Hierarchy of nearly 200 sources searches for the truest truth of geopolitics at all times on World Monitor. It all started as a weekend project.
Geopolitical turmoil is being felt like never before, especially since the Israeli and US attacks on Iran, which triggered a “rain” of events that were difficult to follow and interpret.
It was because I felt this difficulty that Elie HabibCEO of the music streaming platform Anghami, created , a threat and conflict monitoring panel based on open source data, which is now used by people around the world — around two million, according to — to monitor crises and conflicts in real time.
Habib tells that he did not intend to create another news aggregator. What I wanted was a system capable of connecting scattered signals and above all presenting them on a dynamic map, with an immediate reading of what was happening – the website has the heat map on the left and live broadcasts from the world’s largest media outlets on the right.
Similar solutions existing in the OSINT (open-source intelligence) ecosystem tend to be paid and accessible mainly to governments or large companies. Habib says that he built a first version “in a single day” and that the current platform is the result of “five or six days” of development that included help from the community.
How it works and how it checks the facts
World Monitor processes a complex stream of data. Try to bypass the noise of social media and collect information “directly from the source” — or from multiple sources.
The platform has “zero editorialization”, explains the creator. “No human editor makes a decision.” It is based instead on a hierarchy of sources: news agencies like Reuters and AP have the highest level and follow the biggest broadcasters (like BBC and Al Jazeera, but also investigative journalism outlets). They are around 190 sources ranked by trust scores.
The software analyzes reports to detect emerging events and patterns. If several sources considered credible report the same development within a short interval, the system signals an alert. But headlines alone are not enough: to reduce the risk of amplifying wrong claims, World Monitor looks for correlated physical signs on the ground, such as blackouts, diversion of military flights, anomalous ship stops, fires detected by satellite.
An isolated indicator may be noise; three or four simultaneously, he maintains, justify highlighting as a possible escalation.
Habib reinforces that the system ingests more than a hundred flows simultaneously. The result is an interactive globe that flags conflict zones, assigns escalation scores and integrates multiple layers of information: positions of military aircraft when they transmit via ADS-B transponders, movements of ships tracked by AIS signals, location of sensitive infrastructure such as nuclear installations, submarine cables and energy grids, as well as indicators such as Internet failures and satellite fire detections.
The technology used is based on WebGL rendering and normalization and geolocation processes that make data from very different sources comparable.
The site is being used all over the world, by users for a variety of purposes: traders following cargo ships to monitor supply chains or engineers monitoring networks and critical infrastructures. Recently, with the emptying of commercial airspace on several routes, it began to function as a real-time escalation “monitor” for casual observers and analysts.
