The COVID-19 pandemic has forced social media companies to take a more active stance against disinformation. The most striking recent example came on March 31, when Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all banned videos from Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro. These videos featured Bolsonaro advising the use of an antimalarial, chloroquine, to treat the novel coronavirus. Charlie…
Besides viruses, what else is terribly contagious? Lies, of course. As the coronavirus pandemic engulfs the world, disinformation associated with the virus has taken on many forms. Whether it’s your uncle sending you a Tom Hanks meme at 4 a.m. or the current occupant of the White House lying about Barack Obama supposedly harming the…
On March 16th, 2020, virtually every major social media company released a joint statement on their efforts to curb the spread of disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. As of the writing of this article, the top comment on Facebook’s Twitter post of this statement is, itself, a piece of disinformation, furthering the conspiracy theory that…
Even by the low standards of Telegram, an online messaging service that is sometimes described as “a safe haven for pro-terror Nazis”, the Ukrainian-language Telegram channel devoted to praising the Christchurch shooter is an ugly spectacle. The channel, which we will not name as to not promote it, is full of vicious racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia…
Tear gas has been used in a number of incidents in recent months in Iraq, France, Chile, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Numerous allegations about tear gas have been made, and misinformation, half-truths, myth, and suppositions have been passed around on social media. Yet there is actually a wealth of information about tear gas available in…
In the previous part of this investigation, we showed how a batch of images published by Europol, Group ImageG13, was geolocated to a small coastal village in southwest Madagascar. Based on the evidence discussed, it was determined that ImageG13 was most likely produced between January 2002 and March 2004. Given the number of hotels and…
This investigation is an excerpt from the weekly CryptOsint, Brenna Smith’s newsletter which digs into the intersection of open source research and cryptocurrency. You can subscribe to the newsletter here. Crypto-twitter was abuzz this weekend over a rumor of police raids at one of the world’s most popular and most influential exchanges, Binance. The twist:…
This investigation was conducted jointly with Umut 2020, a new Kyrgyz popular movement focused on investigating corruption. You can watch their video of the report at the bottom of this post (Russian). On November 10th, the businessman Aierken Saimaiti, who had an arrest warrant international arrest warrant issued after fraud allegations, was shot dead in…
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the three former republics of the Caucasus, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, failed to demarcate and delimit their borders. This failure has resulted in regular incidents across the fringes of each nation’s respective territory. The well-publicized border disputes between Armenian and Azerbaijan are complex in nature, and the two…
These findings were made by BBC open source investigator Benjamin Strick and Elise Thomas, a researcher with the International Cyber Policy Centre at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. A new open source investigation has analysed a well-funded and co-ordinated social media campaign aimed at distorting the truth about events in the restive Indonesian province of…
