ETHICS AND TRANSPARENCY

This page collects Indicator’s standards for reporting, AI use, corrections, and more.

last updated: May 17 2026

1. Editorial principles

2. Transparency and conflicts of interest

3. AI policy

4. Corrections policy

We believe in the power of digital tools and digital media to improve access to information and improve democratic discourse. We recognize that economic and political incentive structures often lead to the proliferation of falsehoods, platform manipulation, scams, and other harms.

We believe in journalism as an accountability mechanism that furthers transparency and democratic discourse.

We focus on exposing digital deception in its many forms — scams, search engine and social media manipulation, disinformation, trolling, mobile app abuse, spyware, AI slop and more — because we believe it causes real harm and undermines the ability of citizens to understand and engage with the world around them.

We prioritize investigating digital platforms because of their reach. We aim to choose topics based on prevalence and harm.

We agree with the perspective that “freedom of speech does not equal freedom of reach.” We think platforms can and should impose rules that discourage abusive content and encourage healthy online ecosystems — or face consequences.

We generally believe that people who work for big platforms, especially in digital safety roles, care about the issues we cover and do their best to reduce harm. We also recognize they face resource constraints and internal incentive structures that don’t always align with information integrity.

We recognize the double-edged nature of open source intelligence tools: they can be used to responsibly gather information and can also be used for surveillance. We do our best to flag this in our coverage and to monitor for known abuse.

We believe socio-technical challenges require socio-technical solutions. Put differently: we don’t think that product fixes alone can solve societal problems.

Transparency and conflicts of interest

We are primarily a reader-supported publication. In our first year of operation, subscriptions represented more than 90% of Indicator’s total revenue. However, we do run ads in our Briefing newsletter and Show & Tell podcast. Ads are clearly marked as sponsored content. We do not accept financial support from companies that we cover (as Indicator or as individuals)

We strive to be fair, accurate, and nonpartisan in our reporting. We do not belong to or donate to political parties. When we express an opinion in our work, we do so based on reporting and domain expertise.

Alexios used to work for Google and ran the International Fact-Checking Network. He holds no shares in the former. He discloses his role in the latter any time he writes about it.

We believe journalism can and should be used by policymakers, but do not lobby or engage privately with political decision-makers to promote specific regulations.

Our use cases of AI include:

• Assistance with scraping, gathering, organizing, categorizing data, and expanding on information that we’ve gathered. For example, we might use Claude in the browser to scrape view counts and comments from hundreds of TikTok scam videos we are writing about.

• Assistance with reviewing newsletter and Google Alerts content to prioritize information and identify links and information of interest.

• Generation of interview and workshop transcripts. For example, we use Google’s AI tools to generate transcripts and notes from our monthly workshops.

• Drafting social media posts and other marketing material. Such content is never published without human review and editing.

• Generation of dashboards, graphics, and charts, interactive or static. This always involves human review and vetting. We also check the resulting visualizations to ensure the data is represented accurately. One example is our AI Community Notes dashboard.

• Generation of illustrations where we might otherwise have used stock imagery or screenshots. We label the image through an overlay or in credits
  Using AI in our operations to access and analyze data about our audience, revenue, and subscriptions through Stripe and Beehiiv.

• We use AI in our operations to access and analyze data about our audience, revenue, and subscription trends through Stripe and Beehiiv.

• Tracking our impact. For example we automatically extract information about platform takedowns from our articles and cite the data on our About page. We manually review all outputs before publication.

• Building tools for our members. We will test for a range of possible harms through a battery of representative and adversarial prompts that we make available to subscribers upon request.

We correct our errors publicly. We encourage people to contact us to request or suggest corrections at [email protected] and we flag when such an email leads to a correction.

We add corrections to the top of articles and also collect them on this page.

We aim to clearly state what was incorrect and to provide the correct information. We also aim to concisely explain why or how the error occurred.

We add a Correction when we correct a factual error of any nature. We add an Update when we insert information or improve the clarity of a passage in a way that does not materially change a statement or factual claim.