For years, the Lebanese engineer Elie Habib worked in a sector very different from geopolitics: entertainment. Co-founder of the company streaming musical Anghami – one of the most used in the Arab world – has designed, in record time, a global map created with more than two hundred journalistic sources and tracks military alerts, air traffic and internet interruptions in the middle of the conflict. His project and a dozen others—for example, and , also coded with AI in the blink of an eye—have appeared in recent weeks. War can now be seen by everyone from one interface.
For Habib, it is “automated journalism in real time.” “It is clear that the system is not writing articles right now, but it will,” says this technology entrepreneur who lives in the United Arab Emirates.
Like him, other creators often present these tools as a way to directly access the facts, without intermediaries. But for Patricia Ventura, a digital communication researcher, the phenomenon reflects an old idea in the technological world: the belief that more data and more speed automatically lead to better understanding. “They think that technology can solve everything and that more information, faster and in real time will always be better, but the key is to make sense of all this information,” he emphasizes.
Craig Silverman, a disinformation expert and co-founder of a website dedicated to exposing digital deception, has a similar opinion. For him, there is even the risk that the opposite of understanding what is happening will happen. “It can completely overwhelm the person watching it and not really know what to do with it all,” he warns. “These platforms have direct Bloombergof Sky News a from BBC. People who believe they offer an alternative to the media probably don’t realize that those same sources are a central part of the panel itself,” says this Canadian journalist, who specializes in open source intelligence (OSINT).
Make sense of data
In the last decade, one of the main challenges faced by researchers using OSINT was the saturation and abundance of online information, including the most current, created with hyper-realistic video generation models. “I believe that journalism is as necessary as ever to make sense of all this amount of information,” says Ventura.
This researcher warns that the interpretations made by an AI are unstable. “You ask one of those tools to interpret the same topic and one day it will do it in one way and another day in another,” he points out. For her, that characteristic limits her capacity. “They have no solid foundations to interpret anything,” he says. Furthermore, he emphasizes, an artificial intelligence system cannot adequately contextualize what is happening. “It does not contextualize human suffering, something that journalism does,” he points out.
World Monitor is an open source platform that was created by Habib in early January. He developed it as a solo experiment and shared it only with a few friends and contacts on social networks. When the United States and Israel began, with the aim of beheading the ayatollah regime, their project reached a much broader dimension. The popularity of World Monitor has only increased as the attacks have expanded territorially.
The germ of the platform, says Habib, was born from the need to “understand what is happening in the world.” Although many users use it in real time, he insists that was never his intention. “I don’t want people to use it just to continue wars, I hope they end,” says the engineer.
According to its data, World Monitor has almost five million users around the world. Around 430,000 come from the United States, but active communities also appear in India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Europe. In Spain, he says, about 70,000 people use it. Although this is not the case with this platform, others, in addition to combining satellite images and ship tracking with a chat function, can bet on, for example, who will be next or who they will name.
emotional distance
The panel analyzes more than 200 news sources and about 250 different data signals: air traffic, ship movements, GPS interference, satellite activity, internet connectivity, military alerts or airport closures. The central idea of the project, says its founder, is to interpret the signals that are observed together. With this data, the system creates an instability index that identifies which countries concentrate the most risk signals. “I don’t want to follow 200 countries at the same time, I want to know which ones show signs of instability and focus on them,” he points out.
What began as a personal project aims to anticipate where the conflicts are moving. “The next phase of the project is to tell you what is happening before it appears on the news,” says the Lebanese computer scientist, giving a recent example related to maritime trade. When observing traffic in the —one of the main passage points for world oil— he detected an abrupt drop in the number of ships. “When there was no traffic, I knew that raw material prices would rise,” he says.
Silverman, however, warns that these panels can transform the perception of conflicts. “There’s an element that makes it feel almost like a video game or something fun to watch,” he notes. That aesthetic of real-time data and maps, he says, can generate emotional distance from the human consequences of war. “I wonder if that creates a sense of detachment from the tragic human toll conflicts cause.”
Ventura adds another idea that he considers problematic: that data represents reality as it is. “This information is based on an assumption that is fallacious: that the data is reality and reality is the data,” says this researcher. “A machine cannot ask why citizens need to know this, it cannot carry out journalistic investigation or offer context to what is happening,” he says. Nor does it assume responsibilities.
Relying solely on automated panels, he concludes, can offer an incomplete picture of reality. “We have to question the idea that the data represents what is happening, because that is not entirely the case,” he says. And much less when the information is based “only on data for which there is no verification.”
