&A section. Thanks so much for taking to the stage again, John Carlo. I will pass the mic over to you now. I have not done a stage talking a while. I used to do them all of them way back and Charlie has taken over and so it's really happy to be here on this stage again. As he just heard, I'm the director of research and training here at Bellincat. I took over for Eric toller after he went to the New York Times and since then that was back in September. I've been doing a lot of different things, a lot more administrative work and a lot more sort of like high level planning and strategizing and among that, I do still quite a lot of education work, including this project. The media literacy champions project that I'll be talking about in a little bit. Before I get to that though, I thought maybe it'd be interesting to give you kind of a rundown, a history of how is it and why is it that Bellincat is doing research, is doing training. One of the things that we've always had fun thinking about internally here at Bellincat is how to describe us. Like what is Bellincat? What do we do? What does Bellincat do? And it's always a tricky question to answer because we're sort of equal parts research organization, but not we're not entirely a research organization. We're not really a newsroom and that we're not really in the business of sort of breaking news. You know this happened and we published something we take a long time usually to publish our results. So we're not quite straightforward news organization and we also do a lot of training. So that's actually a big part of the work that we do. Some of us are doing like 50% of our time is dedicated to training. So you see we're sort of an interesting combination of of things. So we're part research organization, part newsroom, part training. So I wanted to give you a sort of a history of that because not all of you may be aware of all of the training that we do and all of the different kinds of training that we do. So I'll start with that and then I'll build up to this latest initiative that we just finished working on this past year. Actually last month is when we wrapped up our involvement in this project. Again, the media literacy project. So belly cat's history in education began and this is this is my law of recollection number one. I wasn't there when this happens. So this is me hearing Eric and Elliott talking about it and then remembering or half remembering. So you know don't quote me on this some dates maybe wrong and also details maybe wrong. But as I recall. As far as I'm aware, as far as my memory goes, we started doing training pretty quickly after a certain belly cat was found. So you'll remember that belly cat launched in 2014 and really quickly after its launch, belly cat became an international name almost overnight with our investigation into the shoot down of MH 17. Really in the earliest stages, the big the first sort of big project that belly cat ever worked on what's the MH 17 project and suddenly many people all across the world were hearing the name belly cat and were very impressed with the work that we were doing. So belly cat really burst onto the international scene as an organization that was doing really impactful work in a novel way. So remember again back in 2014 this open source research thing wasn't what it is today. So back then you didn't have the New York Times. Visual investigation team. You didn't have the Washington Post visual for rent 16. You didn't have basically the mainstreaming of open source research as we do today. Thankfully. So I remember even starting in 2015, Elliott and Eric had an idea to say, hey, you know, we're getting a lot of requests. A lot of people are sort of messaging us asking us how we're doing this work. Again, it's kind of a new thing. Not a lot of people are familiar with this open source thing and pretty much right off the bat again within a year of belly cat starting. We were doing training and historically we've done two kinds of trainings sort of broadly speaking. We do what we call the public trainings. So some of you in the audience may have come to one of our public training events or you may want to come to one. They sell out really quickly. So you have to like really be a subscriber newsletter. So subscribe to social media platforms because they sell out super fast. And these used to be exclusively in person. But because of COVID, we started doing them online. And so today we do both. So we have public digital workshops. We call them and we have in person digital workshops. So. Just, well, just next week we have a digital workshop in the in the in the Americas time. So Tuesday Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Two of my colleagues, Pooja and Peter are going to be leading that session. So we have, you know, journalists, lawyers, human rights activists, et cetera, coming to that. And that's again, something that you can sign up for. You have to pay to come. You know, we have limits on what the kinds of folks that we train. So we don't train police. We don't train military. Obviously, intelligence people. We don't train either. It's all civil society folks who are doing good work. And then we also have in person workshops. So these are they last up for week. So it's nine to five Monday through Friday. And the next one that's coming up of those is in London. And I can't remember the date. It's going to be posted on our website today. So anyways, we've been doing those since about 2015 in person workshops. So you go, you have two, three bell and catch trainers on the teach you everything that bell and cat knows about flight tracking, geolocation, how to do image verification. We talk about workflows archiving. It's a whole the whole kind of tool kit that we work with. And we've been doing that for a number of years. And it's a it's a really important source of income for us. So it's always been one of our sort of funding pillars. We are able to sustain ourselves with this income from trainings. We also do what's called private workshops. And so those are when we have an organization reach out to us. And they say, hey, we are giving example sort of a general example somebody will say, hey, we have a newsroom. We're a we're a major international news organization. We have a newsroom of folks we are trying to launch our own open source research unit. Can you come and train our newsroom. And so, you know, we'll give you the space. You can come to our office. You know, we have 20 journalists who are interested in this. Can you can you come will pay you and you can do the training. So we've been doing those for a number of years as well with the same very hard limitations that we're not training police. We're not training governments. We're not training military. Thankfully, we've always been very we've always had the ability to be very selective. We get way more requests for training that we can handle. And