A look at Watchdog, a Sri Lanka-based research collective that built a fact-checking app and uses open source data to investigate the country's ongoing crises
From protests to power cuts, Watchdog uses open source research to investigate Sri Lanka's ongoing political and economic crisis. Tweets: @sarahbellelin , @aishnazim , @nilchristopher , @vickiturk , @elliiipses , @sunilagala , @erebussagace , @restofworld , and @bhanoob See also Mediagazer Tweets: Sarah Belle Lin / @sarahbellelin : “Watchdog's protest tracker has emerged as the most comprehensive online archive of the historic events unfolding in Sri Lanka. Its data set, which comprises 597 different protests and 49 conflicts, has been used by global news organizations.” https://restofworld.org/... Aisha / @aishnazim : @TeamWatchDog has a lovely feature here, of its inception growth, the protest trackers, Elixir et all. but also @restofworld - what the ABSOLUTE fuck is it with making it sound like a boys' club /weird frat? Half of us are women/queer, yet zero reference? https://restofworld.org/... Nilesh Christopher / @nilchristopher : In May, I traveled to Sri Lanka to meet @TeamWatchDog — a small group of factcheckers countering state propaganda & unpacking the truth of the ongoing crisis using public data & open-source research Meet Sri Lanka's answer to Bellingcat — for @restofworld https://restofworld.org/... Vicki Turk / @vickiturk : “Bellingcat is interested in Ukrainian weapons, we are more interested in public infrastructure” - Meet Watchdog, the Sri Lankan research group using OSINT methods to document the truth of Sri Lanka's brutal economic crisis. Great story by @NilChristopher https://restofworld.org/... Minoli W / @elliiipses : Lovely article by @restofworld on @TeamWatchDog Tagging below the amazing women/queer folks that they somehow forgot to mention in the article- because we're no strangers to having to write our own stories. https://restofworld.org/... Sunila Galappatti / @sunilagala : Read this for the sheer relief of its not-made-up description of our crisis and its causes. I suppose when you're writing about a fact-checking operation. A lovely, 100 x deserved piece about @TeamWatchDog at work. https://restofworld.org/... Clarky Cat Boz Boz / @erebussagace : “Watchdog is hunting hoaxes, investigating matters of public welfare, and building software to combat the latest in a string of crises Sri Lankans have had to contend with.” https://restofworld.org/... @restofworld : “We don't have any gas. We don't have fuel and some food items. We lose power for 3-4 hours daily now.” For months, Sri Lanka has been in a crisis. Read @nilchristopher's new feature about the team fact-checking government propaganda https://restofworld.org/... Bhanuka Harischandra / @bhanoob : @TeamWatchDog has also received requests to create QR codes to track the shipment of medicines during delivery. “I don't want to do it,” @yudhanjaya said. “We are taking on functions of the nation state because these motherfuckers are so incompetent.” https://restofworld.org/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Watchdog arrives into an information environment Sri Lankan civil society has already flagged as broken: back in 2018, the government and civic groups accused Facebook of failing for years to monitor accounts inciting ethnic violence on its services. Weeks before this profile, experts warned that hacked data dumped by Anonymous from Sri Lankan government sites had exposed ordinary citizens to cybercrime risk — so the country's crisis is being documented by outsiders as much as by locals.
Watchdog's answer is to build the archive itself: a protest tracker covering 597 protests and 49 conflicts that global news organizations now cite, plus a fact-checking app supporting its investigations. That puts it in the same regional lineage as India's Alt News, whose fact-checkers have been ground down fighting ruling-party misinformation, but with a different posture — it declined a request to build QR codes tracking medicine shipments, drawing a line around what its methods will be used for.
First-order effects
- Global news organizations covering Sri Lanka's protests and power cuts now depend on Watchdog's tracker as their most comprehensive source, making a small local collective de facto infrastructure for international coverage.
- Watchdog's refusal of the medicine-shipment QR request sets an immediate boundary: its open-source toolkit is available for investigation, not for state-adjacent surveillance of supply chains.
Second-order effects
- Newsrooms get a working alternative to platform moderation they cannot rely on — after Facebook's documented failures in Sri Lanka and the Sisyphean experience of platform-hired firms like Boom in India, verification work is migrating to independent collectives rather than waiting for social networks to act.
- The Anonymous data dump and Watchdog's careful sourcing sit side by side in the same crisis, pressuring local institutions to distinguish between leaked raw data that endangers citizens and verified open-source documentation that protects them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, crisis countries will increasingly grow their own Bellingcat-style OSINT collectives that outpace both platforms and foreign media, turning verification capacity into a domestic institution built during political breakdown.
- Watchdog's line-drawing on surveillance requests previews the central governance question for open-source research: the same methods that document protests can track individuals, and collectives will have to codify where investigation ends and monitoring begins.
The trend: Crisis-era accountability is shifting from platform moderation toward small independent OSINT collectives whose datasets become the primary record that global newsrooms cite.