Craig Silverman
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Articles by Craig Silverman
Briefing: US judge rules for fact-checkers and content moderators
Our weekly Briefing is free, but you should upgrade to access all of our reporting, resources, and a monthly workshop. Hello! The Briefing is back from its one week summer break. Here’s what you missed. David Weisz wrote a guide to seven no-code scrapers that offer a free tier. He laid out the pros and cons of each tool to help you decide which scraper is the right fit for your needs.
3 Free Tools to Dig Deeper in Online Research
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Todayâs tools help you track a topic with digital scouts, figure out where an image came from, and search like a pro without memorizing operators. This is a guest post from Craig Silverman, following up on his Digital Investigatorâs Toolkit.Craig and Alexios Mantzarlis run Indicator, which publishes digital investigative guides and tools. They also have a free newsletter. Use it to: get an agent-curated summary of new info about a topic you care about, delivered on your schedule.
By Jeremy Caplan Verified, Craig Silverman Verified
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Wonder Tools: Useful tips for creative productivity
4 Free Tools to Dig Deeper Online đ
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Iâm inviting my most helpful colleagues to share useful tools and insights. Craig Silverman, who wrote todayâs post, is one of the sharpest researchers I know. He and Alexios Mantzarlis are building a sharp new publication, Indicator, especially worth following if youâre interested in digital deception. - Jeremy Craig: Weâre all trying to make sense of a chaotic information environment awash in synthetic fakes, sophisticated scams, undisclosed ads, and unverified claims.
By Jeremy Caplan Verified, Craig Silverman Verified
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Wonder Tools: Useful tips for creative productivity
New OSINT tools help journalists fight misinformation
Posted Thursday, May 28, 2026 12:00 am The OSINT Navigator is geared towards people who aren’t familiar with the language of digital deception and all the tools and techniques. They may feel a bit overwhelmed when trying to find out who owns a website. We’re trying to make it less daunting to type a question in natural language to reveal some options.” The world is awash in digital deception in the form of articles, images, videos and AI-generated content.
Show & Tell: How Amnesty International collects evidence from war zones for visual investigations
Barbara Marcolini, a visual investigator with Amnesty International's Evidence Lab, joined us for May’s episode of Show & Tell. Before joining Amnesty, Barbara was a founding member of the Visual Investigations team at The New York Times, where she won five News & Documentary Emmy Awards and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. You can watch the episode above or on our YouTube channel. Barbara walked us through her 2025 visual investigation into Israeli military operations in southern Lebanon.
How AI-Generated Influencers Exploit Celebrities to Sell Synthetic Nudes
Late last year, the Instagram account @ayannasoblack began posting images and videos of a young woman with a strikingly dark complexion, which she attributed to "South Sudan Genetics." On December 7, the account posted a photo of her in bed with a man that looked exactly like porn star Johnny Sins. The next day the account shared an image of her and The Rock inside a Planet Fitness, attracting over 525,000 likes. On Dec.
The curious case of the disappearing Lamborghinis
When Sam Zahr first saw the gray Rolls-Royce Dawn convertible with orange interior and orange roof, he knew he’d found a perfect addition to his fleet. “It was very appealing to our clientele,” he told me. As the director of operations at Dream Luxury Rental, he outfits customers in the Detroit area looking to ride in style to a wedding, a graduation, or any other event with high-end vehicles—Rolls-Royces, Lamborghinis, Bentleys, Mercedes G-Wagons, and more.
AI-generated doctors are dispensing dubious health advice
5 hours ago The leader of Ukraine's special drone branch said his operators are striking advancing Russian infantry at extreme close range, providing rare insight into how some of the country's best pilots are fighting. Maj. Robert "Madyar" Brovdi, the commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces, wrote in a …
The state of online search: How to find what you're looking for in the age of AI
Craig & Alexios here. We're a two-person team, and memberships keep us going. You can get 20% off until Wednesday. You get unlimited access to all our investigative guides, monthly workshops, and archival content. Membership also includes recordings and transcripts from all past workshops. Upgrade now. In early January, YouTube announced it was "enhancing the search experience" by updating its filters.
Briefing: Grok brings nonconsensual image abuse to the masses
Our weekly Briefing is free, but you should upgrade to access all of our reporting, resources, and a monthly workshop. Craig published a detailed look at more than a dozen free tools you can use to investigate YouTube videos, channels, and comments. Alexios reviewed a study about the impact of Facebook’s fact-checking program, which continues around the world one year after Mark Zuckerberg terminated it in the United States.