so we we pick and choose like the ones that are really sort of most important to us. And that are most aligned with our message. So those are the two. Let's say training. I don't know. Dreams that we've been working with since 2015. The public workshops, the public trainings and the private ones. over time and this became true certainly after I joined. I mean, it was true before, but I personally worked a lot in this area. When I joined Bellincad in 2018, I was doing a PhD. I was about halfway through a PhD in criminology and socioligal studies at the University of Toronto. And so when I came to Bellincad in 2018 as a volunteer and then when I was subsequently hired, I had a lot of interest in obviously in academia 'cause I was literally, you know, like doing a training to become a professor and work in academia the rest of my life, hopefully. At that time, hopefully, I'm hopeful, I'm thankful that I was able to move away from that and that I'm doing this job. But at that time, that was my career path. It was academia. And so when I joined, I said, hey, this is fantastic. This kind of research is super important. It also has academic scholarly applications. Like people are using it in journalism, people are using it in human rights investigations, like amnesty and whatever. But you could also, like, I know lots of researchers in the academy would love to have these research skills. And so over time, we started to engage more and more with universities. And so we would have, we would sort of, again, imagine our inbox and it's full of requests for trainings. We started to kind of pick out the ones that were from universities. So we would say, oh, this is from a university that's interesting. It's a master's level graduate school, journalism course in Germany. And they're really interested in having us come in for a day. So we would prioritize those. And so starting again, and, or honestly, I say starting in 2018, 2019, we started to focus on that. And very quickly, we discovered that there was a growing interest from researchers in universities on these methods. You may be familiar with the human rights center at Berkeley, which is the premier human rights open source research center in the world. And it's really the closest thing I think to a class that you can take at a university that can teach you how to become a bell and cat researcher. So they were spearheading from within the academy this move to say, hey, there's this thing called open source research. You can do it from your living room. You can learn how to do it from your whatever your office. You can learn how to do these things. You can have an impact on investigations, on all kinds of topics. And so they were kind of leading the charge in the, again, in the university setting, kind of training people to do this kind of work. And in fact, several of our colleagues over time here at Bellinkett have come directly from the human rights center at Berkeley. And Kayleigh Willis at the New York Times is from that center as well. So again, we started like doing public workshops for everybody, not everybody with limitations. Like folks who would apply, we would approve them and then they would come. If you worked in a new room and you wanted us to come and train your roots, we would do that. Over time, we started to say, hey, universities are interested in this, younger people, right? Are interested in this, people who have not yet entered their fields as careers, they're interested in this kind of work. So let's focus on that. And so over time, we've had lots of, it really great collaborations with universities all over the world. Well, North America, Western Europe, Africa and Latin America, I mean, early, I don't think you've ever done. We may have, we've given talks at universities in Asia, but we haven't, I don't think we've been there to give a talk like in person a workshop. So just to give you an example of the kind of collaboration that we've been able to build up, over time with universities, there is a university, so there's an organization called a vehicle, Sedo Cetenta, in England, the name is 070, so if you Google 070, you'll find their website and in Spanish, that number is Sedo Cetenta. That's what you say. Anyways, they're based in Bogota, they do fantastic work. They are just the most dedicated, like really sharp journalists out there. And they are based in the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, so Bogota has a university, it's called the Universidad de los Andes and they're hosted there, so they're not officially connected to the university, they just have an office there. By the way, their office, if you've never been to Bogota, Bogota has a giant mountain range, and it's a very kind of sharp, what do you call it? It's almost like a sheer mountain cliff that's on the side of the city. And the Universidad de los Andes is built up the mountain, so the entrance to the university is like a sea level, whatever elevation Colombia is, but then you have to almost climb rock climb up and up, so you might have a class that's like 500 meters above the entrance to the university, so it's all stairs and elevators and stuff. And Sedo Cetenta has a really beautiful office that's in an old train car that was put up there for some reason. I can't remember the story, but anyways, you have to like, it's almost like a mystical experience. Like you go up the mountain, like the altitude sickness is like making you dizzy, and you're climbing and you're climbing, and it's also it's a very serpentine sort of climb, and then you turn a corner and there's a beautiful old train car and Sedo Cetenta's there. Anyways, getting carried away here. So Sedo Cetenta is based in the University of Los Andes, and over the years, we have been able to do many training events at the university at, thanks to Sedo Cetenta. So Sedo Cetenta will find the room for us. They'll talk to the university, they'll get approval, and they'll give us a lecture hall. And then one of us, it's usually me, we'll fly down there and then we'll give a class to journalists in Colombia on how to do open search research in Spanish, a native Spanish speaker from Venezuela. And so as we've grown over the years, now we have a couple of other Spanish speakers with us, and so we're continuing to do that sort of initiative, both in Colombia, but also with other universities, hopefully in the region as well. And so, you know, again, we begin with training the public, journalists, human rights activists, etc. Over time, we realize, hey, lots of people in the academy are interested in this kind of stuff. Maybe we should train them. The most recent development there, I could say, I should say, 'cause I'm personally involved with it, so you gotta shout 'em out. So I completed my PhD, and I was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Utrecht, with something called the Global Justice Investigations