By OSINTcurious, for GIJN Editor’s Note: This post by the OSINTCurio.us Project‘s Technisette was based on a presentation at the Dutch OSINT Conference 2019 about how to search on Instagram. Before We Start Although it’s not necessary to have an Instagram account in order to do some OSINT on Instagram, it might come in handy whenever you want to follow certain hashtags or profiles. Creating an account is possible via…
By Giancarlo Fiorella, for Bellingcat Flight tracking is an accessible and useful tool for open source investigators. Being able to track the movements of aircraft belonging to powerful individuals and armed forces can add important details to stories, or even uncover entire new narratives. There are several commercial and hobby websites that allow us to do just that. The purpose of this guide will be to get you up-to-speed on…
By Victoria Kwan, for First Draft News The first of six new guides from First Draft covers the tricky ethical terrain that comes with reporting in a world of information disorder. This is the first in a series of new Essential Guides published by First Draft. Covering newsgathering, verification, responsible reporting, online safety, digital ads and more, each book is intended as a starting point for exploring the challenges of…
Sources: dw.com, cnn.com, vice.com, 112.international, disinformationindex.org At least 235 million USD was earned from advertising on websites of disinformation and extremist character. Worth noticing, ad exchanges whose ads were shown on the dark side of the Internet could have no consciousness of what type of activity they sponsor. The new research by Global Disinformation Index organization shows that the issue is serious. Researchers analyzed over 20 thousand of dubious Internet…
Reports of organizations which research the phenomenon of disinformation point out to common technics and topics used by pro-Kremlin propaganda in media of countries included in the research. Similar tools are used, changing only accents, depending on country’s features, manipulating facts or emotions, hitting weak spots, artificially enlarging problems and playing on disagreements. Often, they use relations with neighboring countries. However, in Poland such operations do not include all neighbors.…
We have been asking ourselves the question from the title for years and for years we have been trying to create more and more efficient programs, making use of new researches, reports and experts’ experience. As we know, disinformation is not only about falling for the fake news but also for manipulation. Manipulation interferes with the worldview and distorts the everyday media feed. It is common, when used as a…
Every action taken against security requires from the aggressors operations against the view on this security. Therefore, disinformation and propaganda actions are aimed at different areas at the same time: “We are talking about general areas, because some of them have very specialized operations – so called micro-operations”, explains Kamil Basaj from Info Ops Polska Foundation. “The most important ones can be divided in two groups. Firstly, it is the…
Thinking about disinformation, we usually focus on operations aimed to misrepresent the reality or to give it own narrative. As Stop Fake we do purely journalist work here, we verify sources, check facts, determine real course of events and give the proven information. There are, however, outlets that focus their efforts on diagnosing the source of disinformation, the way it came through and determine what areas of state’s functioning does…
If we know lots of people on social will only glance at our headlines and not tap through, why can’t we bring better information to them where they are? By Joshua Benton, for NiemanLab This is a great idea: In order to reduce the number of its old stories that get recirculated as new, The Guardian is making a story’s age more prominent, both to readers and to those who…
By Bellingcat Investigation Team On 11 October 2014, a Facebook profile to a person named “Ruslan Boshirov” — the cover identity of Skripal poisoner Anatoliy Chepiga — posted a lone photograph of Prague, showing the heavily trafficked Old Town Square and the Astronomical Clock. The upload date of this photograph coincides with a report from the Czech publication iRozhlas that “Boshirov” (Chepiga) visited Prague on 11 October 2014. The Daily Mail reported — which, obviously, requires more than…
