Catalog: Researching Disinformation Networks
Resources for those who dive deep into the origins of intentional misinformation and hold bad actors to account.
This page is one part of the Prism Anti-Misinformation Resources Catalog. See the Table of Contents to navigate to other categories of resources.
How To OSINT
Digital Investigation Recipes (First Draft)
These recipes provide researchers and journalists with the tools, methods and know-how needed to carry out advanced investigations of their own. Developed as part of a collaboration between the Public Data Lab, the Digital Methods Initiative, Open Intelligence Lab, and First Draft. Recipes: Investigate ad trackers with Gephi and the DMI Tracker Tracker tool; Track YouTube videos across the web; Find misleading YouTube videos on fringe platforms; Unearth misinformation networks on YouTube; Track the cross-platform spread of misinformation; URL analysis; and Map the spread of misleading memes across the web.
Digital investigations for journalists: How to follow the digital trail of people and entities (Knight Center)
A self-directed course featuring content from the Knight Center for Journalism in America‘s a four-week massive open online course (MOOC) titled “Digital investigations for journalists: How to follow the digital trail of people and entities.” For anyone interested in learning how to investigate digital content and accounts.
5 Steps For Digital Investigations (Brandy Zadrozny via Knight Center)
A short video from a Knight Center self-directed course on digital investigations,
360/DigitalSherlocks (Digital Forensic Research Lab)
DFRLab believes that more people doing this work to high standards benefits us all. In that spirit, over the years DFRLab has worked to grow and support its community of Digital Sherlocks through dedicated trainings and workshops for journalists, students, and members of civil society around the world. In 2019 alone, DFRLab experts trained over 1,500 people across six continents and 30 different countries on media literacy, open-source investigative techniques, fact-checking and source verification, narrative analysis, social media monitoring, and many other topics.
Media Manipulation Casebook (Harvard)
A digital research platform linking together theory, methods, and practice for mapping media manipulation and disinformation campaigns. This resource is intended for researchers, journalists, technologists, policymakers, educators, and civil society organizers who want to learn about detecting, documenting, describing, and debunking misinformation, disinformation, and media manipulation.
Dichotomies of Disinformation (DFRLab via GitHub)
A taxonomy of “disinformation” campaigns, addressing both definitions and the reducible components of these campaigns.
Countering Disinformation (International Foundation for Electoral Systems, the International Republican Institute, and the National Democratic Institute)
Uses case studies to illustrate lessons learned and the evolution of counter-disinformation programming and other interventions. Where possible, links are provided to entries in the Global Database of Informational Interventions.
Lexicon of Lies: Terms for Problematic Information (Caroline Jack via Data & Society)
Traces the specific origins and applications of several forms of problematic information, unpacking lazy usage habits and uncovering buried cultural origins.
Basic OPSEC Tips & Tricks for OSINT researchers (OSINTCurio.us)
Always start by defining your threat model against the research questions you are trying to find answers for. Don’t harden your machine or browser to look up geographic information through Google Earth, but it probably makes sense if you are going to deep dive in a website and forum full of persons that are building Remote Access Trojans. General framework for thinking about OPSEC: 1) What tools are needed? 2) What sources am I going to use? 3) What research machine am I going to use? 4) Who is my adversary?
Measuring the Efficacy of Influence Operations Countermeasures: Key Findings and Gaps From Empirical Research (Jon Bateman, Elonnai Hickok, Jacob N. Shapiro, Laura Courchesne, and Julia Ilhardt via Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)
Research shows that fact-checking can reduce the harmful impacts of false information. But beyond that, we know relatively little about the efficacy of counter-influence measures being implemented or considered by platforms, governments, and civil society.
What’s Working and What Isn’t in Researching Influence Operations? (Alicia Wanless via Lawfare)
The field working on influence operations is eclectic, with people coming from a variety of academic disciplines and sectors, driving initiatives around fact-checking, media literacy, academic research, investigations, policymaking, and development of tools for potentially countering influence operations.
Thread: Resources for journalists and researchers to protect themselves against online harassment (@dpfunke via Twitter)
A compilation of links for staying safe while doing research online.
Online Harassment: Strategies for Journalists’ Defense (Knight Center)
This resource page features course content from the Knight Center for Journalism in the America's massive open online course (MOOC) titled “Online Harassment: Strategies for Journalists’ Defense.” The four-week course took place from November 16 to December 13, 2020.
