A team of investigative journalists from Germany and the US used undercover reporting, OSINT, and data analysis skills to connect online extremism with offline terror.
The influence of extremist groups on mainstream politics is on the rise, and journalists need tools to face this threat to healthy democracies.
Attendees to GIJC21’s plenary session were asked three questions about the challenges to democracy in their countries, and the role of journalism in upholding or weakening democratic values and institutions. The poll results reflect the threats faced by reporters around the world, from disinformation, fake news, and extremism.
In this GIJN webinar, we bring together four senior journalists who have investigated the extremist far-right in different parts of the world. They will offer tips and tools on how to track and report on violent organizations and individuals in different contexts, and give guidance on safety.
On October 30, the student news site of duPont Manual High School in Louisville, Kentucky, in the United States, published a bombshell of an investigation: While training officers, the Kentucky State Police had used a slideshow that quoted Adolf Hitler. The reporters behind the story were a 16-year-old and his younger brother.
Last year The New York Times published an interactive article on white extremist killings from New Zealand to Norway to the United States. Using maps and a timeline to plot the data, the project revealed the troubling frequency and, in some cases, strange connections between the events. Here graphic designer Weiyi Cai explains how they obtained the data for project and the decisions they made about visualizing it.
To investigate radicalization on YouTube, journalists from two Dutch media outlets teamed up and examined 600,000 videos, 120 million comments, and 20 million automatically-generated recommendations —using software they wrote for this occasion. Dimitri Tokmetzis, who runs the data desk at De Correspondent, wrote about how they did it for GIJN.
At a time when press freedom is deteriorating in many states participating in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, having a voice to raise journalist cases and hold governments to account is vital. In a recent interview, the organization’s new Freedom of the Media representative Harlem Désir discusses his plans and explains why he is prioritizing journalist safety, fighting impunity and combating violent extremism online.