Lab. This is modeled after the Human Rights Center at Berkeley. So there's about four faculty at this program, and it's an interdisciplinary graduate program, sorry, class, where if you are a law student, or if you're a student from Kerminology, whatever discipline doesn't matter, you can take this class, and you learn open search research methods, specifically to do research on human rights investigations. And so that's been going on to September. It's going really well. We have a really, really, really engaged cohort of students, super bright people. And so that's been going really well. And so starting about, I wanna say two years ago, overlapping with this turn to educating universities and talking to students and so on, we were approached by an organization that UK, and the name of that organization is the student view, and they are a really cool organization. They train, they are essentially teaching media literacy to young people in the UK. And so they reached out to us, and they emailed us, and they said, "Hey, Bell and Cat, how's it going?" We are the student view, we're in the UK, and we love to train students on media literacy. And part of media literacy is stuff like detecting misinformation, and how do you know if a picture really is, what the people claim that it is, and how do you know if a video is authentic, or if it's not authentic, right? So they said, "We have an idea for this project, really ambitious, but we have an idea for this project." What we wanna do, is the student view talking. They said, "What we wanna do is we want to bring together a bunch of experts in different areas and have them work together on delivering a media literacy program to teachers in the UK." So they brought together a bunch of partners, including PHC, which is a UK institution that if I'm not misremembering, helps to create cool curriculums on health and safety for students for what I would call high school students. In the UK, I always forget the terminology, it's different, anyways, high school students. So these are like 14, 15, 16, 17 year olds. And so they said, you know, we have lots of students who wanna learn about media literacy, we have lots of teachers who want to learn about, you know, how to detect this information, and what is this information, and how do you know, if you're looking at these information or not. And you guys, that Bellincatter like experts in this. So what they did was they brought together all these partners, and then they got funding to have us co-develop a curriculum to teach teachers how to teach media literacy. So that's what's called a train, the trainer program. So, Bellincat was training that people who were going to actually conduct a training in schools. And so we sat down. There was a couple of us doing this. And for different reasons, I was the one who kind of put the finishing touches on it. And we developed six lessons on different aspects of media literacy within the parameters that were set by DHSC. So there were topics that were not appropriate for the classroom. So we're not teaching students, you know, we're not like what we would do in an overall workshop, which is what, you know, we might refer to like research that we've done on massacres or war crimes. Obviously, we weren't bringing that into the classroom. So we have to come up with different examples, et cetera. And so that took about, I want to say maybe six months that process of developing that curriculum. And essentially, what we would do is we would sit down, we would brainstorm, okay, so how much time do we have, how many lessons can we realistically do? We ended up with six. And then we said, okay, so what are the topics that we want to hit? So one of the lessons is on like what is this information? Another one of the lessons is on AI generated images. What is that? How do you make them? Where are they coming from? What can you do with them? What's your you watch out for that kind of stuff? So we had a very involved process. Again, it took about six months and we want to say maybe a little bit longer. And it was a lot of back and forth. So I would come up with a slide and we come up with the lesson plans, send them to DHSC and they would say, yeah, you know, this break, can you talk a little bit more about this? You can't talk about that because it's too, you know, well, whatever, it's like out of place in the classroom, et cetera. And so after that process, we had our six lessons and we were, you know, everybody was really happy with them. And as part of this initiative, and this is a really, really, really cool part of this, I also wrote a handbook for what we call the pop up use room initiative. So part of this project with the student view was to create these lesson plans. And also they had an idea. They said, what if we can help teachers set up like a newspaper club at their school? So you know, you go to school and after school, you have like a football, right? Like you're in the football team, you go play football after school. In my school, we had like the chess club. So after school, you would go and you would play chess. So they said, what if we help teachers set up like the newspaper club where after school, if you're a student and you're interested in, you know, being a journalist or like all the, you know, open source research, you can, you can research stuff, right? So you can talk about things that are happening in your school. Maybe you can research things that are happening in your community. You know, are the, is the garbage kind of piling up on the streets and, you know, maybe the garbage system, like the pick up system's not working too well. You know, this is stuff that students might notice in their neighborhood so they can do research on, right? And so they said, you know, it'd be great if you had a handbook of like how to set that up. What are some things for some practical skills that students can deploy to research, to do some very basic sort of research online. And the idea is that, and that's the face that we're right now, we are recruiting journalists to join these pop-up newsrooms. So you may have a pop-up newsroom in a school in the UK. And then what we're hoping to do is match that newsroom with a journalist. And so the journalists might come in and talk to the students about what is like being a journalist or they might give them tips for stories, that kind of thing. But the really cool initiative, basically, trying to get people excited about the world and, you know, get them to realize that, you know, you can interact with a world in a way that's wholesome. And I think journalism does that because journalism allows you to go out there and see what's happening and call attention to things that may be happening that are not good, and inform people about these things. So that hopefully, you know, more action can be taken, there's more awareness about these issues, et cetera. And so we