Centre for Information Resilience

The Centre for Information Resilience is an independent, non-profit social enterprise founded in 2020 and registered in the United Kingdom, with a small London base and contributors spread across the world. Run as a community-interest company funded project-by-project through government grants rather than core money, it sits alongside groups such as Bellingcat in the open-source investigations world — and borrows from them directly, building parts of its workflow on Bellingcat’s open-source tooling.

Its best-known project is Eyes on Russia, an interactive map and database launched in January 2022 to document incidents in Russia’s war on Ukraine: troop movements, strikes on infrastructure, civilian harm, and possible war crimes. The collection side leans on automation. Analysts cast keyword, date, and hashtag searches across X, Telegram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube, and use an auto-archiver derived from Bellingcat’s open-source tool to capture and preserve that material before platforms remove it. The team has been explicit that the automation exists to free analysts for the part that stays human — verification.

That verification is deliberately manual and reproducible. Each item is geolocated against satellite imagery and street-level views, chronolocated using shadows, weather, and metadata, and reviewed by senior investigators before it joins the map; every entry is fingerprinted with a cryptographic hash and timestamped publicly so any later tampering shows. The mapping platform was built with the analysis group C4ADS, and the same model underpins the Centre’s other monitors, including Afghan Witness, Myanmar Witness, and Sudan Witness. The result, cited by outlets including Reuters and the BBC, is a standing record assembled at machine scale but checked by hand.