In June’s episode of Show & Tell, Omer Benjakob, the disinformation and cyber reporter for Haaretz, revealed how he and colleagues infiltrated a shady disinformation-as-a-service operation dubbed “Team Jorge.”
Omer worked with international collaborators on a seminal series that shed light on the inner workings of “Team Jorge” and how its product generated inauthentic social media activity at scale.
But the core product of this industry, according to Omer, isn’t clickbaity false content but the fake humans spreading it. These “avatars” are built on real identifiers like SMS-verified phone numbers, in-country IPs, and working email accounts. As he put it on the show, "Jorge's avatars are realer than my mom.”
You can watch the episode above or on our YouTube channel.
We also discussed a recent collaboration with Libération that investigated a smear operation targeting French mayoral candidates. This operation – conducted by an Israeli firm that called itself “BlackCore” – was mentioned in a report released last week by Viginum, the French agency that monitors for foreign interference.
In the "Show" half of the episode, Omer walked us through the AI-powered toolkit he built to structure and support his reporting. Omer was initially skeptical of AI as a “hype cycle that is mostly compensating for the enshittification of Google.” But he has now found value in use cases that boost his capacity to investigate digital deception. (That’s similar to our experience.)
Omer’s toolkit includes a bespoke transcriber trained on Hebrew and English that keeps his source conversations out of the cloud; a tool that structures and searches all of his screenshots; and an automated pipeline for ordering and analyzing corporate registry documents.
About Show & Tell
Show & Tell is a monthly podcast hosted by Indicator co-founders Alexios Mantzarlis and Craig Silverman.
We talk about digital investigations with leading journalists, OSINT investigators, threat analysts, and trust and safety researchers. We aim to be as practical as possible by having our guests walk us through one or more investigations or analyses they actually worked on.
This is our fifth episode. Our previous episodes featured:
Barbara Marcolini, visual investigator with Amnesty International's Evidence Lab and formerly founding member of the Visual Investigations team at The New York Times.
Clara Jiménez Cruz, CEO of the nonprofit Spanish fact-checking and digital investigative outlet Maldita.
Jeff Horwitz, an investigative reporter for Reuters who has focused on the scam economy and Meta’s platforms.
Kolina Koltai, a senior researcher and trainer at Bellingcat, the award-winning nonprofit investigative outlet.
We hope you enjoy and learn from the conversation with Omer. Catch every episode by subscribing to our YouTube channel. We're also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Have a suggestion for who we should feature next? Email us.