Free tools to investigate YouTube videos, channels, and comments
The first YouTube tool that I used (and wrote about) was the YouTube Data Viewer from Amnesty International. Released in the summer of 2014, it enabled you to enter a YouTube URL and receive the exact upload date, as well as several thumbnails you could use for reverse image searches. It was an early verification/OSINT tool that inspired many more over the ensuing years. Today it’s much easier to extract a wide range of information about a YouTube video or channel.
OSINT 2025: New and updated digital investigative tools of the year
Image generated with Google Gemini People often tell me that they find it challenging to keep up with the world of OSINT and digital investigative tools. This year seemed even more difficult than in the past. I tracked a lot of tools, but I also had to try and keep up with apps that stopped working. There were cases where I’d mentioned a tool in one of our Briefings and then realize weeks or months later that it was dead.
2025: The year tech embraced fakeness
On January 7, Mark Zuckerberg posted a video on Facebook. “There’s been widespread debate about potential harms from online content,” he said. “Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political. But there’s a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there.” Zuckerberg said that Meta’s moderation systems were making too many mistakes and censoring content.
Thousands of undisclosed ads flooded TikTok to sell AI study apps
Last month, a TikTok account named @studywithinez issued a warning to college students. “My uni cannon event was when i realised there was legit NO way to get away with using chatgpt now, that oxford comma or em dash WILL get you expelled,” read text that was superimposed over a short clip of a young woman looking at the camera and shaking her head.
Scam Ads Are Flooding Social Media. These Former Meta Staffers Have a Plan - MaharlikaNews | Canada’s Leading Online Filipino Newspaper – No. 1 Information Hub for Filipino-Canadians with 250K Visitors in 2020
When billionaire Dutch TV producer John de Mol sued Facebook in 2019 over its alleged failure to stop scammers from using his image in deceptive ads, the social media company sent Rob Leathern to Amsterdam to meet with Del Mol’s team and to speak with the media. “The people who push these kinds of ads are persistent, they are well funded, and they are constantly evolving their deceptive tactics to get around our systems,” Leathern told Reuters at the time.
SNSにあふれる詐欺広告、メタ元社員が問う広告システムの透明性
※本記事は、デジタル詐欺の実態を調査する独立系メディア『Indicator』と『WIRED』の共同取材によって制作された。 オランダのテレビプロデューサーで億万長者のヨン・デ・モルは2019年、自身の肖像が詐欺広告に使われるのをFacebookが防げなかったとして訴訟を起こした。このときFacebookがアムステルダムに派遣し、デ・モルのチームとの面会とメディア対応を任せたのがロブ・リーザーンだった。 「この種の広告を仕掛ける人々は非常に執念深く、資金力もあり、わたしたちのシステムをすり抜けるために詐欺の手口を常に進化させています」とリーザーンは当時ロイター通信に語っている。 現在はメタ・プラットフォームズに社名を変えた同社で4年間勤務したリーザーンは、詐欺広告対策における「顔」ともいえる存在だった。メタの広告製品を悪用する詐欺業者やその他の不正行為を防ぐビジネス・インテグリティ部門を率い、詐欺広告に関して定期的にメディア対応を行っていた。また、業界初の無料で検索可能な広告データベース「Meta Ad...
The Indicator Guide to hunting for documents and files in open buckets, servers, and directories
Image generated with Google Gemini A few years ago, Foeke Postma, a researcher at Bellingcat, revealed that US soldiers stationed in Europe had posted sensitive information about nuclear weapons on publicly-available flashcard learning websites. The information, which included details about the shelters that housed nuclear weapons, had been uploaded by soldiers that were trying to test their knowledge of key details about their job.
Las redes están inundadas de estafas y estos exdirectivos de Meta quieren combatirlas
Cuando el productor multimillonario de televisión holandés John de Mol demandó a Facebook en 2019 por su supuesta incapacidad para impedir que los estafadores usaran su imagen en anuncios engañosos, la empresa de redes sociales envió a Rob Leathern a Ámsterdam para reunirse con el equipo de de Mol y hablar con los medios de comunicación.
Briefing: Meta's multi-billion dollar scam ad business
Correction: We updated the item about arXiv’s policy change to reflect that the repository hasn’t stopped accepting all CS preprints, just surveys and position papers. We regret the error. Our weekly Briefing is free, but you should upgrade to access all of our reporting, resources, and a monthly workshop. Alexios interviewed Shane Vogt, a lawyer representing the New Jersey teen that’s suing AI nudifier ClothOff.