deployed the classes. I can remember, we did like 12 sessions. They were all online, just it became easier to do them online than in person. Because of course, as you know, teachers are, I don't know, like nurses, doctors, and teachers are like the busiest people in the world, I feel like. I mean, they just have a bill, the Gillian thinks to do. So rather than saying, hey, can we, you know, get 25 teachers to give up a week of teaching and like come pick this class that wasn't realistic at all. But we did like, basically two and a half hour, no, like two hour chunks and hour and a half chunks in the evenings. So teachers could come in, drop in, and get this training. And so the idea then there was that we trained the teachers, you know, they had opportunity to ask questions. And so with the lesson plans that we also produced, they now have the knowledge to talk about these issues to their students and they have the resources to talk to the students, their students about these issues as well. And so that was our involvement with this program, which was a really fun and interesting program to be a part of. Again, the current phase is the journalist recruiting phase. I've looked at some survey data from the program and a lot of the teachers are hoping to start the pop-up newsrooms in September. So hopefully that will start to see a bunch of these come up and students again getting involved and excited with their communities. Yeah, this journalism initiative. I'll start to wrap up here maybe in the next five minutes or so. I was going to say something else. Oh, yeah. Okay, so again, we started with the history of teaching and education at Bellinkat. It was a public then we started looking at universities. Now we're working with this project in the UK. So clearly we're kind of looking to train younger and younger people, right? So what are we thinking about doing next? Elliot wrote an article in the Financial Times back in December. And this is Elliot Higgins, the founder of Bellinkat. And he, it's a really good article if you read it. It's, it lays out, I think what's a very convincing argument that you know, using without sounding alarmist and without kind of rehashing the same fears that we've always had about this information and technology and are people getting accurate information and the news or not. You know, Elliot kind of breaks that down using current examples. He talks a lot about like the down full of Twitter with Elon Musk coming in and just, you know, turning it into a horrific swamp. He talks about the fact that hey, you know, we're in this situation right now where, you know, we're both seemingly kind of more and more and more engaged with social media than ever. Platforms that we tended to trust a little bit more are becoming less and less trustworthy. We're in the new, when this new space where like billionaires can pick up social media platforms that are almost equivalent to like a public space in a traditional sense but now they're turning them into really on the help of places to have a public debate about issues. And so he says, this is troubling and it's dangerous for our societies. And so what could we do? And one of the things that he says is we need to really start thinking about educating young and younger people on media literacy, on how they can navigate the world of information to which they're exposed every second of the day. And this isn't something that we can do like, you know, at the school level, this is like a national, maybe even an international level effort, right? So he talks about the need to bring in a wide range of actors together. So you're going to have to get tech companies on board. You're going to have to set them down in rooms with government institutions that are able to affect change, for example, create curriculums, et cetera, to again, reach younger and younger and younger people. Because I think if there's anything that I've learned throughout this journey, this journey of, you know, belling-cut teaching people is that, you know, it's fantastic. It's great to teach journalists. You've been a journalist for, you know, 30 years. That's a great skill to pick up if you can learn how to teach. That's great. It's really great to teach university students who are about to become journalists because, you know, they're younger, maybe they have more facility with the technology or they know more things about the technology that I do. And they have a chance to like, over the course of their entire careers, affect change and do meaningful work using these tools. And logically, then, you start to look at high school students and go, "Well, you know, if it's better, I'm not saying it's better, it's better, and it's better, but if it's a good idea to train university students because they're about to enter the workforce, why don't we train high school students as well because they're about to enter university and they're about to enter the workforce?" And so, you know, I can tell you that, Elliot's personally really excited about this idea of training, you know, not students necessarily directly, but teachers. Because ultimately, teachers are the experts in, you know, talking to students and training them. But this focus on looking at high school level education, high school level media literacy initiatives is something that I think Elliot is really excited about personally. And so, this year, I think the student projects are involvement in it, it has become, it has come to an end, essentially, we've delivered, you know, when you get into an agreement with somebody, You have to sign a lot of paperwork and it's test lake. here's what each partner is going to do. We've already delivered all of our commitments. So as far as the work goes, we're done. But the program continues. And we signal to the student view that if they want us to help out with anything else, of course they can approach us and we'd be more than happy to help out. But I think we're probably gonna see more engagement on that level in the coming years. I think Ali is gonna spend more and more time to looking at that, making sure that younger, younger people are able to benefit from the work that the work here, the methodological work that we do here at Ali Khan. So I don't know, do we wanna maybe ask a couple questions? You happy to, you know, keep talking with you guys? - Yeah, if you wanna ask any questions, please put them in the chat right now. I can see one already. But first and foremost, I wanted to ask Dr. Mkholy, you started touching on it, but why does Bellingcat feel that teaching me literacy is the solution for the influx of disinformation for the influx of fake news, rather than what other people say, like regulation of social media platforms, for example, why are we pushing so hard for teaching me literacy? Why do we think that's the answer to all this? - Yeah, that's a really good question. I would say that I