How Everlaw for Good Empowers Reporters to Mine Big Data for Stories
Burt Helm discusses how ediscovery software is redefining investigative reporting
Journalism often tells stories on a human scale. A reporter talks to a few people about a specific topic or incident, collates different perspectives and accounts, maybe consults the public record to confirm some basic facts, and produces an article. But sometimes the scale and geography of information that need to be explored to identify the story are literally beyond human capacity.
Burt Helm, now Data Journalist at SentiLink, faced one such story in the early months of the COVID-19 lockdown. Children, isolated from schools, sports leagues and friends, spent more time in online environments.
“My mission is to help the general public understand what’s happening behind the scenes in the technology that they and their families use every day,” Helm says. “The challenge is finding the stories in the data and directing your audience’s attention to the data that matters.”
Helm’s editors wanted him to figure out whether such ecosystems were as child-safe as parents might have expected. The short answer is, “definitely not,” but the journey, through thousands of online interactions across a sprawling array of servers, was a long one.
Or it would have been, without Everlaw.
Empowering Investigative Journalism with Smart, Secure Tech
Helm had access to Everlaw’s powerful ediscovery software through the Everlaw for Good program, which makes the technology available at free and discounted rates to investigative journalists, legal nonprofits, and pro bono attorneys working to serve their communities.
When journalists must wrestle with massive data sets that exceed manual capacity, they need tools like Everlaw, which can distill complex topics; follow key players, conversations, and transactions through gigabytes of data spread across multiple platforms; and connect dots that wouldn’t be readily visible otherwise.
“A program like Everlaw for Good helps independent journalists because we don’t have the resources to keep pace and compete with not just other news organizations, but with the groups and places that we’re covering,” says Helm, whose 20-year career has included bylines in Business Week, Inc., the New York Times Magazine, and Fast Company, where he was Editor-at-Large.
“Ediscovery software and big data software are helping journalists keep pace and stay on top of this ever-expanding amount of data at our fingertips.
For his investigation into online video games during the COVID lockdown, Helm faced exactly the kind of complex and voluminous data that Everlaw was made for. Critics of the social media and online gaming industries often say that digital communities lack guardrails and safety mechanisms. From youth protection to content moderation, these issues come up again and again. But getting at the truth is very difficult.
“Video games today aren’t simply the game. They are the chats, the videos, the social media world, and communities that swirl around these games,” Helm says. “In this case, we discovered basically an underground network tied to a game that involved some criminal activity.”
Helm took a trove of data containing all that sprawling complexity and, with Everlaw, was able to keyword search and track conversations and individuals from platform to platform.
“Without Everlaw for Good, it would be difficult to find a tool that is secure, that is smart, that is savvy enough to help us do the job we need to do.”
“When you reach out to these users for interviews, they don’t want to talk, but they had been talking at length on these servers, so we were able to extract all these conversations.
Decoding Gaming Chats Across Servers with Everlaw
During the lockdown, multiplayer online games became “a digital babysitter,” allowing kids to interact with friends on the same platform, and learn to code by designing their own games. As Helm would learn, these sites were not always entirely wholesome or safe for children.
Looking into the platform and related servers was, he says, like going through the looking glass into a world parents were unaware of.
“We discovered that some kids had hacked all the safety controls and created a wild and sprawling underground network of tween criminal activity, of cash, crime, and sex in ways that we never imagined,” he says.
With Everlaw, Helm could understand patterns and players across various platforms and servers to discover where children’s mischief shaded into actual crime. Were all the bad actors kids, or were predatory adults entering the picture? Who were these people?
“When you reach out to these users for interviews, they don’t want to talk, but they had been talking at length on these servers, so we were able to extract all these conversations,” Helm says. “I think it added up to almost a gigabyte of text, just a simple text file. It felt like the equivalent of thousands of monkeys typing, and we weren’t sure what they were saying, or what was happening.”
Everlaw allowed Helm to identify users in the chat and decipher a cryptic language of slang and attitude. “Essentially, you could see the business of these underground clubs, these groups taking shape.”
Mapping a World Beyond Document Review and Interviews
For Helm as a reporter, using Everlaw was “a quantum leap” from investigation through reading documents and conducting interviews to decoding a whole online world and its culture.
“We could adapt, make new searches as we went, and modify our approach and our thinking and test out new ideas,” he says. “It gave us that flexibility to have a much more sophisticated story ultimately than we would’ve."
“You could see the business of these underground clubs, these groups taking shape.
Years later, Helm’s enthusiasm for the flexibility of that evolving process is undiminished.
“What I really enjoy doing is you start with a few keywords, that gives you some hits, but then once you get inside the document, then you start entering different keywords,” he says. “You’re looking at the words clustered around that word, and that hits you in that direction. As that happens organically, you start to see something bigger than what you would have seen if you couldn’t move through the documents.”
The ability to move rapidly through overlapping cross sections of the data led Helm to some significant conclusions. Beyond identifying bad actors on the platforms, he was able to discover how and why the tech company policies intended to prevent such activities and protect their young users were failing.
“Without Everlaw, I would have had to start on page one, start reading, and keep track of jargon, weird usernames, and all sorts of things,” he says. “Everlaw allowed me to go beyond the reporting I do with interpersonal one-on-one interviews, or beyond the reporting I do with simply reviewing documents. It allowed me to map and graph a whole world through so much conversation that would have been incomprehensible to me.”
Doing Meaningful Journalism as Data Volumes Grow
Rather than only a human-scale examination of a few specific rule-breakers, Helm was able to chart the failings in a massive technology ecosystem, without access to insiders in the companies themselves. Helm continues to use Everlaw for stories that require super-human levels of document review.
“Ediscovery software and big data software are helping journalists keep pace and stay on top of this ever-expanding amount of data at our fingertips,” he says. “As the world is moving online, our conversations and our information are digital and exponentially more complex. Data-mining software is going to be something that every reporter needs to know how to use, simply to move through a world with this much information.”
Programs like Everlaw for Good make it possible for independent journalists and resource-strapped newsrooms to move through that world and do important work.
“Software like Everlaw gives us more sets of eyes to read, more ability to do what would have taken a large news organization poring over documents, which you can do at home over a weekend,” he says. “That’s exciting, it’s empowering, and it gives me a little bit of hope that we’ll still be able to do the same kind of journalism that everybody deserves, even as the world gets more and more complex.”
Read more about the organizations and causes supported by Everlaw for Good.
