Before Russia invaded Ukraine, investigators at an organization called Bellingcat were studying

the movement of Russian troops.

They were looking for evidence that Russian troops either were or weren't amassing at

the border.

And they found clues from a surprising source.

TikTok videos.

This war, TikTok has been the source, but TikTok, Russians are crazy about TikTok.

So you could see almost continuous movement of troops from the far east to the west, thousands

of kilometers that were just chronicle by these young kids.

That's Cristo Grosev, who runs Bellingcat.

Just imagine these people with their humongous tanks and book systems and multi rocket launch

systems are going in long-convuse through small villages and the kids, 14-year-old kids,

they have a phone so they just take a video and upload it to TikTok.

TikTok videos might not sound like the stuff of serious investigators, but Cristo says

in the war between Russia and Ukraine, social media is its own front line, where battles

play out between truth and lies.

So you have a huge volume of real-time video and photo evidence of the war as it develops.

So it's a boom for open source investigators.

It's also a boom for manipulators of information, of propaganda outlets, because they are throwing

in a lot of fake information or misleading information along with the authentic ones.

And part of Bellingcat's mission is to try and figure out what's real and what's fake.

Welcome to the journal, our show about money, business, and power.

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