don't think that we think it's a not solution. I think it's one of many solutions that you mentioned one of them, right? So this is the effect that war level, that war information is having on our societies is, I mean, people have died, right? Like think about how many people have died because they read on some blog that COVID-19 was fake and if you got vaccinated, the government was, or Bill Gates was putting a chip, people lost their life, right? The thing that always gets to be too is like climate change. Like there's so much climate change to the nihilism on the internet, climate change, I'd existential threat to life on the planet. Again, is being, I think, efforts to combat climate change are being undermined by poor information online. You know, some of it is disinformation, so you have actors who are deliberately trying to muddy the waters so people are not able to make logical, rational assessments of what's real and what's not. You know, this gonna include like politicians, companies, et cetera, you know, name any subject, right? There's just so much bad information on the internet that it is really unfortunate. And so one solution, so not that solution, but one way to help fix of that is to teach me the literacy. In other words, to teach people how to discern between good information, that's factual, that's accurate, that is, you know, the result of rigorous research versus some guy's blog who, you know, is not, an authority on vaccines or medicine or anything, you know, you see? So at the level of, let's say disinformation, that's really important. So I would argue every single person who is on the internet needs to have media literacy skills to be able to say, this is junk and this is good information, right? Now media literacy is also about, if you kind of take a step back a little bit, media literacy is just about navigating information period, right? So even, even things like knowing what a, you know, knowing what a fake job ad might look like, right? So if you're a student, you're gonna be looking for work eventually, and you're gonna be applying for work online, like on different websites. So you might Google for like work, you know, websites, right? Like job posting, right? There's a lot of fake like job postings out there, where, you know, people are scamming you at a money and, or, you know, it's a job and they're trying to trick you into doing stuff. And so media literacy is also about like navigating those spaces and saying, I'm presenting with numerous job postings from numerous job websites. What is the good job posting? What is the accurate, you know, truthful, a factual job posting versus what are the scam ones? That's also part of media literacy as well. So both specifically on this sort of disinformation level, media literacy is important because we all spend a lot of time on the internet. We are all bombarding with information all the time. And so knowing how to discern, good information from that information is really important. And also just, you know, for living your life as somebody who might be looking for a job one day, it's also really important. Okay, not that solution, but one of many solutions have to be implemented alongside each other in order to kind of help rectify what is otherwise a path to potentially very leapfutures, Elliot calls it, it's financial tax. - Cool. Yeah, it's absolutely a vital skill set for everyone. Nowadays to have JD Evolans in the chat. So thanks for noting that media literacy is part of the solution, not the solution. We've got a few questions coming through now. Follow Marcus asks about the involvement of Belingad in the actual project. So are you going to attend some of the classes where the teachers deliver the curriculum so you can get feedback? Perhaps you can explain a little bit about how Belingad has been involved with the actual teachers sessions and things like that. But where do you draw the line in this project? - That's good, yeah. So if I was invited to one of the classes, I would definitely make time to go, but no, that's not on the plan. We also, one of the other partners demos, it's called demos, the EMOs, they are the, I forget what the technical term is, but they're the kind of the track partner. So they are the ones in this initiative who are in charge of making sure that the materials that we delivered were implemented in classrooms and to collect feedback to make sure that the material was effective, right? So they're the ones who are in charge of like doing surveys, following up with teachers, and doing all of that sort of accountability work over time to allow us to go at the end of the next year, this year to go, oh yeah, this actually ended up working pretty well or some of it worked really well, but these three things have to change based on the feedback from the classes. So I won't personally be there, but part of the project doesn't ball a very close following of how this actually plays out of the classrooms. - Pets of A asks, and this kind of ties into a minutes question actually. I like the idea of teaching high school age kids, but there are so many people that are older and have maybe 50 to 70 years ahead of them. What are your thoughts about approaching a wide audience? And I wanted to ask you, what's kind of the age limit in terms of going younger in terms of teaching these skill sets? When can people actually absorb these kinds of lessons? - Yeah, look, I think the key, so the question, if I understand it correctly, is like how young can you be, and still kind of, can you teach us at a kindergarten level? Is that what I'm hearing? - I was asking what your thoughts about approaching a wide audience in terms of a wide age range from all to young? - Yeah, so, okay, I'll start with folks in my de-older. So yeah, so our public workshops, I'm in charge of approving people to come to our public workshops because you have to apply and we do like a very, we do a sort of a background check, like we just bat the people. And we have lots of folks who are retired, who are, and they'll say like, "Hey, I'm retired, I retired last year, I'm retiring this year, and I'm looking for something to do now that I'm not gonna be working." And we love to have those people in our workshops because again, media literacy and open-source feature skills are, it's great if you can work in this field 'cause then you're doing something that hopefully you like to do. But I wish everybody in the world, regardless of what their job is, regardless of whether or not they're retired or not, knew how to navigate Twitter without falling into every trap that some guy who created an image with mid-journey stats, right? So there's no upper-age limit. If you're retired and you wanna pick up a new skill, fantastic, like please come to our workshops, please come to our events. Going the other way, I think that, so let me just begin by saying, I'm not a high school teacher, I'm