Scam Ads Are Flooding Social Media. These Former Meta Staffers Have a Plan
Tech News Tube is a real time news feed of the latest technology news headlines.Follow all of the top tech sites in one place, on the web or your mobile device.
Scam Ads Are Flooding Social Media. These Former Meta Staffers Have a Plan
When billionaire Dutch TV producer John de Mol sued Facebook in 2019 over its alleged failure to stop scammers from using his image in deceptive ads, the social media company sent Rob Leathern to Amsterdam to meet with Del Mol’s team and to speak with the media. “The people who push these kinds of ads are persistent, they are well funded, and they are constantly evolving their deceptive tactics to get around our systems,” Leathern told Reuters at the time.
Scam Ads Are Flooding Social Media. These Former Meta Staffers Have a Plan
When billionaire Dutch TV producer John de Mol sued Facebook in 2019 over its alleged failure to stop scammers from using his image in deceptive ads, the social media company sent Rob Leathern to Amsterdam to meet with Del Mol’s team and to speak with the media. “The people who push these kinds of ads are persistent, they are well funded, and they are constantly evolving their deceptive tactics to get around our systems,” Leathern told Reuters at the time.
TikTok sympathy scams use racial slurs and insults to sell products
After being created last month, the TikTok account @michaelpuffyweave made 21 posts that typically followed the same formula. The videos began with a black man or woman in tears and a screenshot of a TikTok comment superimposed above them that included a racial slur or an insult. “You son really got the worst of both worlds he’s a n*gger and a f*gget😂why are you letting him crochet?” read one comment shown over a brief video of a man with tears in his eyes.
Briefing: People are posting fake images of an X feature that hasn't launched yet
Our weekly Briefing is free, but you should upgrade to access all of our reporting, resources, and a monthly workshop. Alexios and Nasha (our awesome intern) posted hundreds of AI-generated images and videos on Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, and YouTube to test whether they were properly labeled by the platforms. For the most part, they weren’t.
Briefing: X tests new way to fight inauthentic activity and a major scam takedown
Our weekly Briefing is free, but you should upgrade to access all of our reporting, resources, and a monthly workshop. Check out what some of our members have to say. Craig published the Indicator Guide to investigating digital ad libraries. It’s a deep dive into using ad repositories in digital investigations, and includes tips for each of the 13 ad libraries currently in existence, as well as a rundown of other tools you can use to examine digital political ads.
Briefing: YouTube gives banned channels a second chance
Our weekly Briefing is free, but you should upgrade to access all of our reporting, resources, and a monthly workshop. Craig showed how to tell if a social media account is earning money directly from a platform. Alexios wrote up the key findings from a working paper he co-authored with Zahra Arjmandi-Lari and Tom Stafford on the community behind X’s Community Notes fact-checking feature. 📍 You probably saw that there are tools that remove the watermark from Sora 2 videos.
How to tell if a social media account is monetized
There are lots of ways to make money on a social platform: sponsored content, affiliate marketing, ecommerce, ad revenue share. One of the most notable recent trends is that creators are increasingly being paid directly by platforms. YouTube launched its Partner Program in 2007, creating opportunities for creators to earn a share of ad revenue. TikTok was the first platform to pay directly based on the amount of engagement. And now Meta, Snapchat, and X/Twitter do it, too.
Briefing: Sloppy Sora surges on the charts
Our weekly Briefing is free, but you should upgrade to access all of our reporting, resources, and a monthly workshop. Craig found over 3,000 Meta ads for nudifiers and AI girlfriend apps that featured bare breasts, simulated sex acts, and other explicit content. This is in addition to the more than 4,000 nudifier ads we reported on a few weeks ago. Alexios published the Indicator Guide to AI labels, an overview of how and when platforms are flagging AI-generated content on their service.
Explicit ads for nudifiers and AI girlfriend apps continue to plague Meta
“Hey, I’m Katie, created just for you. You can imagine and create me just the way you want,” says the female voice in ads placed on Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta products. As she speaks, the video cycles through clips of AI-generated women engaged in a variety of sex acts. It’s one of thousands of sexually explicit or suggestive ads that recently appeared across Meta’s products.
