How to Use AI to Help Find Civilian Harm

Between February 2022 and September 2025, Bellingcat staff and volunteers collected, geolocated, and shared more than 2,500 incidents of civilian harm following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As part of this effort, Bellingcat tested a new machine learning model intended to rank Telegram social media posts on their likelihood of containing incidents of civilian harm. This novel methodology dramatically reduced the search and selection time required, freeing researchers to focus on veri...