“Our pitch was that we were representing a dictator in Africa, and we wanted to delay an election.”
Dr. Manisha Ganguly, Visual Forensics Lead & Investigations Correspondent at The Guardian, speaks to iMEdD about two significant investigations that won the #IJ4EU Impact Award.
The first involves the covert Israeli group "Team Jorge," which, with the help of 30,000 bots, has so far meddled in over 30 democratic elections. In the second, a team of investigative journalists sought to uncover what happens to the bodies of migrants who die while attempting to cross into Europe.
Interview with Dimitris Bounias.
The two investigations that won the European Investigative Journalism Impact Award was Story Killers. I'm profoundly honored to announce that one of the winners of this year's Impact Award is Storytellers. And both Grace project they bore their graves investigation. Story Killers was initiated by Forbidden Stories, which is a French angio that pursues the work of journalists who are targeted or killed for pursuing difficult investigations. Storytellers were started after the murder of Gauri Lankesh, 1, of India's finest investigative journalist, who was looking into the impact of the disinformation industry in India when she was gunned down in her home in Bangalore and Forbidden Stories assembled a team of 100 journalists. Across 30 media outlets and the Guardian was one of them. So I joined the project specifically to look at the open source aspect of it. The main investigation focus for the Guardian was into a very shadowy, secretive team of Israeli mercenaries which call themselves Team Jorge. Now Team Jorge sell a very unique service which is they claim to have helped meddle in over 30 democratic elections. Across the globe, they sell sort of on ground services, but their main offering is a digital suite that they call AIMS, which controls about 30,000 avatars online. These avatars are extremely developed, they're powered by artificial intelligence, and what they effectively do is mimic the actions of a human online in order to manufacture consensus in a democracy and impede democratic debate. We also had a commercial clients, but the trickiest part of this was identifying who Jorge was. So the way to do this was we, Haritz and the Marker were one of our key partners in Israel. And we knew this was an Israeli PR firm. So we had our journalist Omar Bajkov from the Moca and Good Megiddo from Koretz, who posed as clients alongside Frederick Matisyahu from Radio France, who's now. Picture of Biden stories. And our pitch was that we were representing a dictator in Africa, and we wanted to delay an election. So we went undercover and had a meeting with Jorge where Jorges gave us his full pitch, showing us how they manufacture these avatars to meddle in democracy, what their suite of tools was, how they operate anonymously. And all of this created about six hours of secretly recorded footage, which ended up at my desk. Alongside some others. So our job is to use this to figure out two things. One is who Jorge was and the second is how Ames works. And we were successful at doing both because we unmasked him as a former IDF officer named Tal Hanan. And we were able to track his network from meddling in elections in in Kenya to working with the UK disgraced firm Cambridge Analytica to working for Canadian billionaires. To even manufacturing, uh, misinformation and fake news reports that ended up in some of the biggest major French mainstream broadcasters, leading to the suspension and the quitting of one of France's finest, most prominent French broadcasters. So that was a sort of real ground impact, but fundamentally the reason why the story was important is because it provides a window into a very difficult industry to penetrate that impacts. All areas of public life, we understand the impact of disinformation, but rarely do we get a window into how it is created, how it is disseminated and how people profit off this. We see disinformation as a product and a service that is being peddled to the most dangerous dictators across the globe. And this is a threat not just for democracies everywhere, but a threat for truth in itself in compensate them fairly. The second project was again a cross-border. Collaboration called the Body Graves Project, which lasted similarly around six months and spanned 7 countries, and it was actually initiated by a core team of freelancers who wanted to investigate the bodies of migrants who died while crossing into Europe. During the course of this work, which involved interviews with multiple NGO's with pathologists hunting for bodies and morgues, more bodies and shipping containers unmarked. Graves and cemeteries, bodies of men, women, graves of babies all across the borders of Europe. We found that there were over 1000 unmarked graves of migrants who had died while crossing into Europe. And what it exposes is a vacuum in European legislation because fundamentally there are no safe routes for most of these people who are fleeing war, conflict or economic instability to come into Europe and when they die on the shores of Europe. There is no way to repatriate these bodies or identify them, so they simply have no identity even in death, which is the very basic dignity that we should be affording to human beings. So this was a project that was really emotional and involved the work of a lot of really fine freelancers, from Solomon in Greece to unbiased News to Asset. And the Guardian was, of course, a partner, and it's one of those rare. Stories about migrants that actually breakthrough in the media because we are completely saturated with news about migrants dying on Europe shores, but we rarely get to find out what happens to them after. And we rarely get to humanize them because they're because of the xenophobic policies around European borders. It's very rarely that we get to see them as human beings, which this project successfully did, which is why we're very grateful to the judges for giving us the impact award.