13 security tips for journalists covering hate online (The Journalist’s Resource)
Investigative journalist April Glaser shares safety advice for journalists who report on hate groups and the platforms where they congregate online.
Online Violence (International Women’s Media Foundation)
To bolster women journalists’ digital security and help the news media at large better support their employees’ online safety, the IWMF is convening individuals and organizations to address these issues.
_______________
Advanced Tools
A free, open index of well-known resources that scans millions of domains at regular intervals, compiling a searchable database of structured well-known resource data. The search engine supports specific search filters for each resource type, enabling detailed queries to answer a wide variety of questions. Supports Authorized Digital Sellers, Apple Associated Domain, Global Privacy Control, Robots Exclusion Standard, Authorized Digital Sellers for Apps, Digital Asset Links, OpenID Provider Configuration, and security.txt.
Inteltechniques (Inteltechniques)
Locates personal info about any target using different search tools and automated analysis.
Metacrawler (Metacrawler)
Engine which accepts a single search request from the user – extends the search coverage of the topic and allows more information to be found by sending multiple queries to several other search engines.
OSoMe (Indiana University)
Tools developed that let you analyse trends, maps and networks.
SimilarWeb (SimilarWeb)
A competitive intelligence tool that collects data from various sources and categorises events, keywords etc.; generates and exports graphs, tables and other visuals based on collected data.
The Search Engine List (The Search Engine List)
Provides search engines in different categories, such as allpurpose search engines, blogs, meta search, multimedia, news, open source and visual
search engines.
Toddington (Toddington)
Provides search tools and resources within different categories, such as news and journalism, username search, webpage analysis and social media.
Youtube DataViewer (Amnesty International)
Identifies where an image or video appears online.
Berify (Berify)
Upload an image or video and find out if the image or video is distributed at other websites – notifies you when someone uses your images.
Google Image (Google)
Find similar images, webpages where an image has been published.
Image Metadata Viewer a.k.a. Exif Reader (Jeffrey Friedl)
Returns metadata for a given image, such as when and where a picture was taken.
Reverse Image Search (Labnol)
Upload an image and search on Google to verify the source.
TinEye (TinEye)
Find out where an image appears online; discovers modified
or edited versions of an image.
Botometer (Indiana University)
Decides whether the account is a bot by analysing its tweets, its followers and when and where tweets are published.
Foller.me (Foller.me)
Gathers information about a specific Twitter user; conducts automatized analyses based on tweet’s contents on topics, hashtags, mentions, attitudes and activity time.
Followerwonk (Followerwonk)
Helps you explore your social graph – find out who is following you, their location and when they tweet; connect with influencers; compare your graph with others.
Hootsuite (Hootsuite)
Social media listening tool with specific search terms in realtime – this can be useful for tracking mentions of your brand, products, or relevant keywords you are interested in.
Jollor (Jollor)
Monitors and analyses social media data – identifies key influencers and offers unlimited reports and downloadable charts for measuring performance.
Social Searcher (Social Searcher)
A popular and user-friendly social media management software – contains tools such as social performance reporting, advanced social analytics, social monitoring and listening tools, and advanced social listening.
Twitterfall (Twitterfall)
Collects tweets based on real-time tweet searches.
Alexa Internet (Alexa Internet)
Provides various tools based on commercial web traffic data, such as keyword research tools, competitive analysis tools, audience analysis tools and much more.
Crimson Hexagon (Crimson Hexagon)
Social media monitoring and analysis platform that gives you access to over one trillion consumer conversations from social media – also provides many other tools such as advanced image analytics.
Maltego (Paterva)
Focuses on providing a library of transforms for discovery of data from open
sources – this information is then displayed on a node-based graph suited for performing link analysis.
Mediacloud (Mediacloud)
Open source platform for studying media ecosystems – it chooses a set of media sources and uncovers the feeds; each feed is trawled to determine if any stories have been added; all content is then extracted of each relevant story.
PropOrNot (PropOrNot)
Gathers and exposes Russian efforts to influence US opinion using propaganda.
Quetext (Quetext)
Plagiarism checker tool that looks for duplicate content online.
Junk News Aggregator (Oxford University)
Evaluates the spread of junk news on Facebook to identify junk news sources that publish misleading, deceptive or incorrect information purporting to be real news – the aggregator shows junk posts along with how many reactions they received.
