Last year, news outlets reported on a remarkable story: Two war crime researchers from the University of Amsterdam had catfished hundreds of Syrian intelligence officers and military officials who were loyal to the country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad. In 2018, the researchers created a fake, pro-Assad Facebook profile of a woman named “Anna Sh” to gain the trust of the security officers and get them to admit their involvement in massacring nearly 300 people in 2013.
Origen: How New Lines Magazine built a home for long-form international reporting | Nieman Journalism Lab
