“We like to think people have a rational relationship with information. We do not. We have an emotional relationship with information.” To me this quote from Bellingcat says it all, or at least, says a lot. The readings this week made me reflect on the irrational way in which we receive information, and whether journalism is up to the task of helping us make sense of the world rationally. It seems to me that Open Source journalism can serve the public in some ways traditional journalism currently does not. I really appreciated the point in Bellingcat about trust works differently for citizen journalism versus professional journalism. In citizen journalism, trust is generated through transparency and providing all of the evidence to support a claim, while traditional journalism often expects to garner the reader’s trust through its standards, authority, popularity, or name (e.g. trusting CNN because it’s CNN, not because it provides a complete evidence trail as to how it obtains its information). 

When Dean of the Columbia Journalism School Jelani Cobb was on campus last semester, he was asked what piece he would choose to write right now, if he could write on any topic, and he said he’d write a long think-piece about public trust. I wonder if and how open source journalism would factor into that think-piece, and whether more people engaging with information gathering by participating in it could increase trust in reporting — whether allowing for mass participation in the act of journalism would give it greater authority than having it concentrated in the hands of a few, in a newsroom.  

I was also struck by just how many types of injustice Open Source journalism can help uncover. With just youtube, twitter, and google maps, one could trace an accidental Russian bombing, or re-education campus for Muslims in China, or who committed hate crimes in Charlottesville, or the deportations of thousands of Ukrainian children — not in the past, but in real time. That’s a pretty powerful tool, and clearly it’s really changing the game. Still, it was very cool and surprising to read about the history of Open Source and trace it back to the late 19th century in Colquhon’s piece. Maybe now, it is changing the game less in terms of what we can discover as journalists, and more in terms of how quickly we can discover it and distribute that information. It was also really cool to learn about the history of Open Source and trace it back to. Still, I’m curious about to what extent AI will cast doubts on its efficacy, which Bellingcat did not fully address: as the internet begins to host more fake videos, and those fake videos get better and better, how can we keep trusting that putting these videos together can give us accurate information?

Lastly, the FT piece on tech lords and populists was an interesting look into how people derive power in our modern society. I hadn’t before considered how there have always been powerful digital moguls, and there have always been powerful populist politicians, but now the two are coming together and reinforcing each other’s power. But given this power, it seems OSINT might also gain more significance in holding it accountable, especially as the Trump administration and similarly authoritarian regimes globally are shedding their own layers of accountability.