Formulas for Searching Facebook (Plessas Experts Network)
A living document with techniques for finding things on Facebook: directories, native search and advanced search, JSON/Base24 translation, unique graph URLs, searching via Google, and more.
OSINT Resources in Canada (Ritu Gill via start.me)
A free resource dedicated to open source tools located in the different provinces and territories in Canada. Compiled links to dozens of databases and websites.
Guide to getting public records in Arizona (Arizona Agenda)
A downloadable zine to help you learn how to file and fight for public records.
Eagle Eye – Reverse Lookup Tool for Social Media Accounts (thoughtfuldev via GitHub)
A tool to find Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter Profiles of a person using at least one image of the person and a clue about the person’s name.
_______________
Topics in Disinformation Networks
Combating Information Manipulation: A Playbook for Elections and Beyond (National Democratic Institute, International Republican Institute, and Stanford Internet Observatory)
The playbook approach consists of how to (1) identify ongoing information manipulation campaigns; (2) develop real-time and short-term responses; and (3) build long-term resilience to information manipulation.
How to Fight Disinformation (Brooke Binkowski via TruthorFiction)
A three-part series about how communities can fight back and protect themselves against weaponized disinformation.
Strategic Communications Hybrid Threats Toolkit (Monika Gill, Ben Heap, and Pia Hansen via NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence)
This research is for people who want to develop their understanding of dangers to national security that come under the umbrella of ‘hybrid threats’. Such threats involve a combination of different hostile measures, furthering an adversary’s strategic goals while occuring in the ‘grey zone’ which exists between peace, crisis and war.
Who Let The Trolls Out? Towards Understanding State-Sponsored Trolls (Savvas Zannettou, Tristan Caulfield, William Setzer, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, and Jeremy Blackburn)
Russian trolls were pro-Trump, while Iranian trolls were anti-Trump. There is evidence that campaigns undertaken by such actors are influenced by real-world events. The behavior of such actors is not consistent over time, hence automated detection is not a straightforward task.
Robotrolling (Rolf Fredheim via NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence)
We track the most significant increase in inauthentic Russian-language social media activity we have observed since we began in 2017. While the level of bot activity remains much lower than four years ago, the uptick is concerning.
Characterizing the Use of Images in State-Sponsored Information Warfare Operations by Russian Trolls on Twitter (Savvas Zannettou, Tristan Caulfield2, Barry Bradlyn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Gianluca Stringhini, and Jeremy Blackburn)
Extensive image posting activity of Russian trolls coincides with real-world events (e.g., the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville), and shed light on their
targets as well as the content disseminated via images. Finally, we show that the trolls were more effective in disseminating politics-related imagery than other images.
Measuring the scope of pro-Kremlin disinformation on Twitter (Yevgeniy Golovchenko via Humanities and Social Sciences Communications)
The impact of Russian state-controlled news outlets—which are frequent sources of pro-Kremlin disinformation—is concentrated in one, highly popular news outlet, RT. The few, popular Russian news media have to compete with many popular Western media outlets. As a result, the combined impact of Russian state-controlled outlets is relatively low when comparing to its Western alternatives.
Understanding the Use of Fauxtography on Social Media (Yuping Wang, Fatemeh Tahmasbi, Jeremy Blackburn, Barry Bradlyn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, David Magerman, Savvas Zannettou, and Gianluca Stringhini)
Posts containing fauxtography receive more interactions in the form of re-shares, likes, and comments. Fauxtography images are often turned into memes by Web communities. Effective mitigation against disinformation need to take images into account.
Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour Detection Tree, Branches 1-4 (WeVerify project via EU DisinfoLab)
A set of tools proposed for investigating coordinated inauthentic behavior on online platforms. Branch 1 is Source Assessment. Branch 2 is Coordination Assessment. Branch 3 is Potential Impact Assessment. Branch 4 is Authenticity Assessment.
_______________
QAnon-specific
The Gospel According to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information (Max Aliapoulios, Antonis Papasavva, Cameron Ballard, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Gianluca Stringhini, Savvas Zannettou, and Jeremy Blackburn)
Chart: State of the Qnion (@dappergander via Twitter)
Representation of different Q factions in relation to one another and plotted against axes of Spirituality and Technology.
QOrigins Project Master Database (QOrigins Project via dchan)
A searchable archive of 14,000,000+ posts by and about Q from 4chan, 8chan, and 8kun since 2017.