Brown Moses - Investigating Conflict Zones Through Social Media

Birkbeck Institute for Social Research

This talk will be on the growing importance of analysing open source information, in particular from social media sites such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, and various investigative techniques Eliot Higgins (also known as Brown Moses) used with the conflict in Syria.

Eliot Higgins is an independent conflict analyst who attained global recognition through his “Brown Moses” blog on the Syrian conflict. Drawing on extensive Arabic language Facebook, Youtube pages and Twitter feeds, his research focuses on collating, filtering and analyzing images and text from social media platforms that have, among others, provided evidence of supplies of arms to various Syrian opposition groups, as well as chemical weapon usage by the Syrian armed forces. His investigations and research have been widely covered in global media.