In a free world where disseminating and receiving information is a sacred right, we must be critical of sources. We know that there are old and trusted publications we can trust. But in the age of the Internet, there are many new media outlets and foundations that give out a lot of contradictory information to the information market.
In addition, in recent years there have been many social networks where anyone can post any kind of information. While journalists, by virtue of their profession, have to verify what they publish, users of social networks often dump there a lot of contradictory and unverified statements. Open any of them, and you will drown in a flood of human verbiage.
Someone is just pouring out their grievances against people and writing all kinds of unpleasant things about them. Internet bickering and scandals became an everyday occurrence in the modern world and became the “flip side” of the convenience of communication that the global network gave mankind.
But domestic scandals between people on social networks are half the battle. A lot of people have appeared who consider themselves specialists and experts in various sectors of the economy. These impostors can have millions of fans who subscribe to their pages on the Internet. If in the past people learned business news from newspapers, where the authors of the notes check the facts and are responsible for the information, including legal information, then the modern self-appointed Internet expert with his incompetent post on the social network can, for example, bring down a major bank, where millions of depositors will rush to take money in a panic.
Even worse is the influence of bloggers on world politics. As easily as many of them argue about cooking recipes, some take too seriously judging political processes and decision-making as if they are professionals and are no longer joking. A self-taught blogger can easily cause riots in the streets of cities with his online post. A person who thinks he is investigating can buy up fake databases on the darknet, collect gossip on dubious sites, steal scraps of email correspondence, compile them all, and then pass them off as scoops. In this way, entire countries can be defamed without being held responsible for it: the internet is a space of freedom that is almost unrestricted by anyone.
Guided by feelings, emotions, and of course vanity, such people make a name for themselves and make a lot of money. Look at YouTube videos with hundreds of thousands and millions of views, they are perfectly monetized and can bring their creators tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Internet has allowed ambitious people who couldn’t fit into the traditional framework of media standards to become rich and famous. Did it make them, professional journalists and investigators? Of course not. Did they endanger traditional media? Of course, they did.
Here, for example, the Bellingcat website, which has become famous, is proud of its investigations. An entire film was made about it, which is being shown all over the world, claiming that a blogger who is serving a sentence in a Russian prison was poisoned by the Russian state. More recently, Christo Grozdev from Bellingcat shared his opinion about the explosive packages sent to the officials in Spain, also without providing any actual evidence, but blaming “Russian secret services or people hired by them”.
Meanwhile, Bellingcat exists on grants from the Dutch foundation Adesium, the famous American foundation NDA, the Danish National Postal Lottery, Zandstorm and Stichting Saxum Volutum, and the British foundation Sigrid Rausing. The main investigator of Bellingcat Hristo Groziev in general has been managing music radio stations all his conscious life, including in Russia, and then he had an “epiphany” and decided that now he turned from a DJ into an investigator.
As we see, in today’s world you have to be very careful with the information, trusting only proven and reliable sources. Geostrategic Research Center together with Slavia Info published their own investigation about Bellingcat and Hristo Grozdev’s activities, which you can watch on Geostrategy.Rs official YouTube Chanel