Intermediate Scraping Webinar

Four hour online training
22 September 2026, 9 am – 1 pm EDT New York time/ 3 -7 pm CEST Amsterdam time
Price: EUR 350

Would you like to learn how to download hundreds of social media posts at once? Have you seen the tools for open source investigators that were produced during Bellingcat hackathons, but you have no idea how to use them?

This webinar will give attendees both theoretical knowledge and practical experience of scraping websites and analysing scraped data. It will cover several different approaches to scraping and data access, including real case studies from Bellingcat research, and hands-on exercises designed to explore and address the challenges faced by open source researchers.

What you’ll learn:

By the end of this webinar you will be able to:

Understand how scraped data can be used in an open-source investigation
Understand what an API is and how to access data from one
Find and use undocumented APIs with your browser’s Developer Tools
Scrape non-social-media websites with ‘Beautiful Soup’
Scrape public Telegram channels with ‘snscrape’
Analyse social media data with ‘Pandas’ and ‘Matplotlib’
Understand the challenges of maintaining social media research accounts.

What we won’t cover:

Command line and Python syntax
Scraping Facebook, X, or private Telegram channels
Selenium or Playwright

Experience level:
Before attending this webinar you should have:

Familiarity using the command line to run scripts and software
(e.g. these commands should all be recognisable to you: ls ./, cd ../, pip install pandas)
Some basic experience with Python
(e.g. writing basic code, installing packages, importing packages)

Some familiarity with writing and running code within Google Colab is beneficial. Check out our introduction video to learn more.

Logistics:

The webinar will be led by experienced Bellingcat researchers who will guide you through the topics. They have extensive open source research experience and are passionate about sharing their knowledge with you.

Zoom webinar joining details will be shared with participants in the week before the training.

Not ready for this level yet:

In case you think you’re not ready to join this webinar, please check our website for upcoming training, better matching your needs.

Cancellation

Please look closely at the cancellation and event policies in Eventzilla before you take the leap.

FAQs

Why should I join this workshop?

You should participate if:

You want to learn how scraped data can be used in an open-source investigation
You want to Understand what an API is and how to access data from one
You want to find and use undocumented APIs with a browser’s Developer Tools
You want to be able to use certain tools to scrape non-social-media websites and public Telegram channels
You want to use certain tools to analyse social media data
You want to learn about the challenges of maintaining social media research accounts.
For the joy of learning new skills even if you do not need them in your professional life

Why Bellingcat?

Bellingcat is a global collective that has uncovered facts to hold power to account — we share everything, including our methods, because truth belongs to everyone.

Bellingcat began by analyzing footage of chemical weapons attacks in the Syrian civil war back in 2014. In recent years we have worked on covering various topics from civilian harm in Ukraine, through wildlife trafficking in South East Asia, the recruitment of child soldiers in Africa to the luxurious life of Kinahan cartel leaders living openly in Dubai despite an international manhunt.

We turn that same curiosity into a teachable research skill. Combined with practical knowledge of techniques and tools, that’s what this workshop teaches you to do.

How do you screen participants?

We manually approve all applications after registration. We do basic due diligence checks on our participants to be sure that our trainers and all other participants are comfortable with their participation. Members of any police, military or intelligence service are not permitted registration at our workshops, and we allow government employees to join on a case-by-case basis.

Bellingcat reserves the right not to disclose the reasons for declining participation.

That said, the vast majority of participants are approved without any issue.

Who usually attends your workshops?

We have a pretty interesting mix of participants at our trainings. Between a third to a half come from private companies or the corporate world. Among those, we have plenty of information security researchers, corporate security investigators, lawyers, due diligence experts, and other professions. Journalists are the next-most popular profession for our workshops, and then we have a mix of human rights/NGO researchers, academics and students, and even retirees just curious about what this whole OSINT thing is all about.

Can I get an invoice?

In case you need an invoice, please send us an email to [email protected].

Can I receive a certificate for the workshops?

Sure! Just email us ([email protected]) after the workshops, and we’ll send you a PDF certificate.

Can I receive a recording of a workshop?

We do not record our workshops, or allow others to record them. However, we do provide copies of our training slides to participants after the completion of the training for their personal reference.

Can I gift a workshop seat to someone else?

Sure! We have had quite a few people buy workshop attendance for a loved one as a birthday or Christmas gift. Just let us know the name of the person who you are buying the seat for when registration so that we can do a basic due diligence check on them (see the Screening section up above). Feel free to email us at [email protected] to make sure we have their proper contact details so they get all of the invitation information on time.