A look at the Information Laundromat website analysis tool

I love investigating websites. I wrote a chapter about it for the most recent edition of the Verification Handbook and I’m always looking for new tools and methods to connect sites together, identify owners, and to analyze site content, infrastructure, and behavior.

The Information Laundromat is one of the newest and most interesting free website analysis tools I’ve come across. Developed by the George Marshall Fund’s Alliance For Securing Democracy, it can analyze content and metadata. ASD, with researchers at the University of Amsterdam and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, used it in their recent report, “The Russian Propaganda Nesting Doll: How RT is Layered into the Digital Information Environment.”

The Information Laundromat can analyze two elements: the content posted to a site and the metadata used to build and run it. Here’s a rundown of how it works, based on initial testing by me and an interview with Peter Benzoni, the tool’s developer.

Peter told me that the Information Laundromat works best for lead generation: “It’s not supposed to automate your investigation.” The Information Laundromat is open source and available on the ASD’s GitHub account.

Content similarity analysis

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