not a teacher obviously. I have taught at the university level for a number of years, I'm currently teaching as I said at Utrecht University. I've taught a class at the University of Toronto. I've had lots of teaching experience with universities. I think that the key, if you ask me, again, my very kind of late person, A, you can, at the most basic level, when I was in elementary school and when I was in high school, I'd learned a lot about critical thinking skills. I remember my teachers using that phrase all the time, critical thinking, critical thinking, critical thinking. When I was in elementary school and in high school, this was before social media, right? And so I think that if you wanna say, hey, how do we teach media literacy? How do we teach young people how to be successful on the internet and how to not fall for disinformation, misaffirmation, et cetera? I think what you need to do is kind of abstract all of that and go back to teaching critical thinking skills. Because at the end of the day, I think that's what this is all about. It's about thinking critically. And I think you can teach young people how to think critically because I kind of I'd receive that training when I was in grade five, grade six, right? So I think that's a key. If you want to go younger, if you want to teach younger people how to do this, you don't have to talk about like, hey, when you guys are on telegram, doing research or whatever, watch out for this, you can just kind of abstract it and say, hey, critical thinking is important. Sometimes people say things that are lies. Like how do you tell the difference? I think that's one way to do it. Again, I'm a late person when it comes to teaching children. So take that with a great salt. (laughs) - Your schooling sounds a lot better than mine. I definitely didn't have a full school thinking classes. I wish I did though. It would have been very useful. - Yeah, but I think, I'm not gonna pretend I remember exactly what I learned grade five, but I do remember I was like built into, I just remember that phrase. And I think they just built it into everything. So it was just, I don't know. If it was kind of peppered in every kind of lesson, there was a critical thinking a lot. - Gleb had a kind of a follow up question to this. Have the teachers ever got back to say that some students may be too far in? I feel it's much harder to teach these media literacy skills to post university age people, due to them already having established frameworks for their reasoning. Is that something that's also seen in younger people? I think this is a really interesting question. - Yeah, I think, thanks for coming. Good to see you. Yeah, so I'll give you an example. I had an interesting interaction with a teacher during one of the lessons who they said, I think we were, I can't remember the details, but I think we were talking about, we were going through some examples of I think like climate change, the nihilism. There was some like Instagram posts where people were saying it wasn't real. That's important to me. And we were talking about, so we were looking into this example, we were saying, okay, so when you're talking to your students about this, how do you break down the statements that are made in this article in a way that is critical? So it was an Instagram post and it would say something like, I don't know, I'm going to give you a dumb example. It was like, if climate change is real, then why did it snow this morning? And so we were breaking that down and going, okay, so how could you have a conversation with your students about thinking about this critically? What are some critical questions that you can ask about this claim? And one of the teachers said, you know, I have students who are like contrairions, like to get a rise out of people to, to, I don't know, kind of be funny, they'll just say, they'll go, no, no, no, teacher like really climate change is not real, right? And so this teacher asked, how do you tell the difference between whether or not that student really believes that or if they're just doing that to get a rise out of people? And how do you kind of factor in the fact that a lot of teenagers, I certainly was this way, are going to want to be edgy. And they're going to think that, you know, pushing the envelope is a good thing. And so how do you kind of balance all of that? Because some students essentially may be too far in as glib is putting it. And I said, I don't know, I have no idea. You know, and I think the answer, you know, my answer now is, is, you know, if you're, if you're too far in the rabbit hole, you know, it's a tough place to be in. It's a tough place to get out of. And the best solution to that might be to, you know, get people early, like each and particular thing can skills early so that they don't fall into the rabbit holes in the first place. I realize that's not a satisfactory answer, but, sorry. When you were designing the lessons, how did you avoid kind of the lessons becoming old or dated after a while? Because obviously with school curriculum, you want them to stay fresh and relevant. But with things like you mentioned that one of the lessons will join AI manipulation. Obviously that's it. That's changing every second. So how did you kind of future proof these kinds of lessons for the teachers? Sure. Yeah. So I'll say that the, let's say that the standard property procedure, we use that term for working with images, like a picture or video, you know, if we're doing something like a fact check, those rules have already been established. And they've been pretty stable for the last many years. You can Google verification handbook, and you could probably read a handbook on how to verify images from like four or five years ago. And some details will have changed. But overall, I think that handbook is probably going to be pretty good. Like you're going to be able to deploy it today and say, hey, it worked. Everything so works. With AI, as you said, Charlie, there is no future proving. And so I be like the first slide in the section on AI images is like a big disclaimer. This is maybe obsolete as I'm delivering this training to you right now. So I put these slides together. Like I reviewed them last night. I cannot guarantee-- and in fact, I can bet money that in six months, all of this is going to be really old news. And you will never-- you'll say I can't use any of that anymore. And that is new. So the rapid pace at which AI, in particular, AI generating technology-- AI image generating technology has developed over the last while, is unlike anything that I've seen in this field before. And that means that workflows are obsolete pretty much as soon as you write them down. And so they have to constantly be rewritten. And so there is no way to future prove that. I certainly did it in the classes. I tried to keep it abstract by talking about the kinds of images that