TikTok isn’t just for dance memes – it’s now being used by amateur investigators to track the Russian military buildup along Ukraine’s borders.
Among those researchers is the Conflict Intelligence Team, or CIT, a tight-knit collection of investigators based between Russia and Ukraine.
CIT practices open-source intelligence, a method of gathering and analyzing information that, as its name suggests, draws on publicly available data like social media posts and satellite imagery.
“It’s basically a bunch of independent bloggers slash researchers slash military equipment enthusiasts,” said Kirill Mikhailov, one of a handful of the group’s core members. Mikhailov, 33, is from Russia but currently lives in Kyiv, Ukraine.
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The group came together in 2014, he said, during the early days of fighting in eastern Ukraine between that country’s military and pro-Russian separatists. Mikhailov said the group’s audience is primarily “people in Russia who need to be informed about this stuff,” but the group’s work is also translated into English for Western audiences.
Read more: ABC
