Hauter, J;
(2021)
Forensic conflict studies: Making sense of war in the social media age.
Media, War and Conflict
10.1177/17506352211037325.
(In press).
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Abstract
Online media is a blessing and a curse for academic research on war. On the one hand, the internet provides unprecedented access to information from conflict zones. On the other hand, the prevalence of disinformation can make it difficult to use this information in a transparent way. This article proposes digital forensic process tracing as a methodological innovation to tackle this challenge and make case study research on the causes of war fit for the social media age. It argues that two important features of process-tracing methodology – source criticism and Bayesian updating – are well developed in theory but are rarely applied to the study of armed conflict. Digital forensic process tracing applies these features to online media sources by drawing on the journalistic practice of open source intelligence (OSINT) analysis. This article uses the case of the war in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed methodology.
Type: | Article |
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Title: | Forensic conflict studies: Making sense of war in the social media age |
Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
DOI: | 10.1177/17506352211037325 |
Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352211037325 |
Language: | English |
Additional information: | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | disinformation, open source intelligence (OSINT), process tracing, Russia, social media, Ukraine |
UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > SSEES |
URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10140901 |
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