Briefing: X changes its verification messaging and platforms face greater liability in Brazil

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Craig offered a detailed OSINT tutorial about domain-generating algorithms and connecting websites via shared URLs, HTML titles, and favicons.

Alexios found 517 likely AI-generated nonfiction kids books on Amazon. After we reached out for comment, Amazon removed 198 of them. A reader pointed out that the titles are also available on Hoopla, a platform offered by many public libraries.

Also this week, Meta sued the Crush AI network of deepfake nudifiers and introduced new tools to detect ads for these services on Facebook and Instagram. It’s a welcome development that comes too late: Alexios first wrote about Crush AI in September of last year.

📍 X no longer advertises its blue checkmark as a way to “boost your credibility.” Instead, it positions it as a way to “stand out and get boosted reply reach.” This is reportedly a response to the EU’s open investigation into the company’s verification practices.

📍 Brazil’s Supreme Court voted in favor of greater platform liability over content moderation, a move that may lead to greater proactive enforcement against scams. (Alexios wrote about Brazil’s muscular but opaque approach to regulating platforms last September).

📍 Misinformation about the LA protests includes fake ads offering to pay protesters, out of context videos of US Marines, and unfairly maligned bricks. To make things worse, Grok is screwing up its fact checks.

📍 Maldita.es uncovered a network of 59 Facebook pages that masqueraded as local public transit companies in order to phish citizens through fake giveaways.

📍 Several Indian media outlets got fooled by a satirical tweet about an Apple designer getting fired. The false claim spread widely.

📍 404 Media reported that several abandoned domains owned by NPR, Nvidia, Stanford, and the US government were hijacked by spammers.

📍 The Globe And Mail investigated the underground market for Meta account reactivation services.

A month go, Indicator contacted Trustpilot, the online reviews platform. We shared a list of close to 100 websites/businesses that appeared to be part of a large-scale scam operation and often had suspicious 5-star reviews. We also provided links to 11 suspicious reviewer accounts and four business profiles that appeared to have fake 5-star reviews.

Within days, Trustpilot removed all of the 5-star reviews for Majestic Ghostwriting, the company that was the focus of our story about a sprawling network of dubious online businesses connected to a notorious Pakistani company. (Trustpilot later placed a warning label on Majestic's profile that said, “This company’s rating is unavailable due to a breach of our guidelines.”)

But Trustpilot didn’t provide a response for our story and appeared to take no further action against the businesses, reviewer accounts, and company profiles flagged by Indicator. This included an account that used a stock image for its profile photo and others that gave glowing reviews pf multiple business connected to the network, including Majestic. Trustpilot removed the accounts’ reviews of Majestic but left the other 5-star raves untouched. (Examples: 1,2,3.)

After a few weeks of follow-up emails, Trustpilot spokesperson Declan Proudfoot sent a statement, which we’ve excerpted below and shared here in full. — Craig

📍BigBang is a new, free tool from Majd Khalifeh, a journalist with Belgian public broadcaster VRT, that helps gather social media posts about an event or breaking news story. Enter search terms, a location, and date and the tool auto populates GPS coordinates and opens your search in new tabs for Google, Facebook, X, and Instagram.

“I've been training colleagues for the past 10 years on monitoring social media during breaking news (armed conflicts, natural disasters, attacks, etc.),” he told Indicator in an email. “In the middle of the tsunami of high-priced platforms and tools, I felt the need to develop a free (desktop) tool to help me shorten the process and save time during breaking news.”

We tested it with the recent plane crash in India and it worked well. Be sure to enable popups in your browser and remember that it only works on desktop.

📍 MetaBeta is a tool to run a basic website analysis, including IP, SSL cert, meta tags, etc. (via Logan Woodward)

📍 Bellingcat ran 500 geolocation tests using AI models from Google, OpenAI, xAI, Mistral, and Anthropic. It found that “LLMs are no silver bullet. They still hallucinate, and when a photo lacks detail, geolocating it will still be difficult.” See the scores here.

📍 Ritu Gill and Matthias Wilson had a video conversation about “the lack of due diligence when adopting new tools.” Worth watching! (Link goes to a short clip with info on how to register and watch it all for free.)

📍 Braian Arroyo and Marcos Volpe wrote a detailed, Spanish-language guide to using Telegram for investigations. (via The Weekly OSINT Newsletter)

📍 Brett R wrote about the Pivot Point in investigations: “Many investigations go wrong not because they lack data, but because they lack direction. Analysts chase threads that are interesting, but not important. Curiosity becomes a trap and the narrative gets diluted. You end up with a stack of screenshots and saved pages, but no clear picture of what it all means.”

📍OpenAI released a report on the (mostly humdrum) ways that threat actors use its tools to spread disinformation. Case studies include a pro-Kremlin operation spreading Pravda articles in German and a Filipino communications firm promoting President Marcos.

📍Conspirador Norteño took another look at the bot network promoting Undress[.]app on X, where the nudifier has a verified account. On his first pass last week for our article, he had found 334 accounts. Now he has found 954.

📍Two new studies look at the descent of online users into conspiracy worlds. This preprint by Pierri et al. studied the linguistic markers of Redditors who eventually joined r/conspiracy and found evidence of conspiratorial language in their posts long before they actually joined the group. In a paper on IJOC, Alice E. Marwick and Katherine Furl observe that conspiracy-minded online users view “red-pilling” as a heavily evidence-based process — even though it’s a slower one than the term suggests and heavily seeded by disinformation.

Want more studies on digital deception? Paid subscribers get access to our Academic Library with 52 categorized and summarized studies:

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