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Craig Silverman
@CraigSilverman
Reporter
@ProPublica
investigating platforms, disinfo, digital manipulation. Editor of the Verification Handbook. DM for Signal. @craigsilverman@mastodon.social
JournalistTorontolinktr.ee/craigsJoined March 2007
5,104 Following
53K Followers

Craig Silverman’s Tweets

Craig Silverman
@CraigSilverman
Kudos to
@JuliaAngwin
for starting
@themarkup
and for being such a pioneer of reporting on privacy, platforms, and algorithms. Excited for what you do next!
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Julia Angwin
@JuliaAngwin
I’m sad to report that I am leaving @themarkup to pursue other projects, which I will announce soon. It was an honor and a privilege to found @themarkup five years ago to create an investigative newsroom that integrated engineers and journalists. /1
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Craig Silverman Retweeted
Keri Blakinger
@keribla
For my first story
@latimes
, I went to Mexico and got drugs. Specifically,
@ConnorASheets
and I went to pharmacies, got pills & tested them. Turns out, some are selling oxy & Adderall over the counter – but the pills are actually fentanyl & meth.
latimes.com
Some pharmacies in Mexico passing off fentanyl, meth as legitimate pharmaceuticals
Pharmacies in several Mexican cities are selling counterfeit prescription pills laced with fentanyl and meth and passing them off as legitimate pharmaceuticals.
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Craig Silverman
@CraigSilverman
End of an era, truly. Really hope the new paid tier is reasonably priced.
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Twitter Dev
@TwitterDev
Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead 🧵
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Craig Silverman
@CraigSilverman
Deadline approaching for journalists to apply with "proposals to investigate the funding behind disinformation in a collaborative and cross-border way on any topic" in the Americas. Those selected attend a
@ICFJ
"investigathon" in April in Austin. Apply:
icfj.org
Disarming Disinformation: Apply Now for the 'Investigathon'
ICFJ’s Disarming Disinformation program has a robust track designed to promote collaborative investigations that help to unravel who or what funds disinformation in the Americas.  Very soon you will...
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Craig Silverman
@CraigSilverman
This is one of the methodologies we used as part of a Google ads investigation published in December:
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Craig Silverman
@CraigSilverman
NEW investigation & 🧵: Google runs the world’s biggest ad network, but it conceals most of the publishers it works with and where it places billions of ad $$$. We cracked open one of the world's most lucrative black boxes and found piracy, porn, & fraud: propublica.org/article/google
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Craig Silverman
@CraigSilverman
The new edition of my relaunched Digital Investigations newsletter shows the 5-step process I used to find piracy sites making money with Google ads and identify a key company working with them. All done using free tools (and Google's own data!): digitalinvestigations.substack.com/p/investigatin #osint
digitalinvestigations.substack.com
Investigating Google's Ad Business
Here's a methodology for identifying piracy sites making money with Google ads
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Craig Silverman Retweeted
Craig Silverman
@CraigSilverman
NEW investigation & 🧵: Google runs the world’s biggest ad network, but it conceals most of the publishers it works with and where it places billions of ad $$$. We cracked open one of the world's most lucrative black boxes and found piracy, porn, & fraud:
propublica.org
Porn, Piracy, Fraud: What Lurks Inside Google’s Black Box Ad Empire
Google’s ad business hides nearly all publishers it works with and where billions of ad dollars flow. We uncovered a network containing manga piracy, porn, fraud and disinformation.
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Craig Silverman
@CraigSilverman
The
@pulitzercenter
is offering grants for stories related to science misinformation, science denial, and the spread of pseudoscience. And "journalistic approaches to identifying and addressing the scourge of scientific misinformation and disinformation."
pulitzercenter.org
Science Misinformation: Journalism in the Age of Truth Decay
The Pulitzer Center is seeking applications for in-depth and investigative stories related to science misinformation, science denial, and the spread of pseudoscience. We’re also interested in...
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Craig Silverman Retweeted
Brecht Castel
@brechtcastel
A good example of confirmation bias: You heared something on the news about 🇺🇸 military vehicles being send to Ukraine 🇺🇦 and then you see a video like this... 🤔 Stay critical at all times! 💪 #OSINT for #FactChecking
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Brecht Castel
@brechtcastel
3.3M views for this video by @EuromaidanPress: "American 🇺🇸 infantry fighting vehicles M2 Bradley are spotted in Poland 🇵🇱 [...] toward the Ukrainian border 🇺🇦. " TRUE ✅ or FALSE ❌? Investigate! 🧵👇 1/... #OSINT 🔎 #Verification 🎥 #GeoLocation 🌍 #HowToOSINT 🧐
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Craig Silverman Retweeted
Shayan Sardarizadeh
@Shayan86
Twitter chief Elon Musk and two men with hundreds of thousands of followers ranting about a completely made up "report" about Ukraine tweeted by some random account without even bothering to check if the tweet they're reacting to is actually true or not.
