How the explosion in Beirut became a textbook case for online investigators

They did not wait for official announcements and press dispatches to try to find out what had happened: as soon as the first videos of the explosion appeared, the community of amateur investigators on Twitter mobilized . These amateurs of open source investigation, also called OSINT (from the English “open source intelligence”), use public and legally accessible sources of information to investigate.

For example, an hour after the incident, Nick Waters, of the Bellingcat investigative collective, used amateur videos to geolocate the epicenter of the explosion: warehouse number 12 in the port of Beirut, where he was located. Afterwards, 500 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, a very dangerous and highly explosive chemical, were stored.

^{On August 4, 2020, Nick Waters of Bellingcat posted the results of his investigation as they unfolded in a Twitter thread, before putting them together in an article posted on the Bellingcat website.}

While the investigation by the Lebanese authorities stalled, open-source investigations, such as those of Bellingcat Where The world, were crucial in understanding the causes of the explosion.

Another video survey published on November 17, 2020 by the research group Forensic Architecture, which brings together researchers, architects and computer scientists, used architectural modeling to reconstruct the explosion minute by minute, and thus understand how the materials stored in the hangar despite the safety rules created a huge homemade time bomb.

Many enthusiasts, whose journalistic investigation is not the profession, also conducted the investigation. Some, like anthropology doctoral student Martin Pfeiffer, have verified rumors suggesting a nuclear explosion:

^{In this discussion thread posted to Twitter on August 4, 2020, Martin Pfeiffer analyzes images of the Beirut explosion to explain that it cannot be a nuclear explosion.}

Others, like researcher Nathan Ruser, have verified amateur footage purported to show a missile attack, where we actually saw a bird fly over the site of the explosion.

“I was following local journalists, I have the chance to speak Arabic so it helped me to follow what was going on”

On Twitter, Casus Belli was one of the first French-speaking observers to broadcast images of the explosion in Beirut. Passionate about geopolitics with a military background, he created his Twitter account in May 2020 to broadcast images and videos on current events around the world. He described to the Observers editorial staff how he found and verified the images of the explosion:

In the “trending” category of Twitter – a tool that serves me a lot! – I saw that something was happening in Lebanon. When the first images started pouring in, sometimes posted by ordinary locals’ accounts, where you could see a big explosion, it was weird. Looking at the pictures people were posting on Snapchat, I realized that something big had happened.

^{In this Twitter thread that began on August 4, 2020, Casus Belli posted, as it fell, news and footage of the explosion.}

At the time, I didn’t have a lot of visibility. I was following local journalists, and I’m lucky enough to speak Arabic so it helped me to follow what was going on. This is not a professional, academic, or journalistic job, because I don’t have a degree to do this, but it’s something that I tinkered a bit in my corner: I was interested in the subject , I dug, and I tried to be as rigorous as possible.

Usually I try to verify the images by doing reverse image searches, on Google or Yandex, or even Chinese search engines, to see if it already exists on the internet. In the case of Beirut, there was a certain consistency in the images. The fact that there are a lot of videos appearing all at once, from several different angles, it gives some credibility to the images.

>> Read also on the Observers website: Missile, drones, nuclear attack? Intox in series around the double explosion of Beirut

I discovered all this world [sur Twitter] : there are people who are really passionate. It is as if we had a kind of intelligence group with people who are totally volunteers, and who, just because of their profession or their passion, manage to accumulate knowledge which allows to have very precise information, and sometimes even better than professionals.

Thanks to its coverage of the Beirut explosion, Casus Belli’s Twitter account grew from 2,000 to 11,000 subscribers in one day.

“Our bias is also to get out of the idea that you can only investigate current affairs if you are a journalist.”

On August 4, 2020, and during the days that followed, members of the French association OpenFacto, which promotes the open-source investigation among the media and NGOs, also tried to understand what had happened in Beirut. They published some results of their research in a Twitter thread. A member of the association, who wished to remain anonymous because of his professional activities, told the editorial staff of the Observers what motivated him to investigate the explosion:

Beirut is a city dear to my heart. It was a purely emotional reaction, but it ties in with the way we work at OpenFacto: we generally work on subjects that are close to our hearts.

In this part of the world, the first question we ask ourselves is: is it an accident, or an act of sabotage, a terrorist act? We first wondered where the explosion had taken place, and what was affected. These are in fact the basic questions: what, where, when, who, and why. Everyone filmed the event on their phones, so it gave access to lots of footage of the event from different angles. Afterwards, it was just necessary to find on a map where it was. It was relatively simple because there was water, so we knew it was near the sea, and we could see the shapes of the harbor. It took us a few minutes.

We also looked at which company was affected. There, it was a little more difficult, because you had to search in Arabic. We looked on the cards, and we looked in the Lebanese commercial register [registre officiel qui contient des informations sur les entreprises, NDLR]. We then tried to find articles in the press that mentioned chemicals in the port, only to find that they had been stored there for some time.

^{This tweet published on August 4 shows a document mentioning the presence of hazardous materials in one of the warehouses in the port of Beirut. Another Twitter user responds by giving the dimensions of the affected warehouse, which match those of the warehouse that exploded.}

Collaborative investigative work is very rich, because we put several brains together, which do not work in the same way and bring several angles of attack to answer the same question. Everyone, with their experience, will ask themselves different questions. And we multiply the small hands, which increases the speed of work.

OpenFacto’s bias is also to move away from the idea that you can only investigate current affairs if you are a journalist. The OSINT community is rich in extremely varied profiles, and when everyone works together around the table, we can bounce back very quickly.

The NGO Amnesty International accused the Lebanese authorities of obstruct the investigation official on the causes of the explosion which killed more than 200 people. A year later, no official has been brought to justice.

In a report published on August 3, 2021, Human Rights Watch accuses the negligence of several Lebanese officials in storing the ammonium nitrate that caused the explosion.

Beirut people still suffer damage of what is considered to be one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in history.

>> For more information, see the latest articles on France 24 on the 1st anniversary of the Beirut explosion