you can make and what the capabilities are today and where they may be going in the future. But I didn't focus any time on like, hey, use this website to check if an AI image is AI generated or not, because that website would stop working already. Because mid-Journey Sticks came out. And it made the website obsolete. So it's really tough. With AI in particular, it's been the most challenging to keep current. Any idea has to do with AI is absolutely as almost as soon as you write it down. Yeah, I think you just have to give those caveats. And as people in the travel saying, teaching those vital skills of critical thinking is really the essence of what we're trying to do here. A couple of people have been asking about getting involved with this kind of project. Maybe you can outline whether we'd be looking to do this kind of thing in other countries. Becky J says, I might have misunderstood the way we can engage in this learning training. If we wanted to donate our time, should we attend a belling cat training workshop first or contact the student view? For example, what's the next steps if you want to get involved with all of this? You have to be a journalist in the UK. So if you're a journalist in the UK, you can check out the student view website and navigate to the section on the pop up newsrooms. And then you can donate your time. You don't have to have training on a belling cat training for it. So that's how to prerequisite. The only prerequisite is you have to be a journalist. You have to be in the UK. That's it. And so there you go. Charlie, thanks for the link there. You just go over the student view, check out the pop up newsroom section. And there's a form that you can fill out. You get that in. And then you get approved. So that's the best way to volunteer for this being a journalist. And I'm sorry, Charlie, I forgot the first kind of question that you asked. OK, I was just asking whether we would be lucky to do this kind of project in other countries or duplicate it in any way. So I'll tell you that it was really challenging to work on this project because of the parameters of the UK curriculum. And I'm saying UK curriculum. But every country that has an educational system is going to have rules for their curriculum. Now, it was challenging for me because up until this project, we didn't have to worry about a curriculum. We made it. So there was no limits on what we could teach and how. So we could use any example. We can talk about any topic. We could literally create the curriculum ourselves. And that's what you would get at a training by Bellincat. It's what we want to teach you. So as soon as we came into the project, we were like, great. So we have lots of examples that we can use. And so immediately, PhD see correctly because they're doing their job. They have to-- they can't just let anybody walk into a classroom, start teaching whatever. They were saying, hey, there are rules. We have to do it a certain way. We can't talk about these sorts of examples. There was a lot of-- and again, I'm not criticizing this. I'm just saying this is the fact. I think it's a good thing. They were saying, you should try to avoid asking the students like the right questions about how they encountered this information or how they fall on for this information online because there's a concern that students might be embarrassed. You share that information. And if they say yes, then maybe they'll be bullied. That kind of thing. Again, not a critique of the project, but an example of a consideration that I never would have imagined myself. Because again, I'm not used to working with these parameters. And so that was challenging. I'm glad that we worked through the issues. And ultimately, we came up with what I think is a good program for the teachers. But that was a challenge. And so if we were approached again by another country and they were saying, hey, can you do this with us? Can you do a student-view project? in France or in Italy or the US or whatever. I would having that knowledge, I would just a lot more time to the curriculum development. So I would say sure let's look into it, but I need like double the time that I told the student to do that I needed because now I know that when you're dealing with curriculums at the national level, for example, the state level and the US Harvard's done, I get complicated. So I guess what I'm saying is that, yeah, I'm not opposed to doing it again, but I would just budget way more time to kind of sit down and get the intricacies of the curriculum down before I commit it to doing something that it is again. - Cool, thanks, I insight. Just moving quickly away from the student view project back onto kind of bell and catch trainings because you mentioned kind of the evolution of our teaching. - Todd, our source in the comments has asked, are there any kinds of terms of agreement for taking the bell and catch trainings? As in, can we put that certification on our resume? Can we have that certification revote? Is there anything that you can explain on the bell and catch trainings? Particularly as we have some online ones available right now on our website. - Yeah, so like the only thing that we ask the participants to do is we'll be sharing like, slide decks and stuff with you, so things that we put together. And we just ask you to not share them outside of the training because it's like our intellectual property. It's they're really important for us to earn income so that we can operate. And so if we share with you a slide deck and then you put it on the internet, that is like severely undermining our ability to do this. So we just say, don't do that, please, these are for you. Therefore, your own use only. That's, I think that's the only requirement that we ask people, you know, we'll tell them, please don't do that. And then in terms of certifications, yeah. So we don't issue them standard so we don't like give everyone a certificate. But if you want one, just email us and then we'll send you one. And then yeah, you can do it with that whatever you want. You can put it in a CD, you can tell people you did it. You know, people talk about it. Like I'll go on Twitter and somebody will say, I just got my certificate from Bell and Cat and they'll talk about it proudly. I think that's really nice. In some countries and in some fields, certification is really important. And so whenever I do training in Latin America, almost everybody will ask for a certificate 'cause in Colombia at least it's good to have like a paper certificate that you did something. Would we revoke it? I don't think we would. I'm trying to think of an idea. Like if you took a Bell and Cat training and then you set up like an evil Bell and Cat organization to like, I don't know, trick people and do evil, we, I don't know, I might email you and ask you or we might issue a statement like disavowing that we trained you or something, but