Tank.

Tanks everywhere.

Once you see them rolling, you'll soon see them all the time.

Every day, users of the TikTok video platform upload new footage of military vehicles on the Ukrainian border, tanks driving through Belarusian villages, convoys on Russian highways, kilometers of queues of parked cars, railroad transport with rocket launchers, anti-aircraft systems and minelayers.

Most of the clips are made by amateurs, by residents of the region who come across the maneuvers of the Russian troops rather by accident and upload them to their profile between pictures of children playing.

Or from the surveillance cameras that are widely used in Russian cars to protect drivers from corrupt police officers in accidents.

Harold Staun

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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This easily becomes an invasion thanks to TikTok's algorithm, which tends to show users videos that are similar to the ones they've already watched.

Unfortunately, the algorithm cannot judge the validity of the videos, it does not distinguish whether the tanks were on the move a few hours ago behind Belgorod or years ago in front of Moscow.

But fortunately today there is a crowd of volunteer fact-checkers who check that.

And who have access to resources that would have been among the most advanced weapons of the secret services even a few years ago.

"Osint" is the term, appropriately reminiscent of military jargon, which describes the democratization of intelligence practices, "Open Source Intelligence".

The amateur filmmakers from TikTok are the ground troops, so to speak.

In the war between Russia and Ukraine, they often provide the first clues to troop movements, which are then verified and compared with images from commercial satellite photo providers.

The private investigators often publish their data on social media days before the official authorities.

As early as February 5, an observer on Twitter reported the relocation of a brigade with more than 50 tanks near the Ukrainian border, which was only confirmed by American authorities nine days later.

Rarely has the public been able to follow troop movements as closely as they can now with the Russian army.

Osint investigators were also able to easily prove that the announced withdrawal was only lip service.

secret services for the people

The analysts now form a lively community on Twitter.

Military experts like Rob Lee, a student at the Department of War Studies at King's College London (120,000 followers) or his colleague Michael Kofman from the American military research center CNA (53,000 followers) have been posting videos of Russian troops for months, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together to compose a larger picture.

One of the best-known platforms for Osint research, especially when it comes to the machinations of the Russian regime, is the British collective Bellingcat, which, among other things, exposed the alleged poisoners of the Russian ex-agent Sergei Skripal as employees of the Russian secret service.

Or proved that the passenger flight Flight MH 17 was shot down by a Russian rocket launcher over eastern Ukraine,

whose path through the Donbass is as well documented on YouTube and social media as a school trip.

Bellincat calls itself "An Intelligence Agency for the People".

But more and more amateur investigators are trying to uncover war crimes or human rights violations in their free time.

For example people like Benjamin Strick, who has already documented a massacre in Sudan with his research or has provided evidence of the genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar.

For the analysis of the images and data, Strick and his colleagues use tools that are available to everyone on the internet.

These include special search engines (for social media, photos or databases) or translation programs, map services or directories of flight routes or railway routes, but also standard services such as Google Earth or Street View.