Solving Creating Community | Bellingcat OSINT Challenge Walkthrough #2

This is my third time attempting a Bellingcat challenge and my second from the Back In Time challenge set by Sofia Santos. In contrast to the last couple of OSINT challenges/exercises I've done, I was relieved that this one was relatively simple.

That being said, I do think that I owe the past two challenges and write-ups for the lessons that got me to this answer quickly.

As always, I have spoiler guards on critical details. Click the spoiler button in the bottom left to turn on/off all spoiler protection. If you leave it on, individual spoiler guards will disappear when clicked → (just like that).

Challenge: Creating Community - A New Place to Connect

These are the main takeaways for me:

• Who: Bellingcat
• When: May 2020
• What: The tweet was posted on the same day as the discord server was created

For Sofia's standards, she's been pretty generous to us here. There's lots of information to go on.

Alright! Let's begin!

Investigation Summary

As with all my walkthroughs, I kept records throughout my attempt in an investigation plan. You can view mine here and access the template for your own use here (click File > Make a Copy or File > Download).

To get the most out of this walkthrough, I recommend following each step using the tools and sources provided below. It's a relatively quick challenge, but as you'll see, the method required some technical steps.

Investigation Stages

• Find the tweet from Bellingcat
• Find the Discord server's ID and creation date
• Calculate the time elapsed

Tools Used

• Google Search
• X/Twitter Advanced Search
• Discord Developer Console
• Time and Date Calculator

Sources Used

• X/Twitter
• Discord
• Reddit

My Path & Thought Process

This challenge was quite simple, only 3 steps.

Stage 1: Find the Bellingcat Tweet

1. Find any Bellingcat tweets mentioning Discord in May 2020

Why: We know the tweet exists from the screenshot, that it was from May 2020, and we can easily verify it by matching it back. We just need the timestamp for its creation as one half of our calculation.

Search Prompt: discord from:Bellingcat since:2020-05-01 until:2020-06-01

Result: Two tweets from May 2020 match our search criteria and the earliest from May 13, 2020 at 00:12 AEST matches our screenshot.

Stage 2: Find the Discord server's ID and creation date

2. Search Google for how to find when a discord server was created?

Why: I don't know how to do that, but it seems relatively plausible that someone will have wanted to before. So I thought I'll just google it.

Sources: Reddit

Result: A number of sites were returned. A Reddit post explained how to use the Discord developer console to retrieve a server's creation date. This required me to find the Bellingcat server ID, and thankfully a how-to was linked in the Reddit post.

3. Retrieve the Bellingcat Discord server ID and run the code

Result: Following the instructions from the reddit post, I extracted the server ID, visited Discord in my browser, opened the console (F12) and ran the code. This gave me a time and date: May 12 2020 23:04:34 AEST

Stage 3: Calculate the time elapsed

4. Calculate the time elapsed between the tweet and server creation

Tools: Time and Date Calculator

Result: Putting the two times I had identified through the calculator gave 67 minutes (rounded down). However, this was the wrong answer. I assumed there was the possibility of a rounding error as the tweet did not give its time down to the exact second. As such, I input 68, which was successful!

Reflections

Other than introducing me to an interesting new tool, the Discord development console, there was one other big takeaway for me from this challenge.

As I allude to in my reflections from my Gralhix OSINT Exercise #031 walkthrough, in OSINT you sometimes need to ask questions that make you feel a bit silly.

Obviously, I didn't know how to find a Discord server creation date or server ID before I did this challenge, but I had this impulse to try figure it out myself. It is great to have that curiosity, but it's not what you always need to indulge when trying to complete an investigation. Apologies if this is just an unrelatable idiosynchrosy of mine, but I suspect it isn't just me.

If you don't know something, ask. Who knows how close the answer really is and how much time you could save. If you can't find it, you get to work it out yourself anyway.

Plus, Google doesn’t judge.

Fin

Thank you for reading. I hope this walkthrough helped!

If you have any feedback or comments you can find me on X/Twitter, Bluesky, and LinkedIn at the handle @rgmarchant. I'd love to hear from you, especially if you found the answer a completely different way to me. Please let me know!

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