Briefing: YouTube bends the knee
Our weekly Briefing is free, but you should upgrade to access all of our reporting, resources, and a monthly workshop. Craig wrote an OSINT guide for investigating WordPress sites in order to reveal author accounts, extract images, files, and plugins — and maybe even find something before it's published. Alexios sat through 202 minutes of AI-generated podcasts by a company that boasts synthetic shows will be the future. They were not good.
OSINT tips for investigating WordPress sites
There are tens, if not hundreds, of millions of websites that use WordPress for their content management system. People, businesses, schools, major news organizations, and governments run WordPress. Platforms like Shopify, Squarespace, and Wix have begun to eat into WordPress’s web dominance, but it remains a widely used content management system, both for self-hosted sites and those that run on wordpress.com.
The Indicator Guide to tools for capturing webpages and social media content
It’s essential to systematically take screenshots as you investigate accounts, webpages, and other digital assets. But it can be a challenge to efficiently capture content and to store it in a way that helps you see connections and perform analysis. Fortunately there’s a growing number of web capture tools — including standalone apps and browser extensions — that enable investigators to quickly screenshot and/or download digital content.
Why is GitHub restricting accounts that share OSINT and dark web resources?
Late last month, Roelof Temmingh was putting the finishing touches on a new GitHub page of OSINT resources when it and his account suddenly disappeared from public view. Temmingh is well known in the OSINT community as the creator of the Maltego investigation platform. He’s now building Ubikron, a web capture and research tool. Prior to being blocked, the Ubikron GitHub account had basic details about the product and company, and a page that listed useful Chrome extensions.
“Dress up your buddy’s wife in a Tiny latex dress”: A digital fashion startup ran Meta ads for an AI app with an “undress” option
“Ever want to see how your neighbor would look in a tiny crop top?” “Dress up your buddy’s wife in a Tiny latex dress.” “Ever wonder how your college crush would look in a cheerleader outfit?” Those are some of the lines used in dozens of Facebook and Instagram ads for DressXme, a tool that allows you to upload a photo of a person and use AI to change their outfit.
Briefing: AI comes for fashion and a tool for guessing email addresses
Our weekly Briefing is free, but you should upgrade to access all of our reporting, resources, and a monthly workshop. If you’re already a member, thank you for your support! Craig did a deep dive into three free or affordable social media monitoring and analysis tools. Then he dug into them even more during our latest members-only workshop. Upgrade to get access to the video, slides, and transcript.
3 free or affordable social media monitoring tools for your OSINT toolkit
CrowdTangle is dead, Tweetdeck is behind a paywall, and major social platforms are generally making it more difficult to monitor, search, and analyze content and accounts. If you’ve got the budget, there are several powerful social media monitoring and analysis tools. At Indicator, we focus on free and low cost options that can serve a wide range of investigators. That leaves a much smaller pool of tools.
Briefing: A resurgence of anti-vaxx misinfo and testing AI tools for research
Our weekly Briefing is free, but you should upgrade to access all of our reporting, resources, and a monthly workshop. If you’re already a member, thank you for your support! Alexios looked into a niche of Brazilian TikTok creators that encourage their followers to fraudulently geolocate their accounts in the Global North in order to make more money from the app’s monetization program.
Hoax pages thrive under Meta’s loosened moderation
After CBS announced it was canceling Late Night with Stephen Colbert, dozens of Facebook pages began pumping out hoaxes and AI slop about the departing host. A page called Rachel Unfiltered generated over 200,000 reactions, comments, and shares for a false claim that Colbert and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow plan to launch a new show. Other pages spread a hoax about Colbert starting a show with Rep. Jasmine Crockett and the false claim he’d adopted “abandoned” twins.
Briefing: AI chatbots gone wild and tips for investigating X and VSCO
Our weekly Briefing is free, but you should upgrade to access all of our reporting, resources, and a monthly workshop. If you’re already a member, thank you for your support! Craig spoke to the CEO of GeoSpy about the present and future of using AI for geolocation. The Q&A was quoted in a 404 Media article about the LAPD’s interest in using the tool.
AI-enabled geolocation: A conversation with GeoSpy's Daniel Heinen
About two years ago, a Reddit user shared a link to a new geolocation tool called GeoSpy. “I created an AI powered image locating tool that lets people find the location a where a photo was taken no exif or metadata needed,” the user wrote. At the time, Dan Heinen, who made the post, worked as an AI research engineer at a defense company. GeoSpy was a side project he hacked together with his twin brothers. It quickly generated huge interest in the OSINT community, as well as some media scrutiny.
