Indicator

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Indicator is your essential guide to understanding and investigating digital deception. We publish original reporting, in-depth investigations, and practical tutorials on open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools and techniques. Our expert research equips you with the knowledge and skills to navigate a chaotic digital landscape filled with scams, search engine and social media manipulation, disinformation, trolling, mobile app abuse, spyware, AI slop and more. Indicator is designed for people on the front lines of digital investigations: journalists, analysts, researchers, and trust and safety professionals—alongside everyday citizens who want to make sense of what they see online. Source

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Scope National
Language English
Country Canada
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Show & Tell: How Amnesty International collects evidence from war zones for visual investigations

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By Craig Silverman Verified, Alexios Mantzarlis Verified, Ethan McCarthy
| Indicator Verified
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.
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How "Cheater Buster" websites use fake info and dubious claims to trick people into paying

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By Alexios Mantzarlis Verified
| Indicator Verified
At 11 a.m. on Wednesday morning, I discovered that my partner Mia has a hidden Tinder Platinum account. At least, that’s according to the website Swindler AI. I ran Mia’s photo through its “confidential consultation service” that uses “a trained advisory team” and “AI-assisted behavioral pattern analysis” to find matches. The website claimed that the woman in the Tinder profile was a 93% match and located her in New York, which makes sense, because that’s where I live. Still, I was skeptical.
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The Indicator Guide to building your own reverse image search engine

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By Ishaan Jhaveri Verified
| Indicator Verified
Ishaan Jhaveri investigates visual stories using open-source and computational techniques. He’s currently a computational reporter and producer with the BBC’s Eye Investigations team in London and previously worked as a reporter on the New York Times’ Visual Investigations team in New York. Reverse image search is a core technique in digital investigations.
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How AI-Generated Influencers Exploit Celebrities to Sell Synthetic Nudes

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By Craig Silverman Verified
| Indicator Verified
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.
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This AI-generated podcast network publishes 11,000 episodes a day. It also ripped off media outlets

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By Alexios Mantzarlis Verified
| Indicator Verified
Gemma Tutton is a Duke University student. She is also a pole vaulter who has represented Great Britain at international competitions. Following a first-place finish at a university meet, The Duke Chronicle named Tutton “Blue Devil of the Week” in an article published on Jan. 31 at 2:57 p.m. Seventeen minutes later, the Durham News Today podcast dropped a new episode on Spotify called “Gemma Tutton’s Triumphant Return to Pole Vaulting.” The show has no affiliation with the student newspaper.
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Briefing: Grok brings nonconsensual image abuse to the masses

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By Craig Silverman Verified, Alexios Mantzarlis Verified
| Indicator Verified
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.
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Free tools to investigate YouTube videos, channels, and comments

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By Craig Silverman Verified
| Indicator Verified
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.
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OSINT 2025: New and updated digital investigative tools of the year

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By Craig Silverman Verified
| Indicator Verified
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.
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2025: The year tech embraced fakeness

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By Craig Silverman Verified, Alexios Mantzarlis Verified
| Indicator Verified
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.
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Community Notes: Big in Japan

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By Alexios Mantzarlis Verified
| Indicator Verified
This article was updated on Dec. 8 with a quote from one of the authors of the preprint on polarization and Community Notes. X’s crowdsourced fact-checking program Community Notes has been shrinking. Despite the recent addition of AI bots, the number of notes was down 26% in the first 10 months of this year compared to the same period in 2024. The number of monthly active authors – defined as contributors who wrote at least one note in a given month – is also down 8.4%.
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Indicator Journalists

Mantzarlis, Alexios
Silverman, Craig