On the evening of October 17, 2023, an explosion struck Gaza City’s Al-Ahli Arab Hospital complex. Shaky videos, filmed by bystanders, captured footage of the grounds partially consumed by flames. Each clip posted onlinerevealed more horror: blankets used as stretchers for carrying maimed bodies, a cratered parking lot with charred cars. Hundreds were reported dead. But what these videos couldn’t reveal was who was responsible. 

In the initial fog of war, several breaking-news teams, including the New York Times and CNN, cited a statement from Gaza’s health ministry blaming an Israeli strike. Visual-investigation teams got to work analyzing footage of the explosion, with the aim of bringing objective facts to light. Instead, visual investigations emerged from major newsrooms and independent organizations that, in some cases, contradicted one another’s work. In several cases they reported inaccurate information or published inconclusive findings. Amendments, editors’ notes, and mea culpas followed. 

The episode exposed the limitations of visual investigations, cutting to the core of the discipline’s credibility. If readers were led to believe that visual investigations produced incontrovertible results, how were they to make sense of uncertainty from experts and legacy media?

Visual investigators’ tools and techniques—including scraping data and satellite imagery, user-generated content verification, archiving social media, and geolocation—were pioneered by independent organizations including Storyful, SITU Research, Forensic Architecture, Bellingcat, Airwars, and Syrian Archive. They gained international prominence around the time of the Arab Spring, in 2011, and during the Syrian civil war, when in-person reporting became too dangerous.

Teams later formed at major media outlets, including the Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, CNN, BBC, and the Financial Times. They were honored with Pulitzers,Peabodys, and Emmys. Today, visual investigators are known by many different names: open-source reporters, open-source intelligence (or OSINT) practitioners, forensic architects, even digital Sherlocks. 

But in recent years their work has been complicated by myriad concerns, chief among them the changing nature of conflict and the evolution of technology—vulnerabilities that have only grown more apparent since that night in Gaza. Artificial intelligence has made it possible to fake evidence, causing widespread distrust in visual media. And then there are the actions of tech companies themselves. In April, Planet Labs, the satellite imaging company, stopped releasing daily imagery of the Middle East. In July, Google added sophisticated image generation capabilities into Google Earth, allowing people to create phony satellite imagery. (The outcry from journalists and others spurred Google to quickly reverse course.)

“I’m less concerned about having to prove to people that something is synthetic. What I’m more concerned about is how we prove to people that something is real,” Imogen Piper, a visual-forensics reporter for the Washington Post, told us. Alexa Koenig, the director and cofounder of the Investigations Lab at the University of California Berkeley Human Rights Center, said that the standard for earning readers’ trust has changed: “We’ve got to figure out how we pivot in this moment, because what we used to use to signal legitimacy is not gonna work, if it is still working at all.”

Visual investigators will have to find ways to overcome these mounting challenges. We spoke with experts—journalists as well as OSINT specialists and nonprofit leaders who influence the field’s development—to understand both the recent past and where the field goes next. Their comments have been edited and condensed for clarity.

VERIFICATION ISN'T ENOUGH

James Harkin

DIRECTOR, CENTRE FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM

Verification tells you whether an image has been faked. But the real problem within the shaky terrain of journalism on which we stand is not the fakery of images but the propagation of half-truths.

If we’re not careful, given the speed at which conflict now happens, we might not properly do the homework in terms of not only our understanding of fakery, but also our understanding of half-truths. The danger is that the next world war might begin with a sort of grainy, contested image, which is thrown up online from some distant and inaccessible outpost right into the pages of a newspaper that has already sacked all its journalists.

To read the rest, head to this link on CJR.