How bookmarklets can reveal hidden online profile info and speed up OSINT investigations
The best OSINT tools typically don’t perform analysis or give you an answer. They extract information or improve your workflow. That’s the idea behind the bookmarklets offered by My OSINT Training (MOT), a site run by longtime OSINT investigators and instructors Micah Hoffman and Griffin Glynn. In their day jobs they lead the investigations team for the National Child Protection Task Force, a US-based non-profit that helps locate endangered children.
Briefing: More AI nudifier ads on Meta and two new investigation guides
Our weekly Briefing is free, but you should upgrade to access all of our reporting, resources, and a monthly workshop. If you’re already a member, thank you for your support! Craig showed how to use free bookmarklets to find hidden data for online profiles and speed up your OSINT workflow. He also shared the video, transcript, and slides from our recent members-only workshop, which showed how to use tools to connect websites together.
Briefing: A new tool for detecting AI images, the Macrons sue Candace Owens and more
Our weekly Briefing is free, but you should upgrade to access all of our reporting, resources, and a monthly workshop. Our next workshop, focused on website investigation tools and techniques, is on August 1. If you’re already a member, thank you for your support! Craig reported exclusive findings from a new study about repurposed YouTube channels, and shared tips for how to identify potentially repurposed channels in the wild.
How repurposed YouTube channels spread misinformation and undermine platform integrity - and how to identify them
Alejandro Cuevas, a Ph.D candidate at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, has spent the last six years researching how user profile signals such as followers, upvotes, and verification checkmarks can be abused.
The Indicator guide to connecting websites together using OSINT tools and methods
A single website can be a portal to uncover ownership, related sites, social media accounts, phone numbers, emails, corporate entities, revenue, and more. I spend hours each year training journalists and other investigators on how to analyze website content and infrastructure, track how a site earns money, and discover who’s behind it. One of the essential skills that every investigator needs is to know how to uncover whether a site is connected to other web properties.
Briefing: X changes its verification messaging and platforms face greater liability in Brazil
Briefing: X changes its verification messaging and platforms face greater liability in Brazil Your must reads and must tries on the digital deception beat this week Our weekly Briefing is free for subscribers, but you should upgrade to access all of our reporting, resources, and a monthly workshop. We’re offering a limited time 20% discount.
OSINT case study: How a single Facebook Marketplace ad helped uncover a network of scam domains
The ad that started it all The ad on Facebook Marketplace showed an 18-drawer rolling tool chest from Milwaukee on sale for the suspiciously low price of $129. The same item from the tool maker typically retails for close to $1,800, which caused a user to flag the ad to Silent Push, a cyber intelligence company. Scammers frequently entice people by advertising a high value item at an improbable price. It could be a car, clothing, tools, or electronics.
Briefing: Viral paraglider takes media for a trip and good news about nudifiers
June 6 Briefing: Viral paraglider takes media for a trip and some good news about nudifiers Your must reads and must tries on the digital deception beat this week ICYMI: Indicator is the merger of Faked Up by Alexios Mantzarlis and Digital Investigations by Craig Silverman. Our weekly Briefing is free, but you should upgrade to access all of our reporting, resources, and a monthly workshop. We’re offering a limited time 20% launch discount.
“ID-Verified Hot Chicks”: Inside the companies using rented LinkedIn profiles to blast thousands of DMs
Caiden Glasier runs Inmailers with Andrej Simunovic In late April, before his account was banned, Caiden Glasier was asked on X what he does for a living. “Fully done-for-you LinkedIn DMs,” he replied. “We source ID-verified accounts (attractive women), write the copy, build the lead lists, manage inboxes, and book sales calls directly to your calendar.” Glasier’s business, Inmailers, offers a high tech version of the classic sales cold call.
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Eradicating Cancer Stem Cells Using High Linear Energy Transfer Radiation Therapy Part 1: Physics and Radiobiology By Daniel M. Koffler, MD, Daniel K. Ebner, MD, MPH, Eric J. Lehrer, MD, Fatemeh Fekrmandi, MD, Felix Ehret, MD, Morteza Mahmoudi, PhD, Chris Beltran, PhD, Daniel M. Trifiletti, MD, Laura Vallow, MD, Michael S. Rutenberg, MD, PhD, Jacob Eckstein, MD, Bhargava Chitti, MD, Bryan Johnson, MD, Joseph M.
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