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Craig Silverman Retweeted
alfred 🆖
@alfredwkng
The CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, one of the largest groups in adtech, gave a speech on Monday at a $3999 ticket event where he called proponents of privacy laws "extremists" and "radicals," and listed lawmakers that threatened the industry. In today's Morning Tech:
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Craig Silverman Retweeted
Bianca Lemmens
@sonasi
The Verification Handbook continues to be relevant and was produced to support ALL journalists. Partners such as
@factnameh
are invaluable to this cause. Thank you from
@datajournalism
at
@ejcnet
to our partners and to the handbook's editor
@CraigSilverman
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DataJournalism.com
@datajournalism
Big news! We’re proud to announce the launch of our Verification Handbook for #Disinformation And Media Manipulation in #Persian. Thanks to @FactNameh for their amazing work in helping spread this must-have resource for today’s journalists. bit.ly/3XT7xlx #datajournalism
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Craig Silverman Retweeted
Archit
@ArchitMeta
After months of investigations, interviews, writing, and rewriting, this report by
@akhmxt
and
@Mahaprajna_N
is finally out. If you were following the The Wire / Meta fiasco closely you might wanna read this. 🎢
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Alt News
@AltNews
Diving deep into the professional past of Devesh Kumar, whom The Wire accused of 'forgery and fabrication' after the Meta debacle, Alt News finds a pattern of manipulations, grandstanding & false claims | @akhmxt @Mahaprajna_N altnews.in/devesh-kumar-u
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ProPublica
@propublica
To open Google’s black box ad business, we wrote thousands of lines of code, scanned +7 million websites and analyzed data on millions more domains from data partners. We uncovered a vast network containing manga piracy, porn, fraud & disinformation.
propublica.org
Porn, Piracy, Fraud: What Lurks Inside Google’s Black Box Ad Empire
Google’s ad business hides nearly all publishers it works with and where billions of ad dollars flow. We uncovered a network containing manga piracy, porn, fraud and disinformation.
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Craig Silverman
@CraigSilverman
Thrilled to announce the release of the Persian edition of the Verification Handbook for Disinformation and Media Manipulation! Thank you to
@factnameh
for your hard work, and to
@ejcnet
for the continued support.
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DataJournalism.com
@datajournalism
خبر مهم! مفتخریم از نسخه فارسی «کتابچه راهنمای راستی‌آزمایی برای دیس‌اینفورمیشن و دستکاری‌های رسانه‌ای» رونمایی کنیم. با تشکر از @factnameh برای کار شگفت‌انگیزشان در ترجمه و کمک به بیشتر دیده‌شدن این منبع ضروری برای روزنامه‌نگاران امروز. bit.ly/3XT7xlx #datajournalism
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Craig Silverman Retweeted
foster kamer.
@weareyourfek
BANG—After our reporting last week on the CNET AI's clandestine, error-rife writing, they paused it. Good thing they did. Besides being a shitty writer loose with facts, as Futurism managing editor
@Jon_Christian
reports: It's a serial plagiarist, too.
futurism.com
CNET's AI Journalist Appears to Have Committed Extensive Plagiarism
CNET's AI-generated articles appear to show deep structural similarities, amounting to plagiarism, with previously published work elsewhere.
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Craig Silverman Retweeted
Cassandra Jaramillo
@cassandrajar
NEW: Election deniers Gregg Phillips & Catherine Engelbrecht created a new charity in 2022 aimed at helping children&women affected by Russia’s war in Ukraine. But we found the project fell apart, much like their other initiatives in proving election fraud
propublica.org
Promoters of Election Lies Also Hyped a Hospital for Ukraine. That Never Happened Either.
True the Vote, a group that spread discredited election conspiracy theories, “abandoned” The Freedom Hospital in April 2022, according to its lawyers. Yet board member Gregg Phillips continued to...
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Craig Silverman
@CraigSilverman
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
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Jesse Brown
@JesseBrown
Filed under "World News" in yesterday's @nationalpost, @JosephBrean wrote that the World Economic Forum is like Bildergberg (sp), Freemasons, and THE ELDERS OF ZION. nationalpost.com/news/world/ins
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Craig Silverman
@CraigSilverman
Because I clicked on one crypto scam ad on Twitter in order to document it, a good % of my ads are now variations of the same scam. Every day. Twitter is doing a terrible job detecting these. This is basic stuff, I don’t even think they are cloaking the URLs!
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Craig Silverman Retweeted
Sol Messing
@SolomonMg
🧵Many have asked if our study means Facebook ads don’t do much. Short answer is no—there are huge differences between political persuasion advertising and most ads bought by businesses:
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Evelyn Douek
@evelyndouek
New podcast! @alexstamos and I discuss the findings of two papers about effects of online speech (cameos from authors @j_a_tucker and @SolomonMg); Twitter cutting off API access; public unis cutting off TikTok access & updates from the courtrooms. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mc-
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Craig Silverman Retweeted
Ryan Barwick☕️
@Ryanbarwick
TikTok, which is beta testing search ads, is coming straight for Google in a new spot.
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Karthik 🇮🇳
@beastoftraal
TikTok's new UK campaign (agency: Mother), literally pitches TikTok as a Google alternative! Every query in the ad would have ideally been tried on Google, but the ad cleverly frames it using TikTok instead! In a way, the brief for this ad came straight from Google! 👇 1/4
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