that's never happened. Yeah, that's the only thing I can imagine that would warrant a revocation. That seems like a very severe measure. If we found out that you were doing evil work, we'd be angry and disappointed with you. - The anti-Velling Cat using-- - Yes, yes. - Fighting, increasing disinformation by fighting the intellectuals. - Yeah. - Yeah, please don't do that. - Just on, and by the way, everyone, we've got a couple of minutes left. So if you wanna, final, final questions in the chat by all means do. Just on Bell and Cat's role in this whole disinformation space, could you describe Bell and Cat as a fact checker? Kind of what sort of role in all of this? How do we describe ourselves to other organizations when we're talking about tackling disinformation? How do we fit into all of this? And can you describe us as fact checker as many organizations I know have? - Yeah, so I wouldn't say that we're fact-takers. Again, this is based on my subjective assessment of what I think a fact-taking organization is. And I'm not critiquing fact-taking organizations they're not good, but there is such a thing as a fact-checking organization. So there are fact, there are people whose job is to be a fact-checker, they work at an organization that has fact-check in the name. And if you go to these websites, all they're doing is they're checking facts, right? So again, I'm not disparaging that, but every article is formatted in this way. The president said this thing. We fact-checked and it's not true. And there's a description. The Ministry of the Environment sent out a tweet saying this. We check and that is true. And so every article is formatted in that way. That's a fact-checking organization. They do important work. In some countries are really, really extremely necessary. There's a lot of them in Africa and Latin America. So I wouldn't say that we're that. We do fact-checking, yes. But this maybe gets to what I said in the beginning about what is belling at even, right? Like, is that you get to a lot of training. So you're training organization? Well, yes and no, because we do also research. Okay, so are you a research organization? Well, yes or no, because we also do journalism. Okay, so you're a journalism organization. Yeah, maybe, but also we do fact-check sometimes, right? So if you were to tally the amount of articles that on belling cat that fit that kind of pattern of like the president said this, we fact-checked and it's not true. It would be a relatively small amount. So I would describe as an open source research organization. So we do research using open sources. Some of those end up being fact checks on our website, but it's not the main focus of our work, I would say. - Yeah, we fit into our own cute little unique docs and points to all of this. As we're talking about disinformation, the importance of media literacy and that, what do you foresee becoming an issue from a positive disinformation this year in 2024? What are the students training for amongst this year in 2024? - So, yeah, so one thing that I'm looking, I'm not looking forward to that, I think it's gonna be an issue. I mean, this is not my idea. I first heard my colleague Nick Waters elaborate on this idea many months ago, some fighting can boring from him. He said, you know, AI images, you know, there's a, there's a disproportionate amount of, I'm paraphrasing what he said, but, you know, there's like a disproportionate amount of attention on AI images because we think, oh my gosh, some guy's gonna show up and he's gonna make an AI image of like, you know, Biden, I don't know, punching someone in the face and then that's gonna trick people and then he's gonna lose the election or whatever, right? So there's a lot of attention on images. What images, what AI platforms can create to trick people who are thinking that an image is real. But what Nick was saying was actually, you know, the kind of the inverse of that dynamic may be more troubling and more impactful, which is that. Now that everyone is aware that we have the ability to create very realistic images using very simple technology, like mid-journey, you just download this, or down here in the mid-journey server. Because everyone's aware of this, there may be an erosion and trust of every image. So what you may have is an effect where people don't believe any image that they see. So you may have an authentic image of a war crime happening and you'll have people go, I don't think that's true. I think it's an AI image. We already saw this actually with an image of the Israeli government published of an infant who had been killed during the October 7 attacks and there was a lot of kind of pushback against that image being published in the sense that people were saying that's an AI generated image, that's not a real, that infant, that's fake. When in fact it was a real infant. And so that is, I think a dynamic, again, citing Nick here, that is overlooked perhaps and that it's not given enough attention. And I think that's something that I'm going to be looking to kind of spot and say, aha, here's an example of that thing that reversal of that dynamic. It's not that the AI image was so realistic that we can't tell the difference. It said it was a real actual image and people are saying, I'm not going to believe what that shows because I think it's AI, but really it's a real image. So that's another scary dynamic to this whole thing that we're all living through together. - And we've already seen that a little bit with image manipulation. And I think Nick did a case study from Colombia where I think the president had tweeted that an image of a guerilla group was manipulated but actually it wasn't. - Yeah. - And those kinds of claims are already emerging. So definitely, I think I haven't seen many people talking about the risk of that. But fake news went viral for a reason and it's because of Donald Trump claiming it and that had a lot of success in the election periods. - Yes, exactly. That's precisely it. It's the image version of fake news, yeah. - Exactly, exactly. Right, we should wrap here because it's on the hour. So thank you so much, John Collefer joining and for explaining the fantastic project that is the Media Literacy Project with the student view demos and VHS CE association and yeah, we wish you best of luck with the rest of the educational materials that we have to design for the link at. and please do get involved with our workshops. You can find them on our website. We'd love to see you. It's all good. Thank you again, DroneColo. Thanks, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for listening to the Stage Talk. If you'd like to catch a Stage Talk live, where you can ask the guest questions, join the Bellincat Discord server by visiting www.discord.gg/bellincat. The music you've heard is titled "Done" by NewerSelf and its courtesy of ArtList. [End of part 2] [End of part 2]