Briefing: What Zuckerberg and Rubio Mean by "Free Speech"

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📍 Craig wrote a detailed breakdown of changes to universal beneficial ownership information that are coming to the EU, UK, and overseas territories like the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands. It shares intel about how to access UBO data, information about fees, and where things stand in different countries.

📍 We launched the private beta of OSINT Navigator, a product that helps investigators find the right OSINT tool(s) for a specific task or need. Navigator uses a curated database of tools from nine independent OSINT toolkits to suggest tools based on a natural language search query like, “How do I find the owner of a website?” Members get early access, additional daily queries, and other perks! (More info here.)

📍 And we published the latest episode of Show & Tell, our monthly podcast that takes you inside digital investigations. Kolina Koltai, a senior researcher and trainer at Bellingcat, walked us through how she exposed the infrastructure and operators behind AI nudifier websites, a tool of image-based sexual abuse that we have also covered extensively on Indicator. Click below to watch and subscribe on our YouTube channel.

“More Speech, Fewer Mistakes,” was the grandiose title that Mark Zuckerberg gave to the January 2025 announcement that he would terminate Meta’s fact-checking program and take a more reactive approach to content moderation.

A few months later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio shut down the US State Department hub dedicated to countering foreign disinformation, accusing it of having “actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.”

Two reports from this week show both men are less concerned about free speech and more concerned about protecting the reputation of the current administration.

First, Engadget unearthed this text from Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk:

The offer flies in the face of Zuckerberg’s promise to transition to a reactive model of trust and safety, which relied more heavily on user reports of potentially violative content. The proactive service he offered to DOGE was provided not for society’s most vulnerable, but for a government team administered by the world’s richest man.

On Monday, The Guardian reported that Rubio instructed US embassy staff to “pursue five broad goals: countering hostile messaging, expanding access to information, exposing adversary behavior, elevating local voices who support American interests, and promoting what it calls ‘telling America’s story.’”

These are relatively reasonable aims in principle, even if everything hinges on how they are implemented. (At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US government ran a secret anti-Sinovac propaganda campaign that could have negatively impacted vaccination rates among the targeted populations.)

More to the point, Rubio’s cable outlines exactly the type of interventions that he and others in the administration previously cast as dangerous censorship when delivered by the Biden administration, university research efforts, or the European Union.

Rubio and Zuckerberg are many things. Being selflessly committed to free speech isn’t one of them. — Alexios

The share of AI-written visible Community Notes on X hit a new record this week.

On Mar 31, there were 87 AI-written notes of any type and 112 human ones, making the corpus almost 44% synthetic. The 7-day average also shot up, as you can see in the chart above.

The trend line has been mostly increasing since X launched AI notes in the summer of 2025, and appears to have accelerated due to a gradual increase in AI notes that were rated “helpful” and a decrease in human notes. (The recent blue spike in the chart shows a surge in human-written notes that came in the early days of the Iran War.)

You can view and filter the data in our free interactive dashboard. — Alexios

📍 The EU Commission, Council, and Parliament banned the use of entirely AI-generated visuals in official communications.

📍 Nota is a company building AI tools for news organizations. Poynter reports that it also ran a local news service endorsed by Microsoft that ripped off some of its clients. The news service has now shut down.

📍 The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI’s Sora was losing as much as 1 million dollars a day and its usage had dwindled to about 500,000 users. Maybe slop doesn’t sell!

Aleksandra Bielska, the head of training at i-intelligence, shared a great tip about how to create a custom RSS feeds for the Internet Archive:

I ran a test with the keyword “disinformation” and was served a feed of recently archived webpages and videos. — Craig

📍 Google Earth released a new satellite imagery dataset “that provides a more detailed, actionable historical snapshot of the Brazilian landscape to help protect Brazil’s forests.” More info here.

📍 Geointel is “an AI-powered geolocation analysis tool that uses pixel-level visual analysis and contextual reasoning — powered by Google Gemini AI — to help identify locations from images.” It’s developed by Timothy Wratten. Note that you need to have a Gemini API key.

📍 Also in geolocation, you can read “Open Source Intelligence (OSINT): AI-Powered Image Geo-location” by Aircorridor at Hackers Arise. They walk through how to use the Geoguessr custom GPT for AI-assisted geolocation.

📍 The OSINT Newsletter published a detailed walkthrough of how to install and use TheBigBrother, a free open-source tool that can research someone’s digital footprint, among other tasks.

📍 Maxim Marshak made 47 updates to his OSINT Repos List, a structured dataset of GitHub repos of OSINT tools.

📍 Peter Allwright wrote, “OSINT Tradecraft: Finding People Who Do Not Want to Be Found.”

📍 Rowan Philp of the Global Investigative Journalism Network wrote, “Tips for Investigating Right-Wing Influencers and Podcasters.”

📍 GIJN also held a workshop with Henk Van Ess on detecting AI-generated content. You can watch for free:

📍 Indicator will have its first in-person event at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy on April 16! W joined with Fundación Maldita.es, Pagella Politica, and the Wikimedia Foundation to host an aperitivo at The Chocolate Bar. eDetails and link to RSVP are here. Attendance is reserved for members so if you’re attending IJF, why not become a member so you can join us?

📍 Marc Owen Jones, an academic who researches disinformation in MENA, launched a dashboard that visualizes data from Meta’s quarterly adversarial threat reports. It analyzes “214 coordinated inauthentic behaviour and adversarial threat operations identified by Meta across 70 countries, spanning April 2018 to Q4 2025.”

📍 The UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee published a report on “Disinformation diplomacy.” It recommends increased funding for the Foreign Office’s Hybrid Threats Directorate and the BBC World Service. It also calls for the creation of an “AI counter disinformation sandbox” to facilitate experimentation.

📍 In more parliamentary reports news, Australia’s Senate's select committee on information integrity on climate change and energy made 21 recommendations in its final report. Most focus on increasing transparency, according to ABC News.

📍 A study in Science tested 11 LLMs and found they were on average 49% more sycophantic — i.e. flattering and overly supportive of their interlocutor’s ideas — than humans. This was true even when a human displayed unethical, illegal, or immoral behavior. (The paper’s methodology made headlines last year for engaging on the r/AmItheAsshole subreddit without disclosure; one researcher called it “the worst internet-research ethics violation I have ever seen, no contest.”)

📍 Correctiv found a group of at least ten German-language Facebook pages that spread clickbaity election misinformation. The pages were run from Vietnam and are part of the network that Craig has been monitoring for a while (he’s also quoted in the piece).

📍 Graphika published a helpful report that looks at how AI nudifiers have marketed themselves across social media (with generous shout-outs to Indicator’s reporting). The company found instances where Grok discussed which tools provide the best AI nudification services. (It takes one to know one, I guess.)

📍 A reporter for The Guardian showed how the reviews-for-pay ecosystem works by writing some himself. He dug into the “growing industry of online scams that is undermining trust in the customer reviews that are a vital part of e-commerce and costing consumers billions of pounds a year in misdirected spending.”

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