Craig Silverman

YouTube video by Indicator Inside The Tools & Techniques That Exposed Facebook Transit Scams And TikTok's Polarization Industry

Check out the latest episode of @indicator.media Show & Tell!

Maldita.es has been doing some incredible work investigating scams, disinformation, and worse on the biggest tech platforms.

So Craig and I got @cjimenezcruz.bsky.social to walk us through three of them, spreadsheets in hand.

Toronto's @thestar.com sent a cease and desist letter to the creator of the podcast network that @indicator.media wrote about on Wednesday. He has promised to reverse course.

www.thestar.com/opinion/publ...

It’s absolutely a challenge and concern!

They unfortunately often won’t comment on specific accounts. Meta said what action they took at the time but didn’t explain why some accounts were left untouched.

We appreciate your patronage!

Here's a video about my recent investigation into more than two dozen accounts using AI-generated doctors and health professionals to push dubious advice and sell products on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube: indicator.media/p/ai-generat...

This AI-generated podcast network publishes 11,000 episodes a day. It also ripped off media outlets Daily News Now tops search results for local news podcasts with AI content

NEW on @indicator.media:

I found an AI-generated podcast network that has published 350,000 episodes in the past month. That's 11,000 episodes a day, or about one year's worth of audio content.

You'll be shocked to find out it's not generating original material.

The Indicator guide to investigating ecommerce sites A practical walkthrough of the tools, techniques, and indicators used to analyze online stores and identify ecommerce fraud operations.

Ecommerce fraud is rampant. It's also easy to launch and hard to trace.

My new guide to investigating ecommerce sites covers how to ID the store platform, trace ownership, analyze traffic, do a safe test purchase etc. I also found a few free, new-to-me tools: indicator.media/p/the-indica...

Briefing: Tracking the AI takeover of Community Notes Plus: Tools for counting crowd size and generating Google Dorks.

Last week I speculated that by the end of the year a majority of “helpful” Community Notes on X could be AI-generated.

To monitor this sorry milestone (and rate my forecasting abilities), I decided to build a free dashboard that tracks the share of AI notes. Check it out on @indicator.media

Er, Canadian *Medical* Asdociation

Very cool to see the Canadian Media Association's Healthcare For Real project cite our reporting:

San Francisco's city attorney sued the operators of 22 AI nudifiers. He wants others to step up, too. David Chiu, San Francisco's top lawyer, speaks to Indicator

New on @indicator.media: I speak to San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu about his office's landmark lawsuit against 22 AI nudifiers.

“Crying girls will make you rich”: How marketers trick users with mass-produced "organic" content Indicator analyzed UGC campaigns that generated over 2 billion TikTok views and found rampant violations of disclosure rules.

The marketers are bragging about it publicly. The platforms know. The FTC doesn't respond.

And now they're moving to AI-generated creators and overseas stock footage to scale even further.

Full investigation at @indicator.media: indicator.media/p/crying-gir...

Behind it is an industrial operation that figured out how to make advertising invisible.

I found a Miami creator who posted ~300 videos going back 8 months that often say she caught her cheating husband and will leave him "tomorrow."

It's all a paid ad for an app, but users don't know.

The result? Users scroll through feeds unable to distinguish genuine recommendations from paid promotions.

They make decisions about apps, services, and personal data based on what they believe are authentic peer experiences.

→ Creators making misleading or false claims about their lives in order to pitch products

→ Platforms failing to enforce their policies

I analyzed 6+ campaigns, spoke to creators, and interviewed marketers who openly talked about how their ads are "undetectable."

2+ billion views generated by campaigns with rampant violations of TikTok's Branded Content policy, and likely violations of FTC rules for social media endorsements

→ College students recruited to mass-produce "authentic" content

“Crying girls will make you rich”: How marketers trick users with mass-produced "organic" content Indicator analyzed UGC campaigns that generated over 2 billion TikTok views and found rampant violations of disclosure rules.

"Crying girls will make you rich."

That's the actual pitch from a marketer selling packages of emotional videos that brands use to flood TikTok with undisclosed ads.

I just published an investigation into industrial UGC campaigns. What I found is troubling. 🧵 indicator.media/p/crying-gir...

How much does a TikTok account cost? In one prolific WhatsApp group, anywhere between 95¢ and $235

Today on Indicator: How much does a TikTok account cost?

Well, it depends. But on one prolific marketplace I track, you can get a handle for anywhere from 95¢ to $235.

YouTube video by Indicator Using Internal Docs, Burner Accounts and Ad Library Research to Expose Meta's Scam Ad Business

Craig and I were tired of going to the Bar for Newsletter Dudes and getting asked "Bros, do you even *have* a podcast?" -- so we launched one.

Our first guest is @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social of "Facebook Files" fame. Jeff loves LinkedIn and handling bees.

Check out Show & Tell from @indicator.media:

@Grok is this true: How X’s chatbot performs as a fact-checking tool New research explores whether the chatbot might replace the crowdsourced fact-checking program – and what that might mean for getting to the truth on X

New on @indicator.media: "@grok is this true" was the single most frequent reply tagging X's AI chatbot in the six months following its launch.

They are indeed very different! I’m referring to the levels of engagement. The AI accounts I found were doing pretty serious numbers.

AI-generated doctors are dispensing dubious health advice Indicator identified more than two dozen social media accounts that feature synthetic doctors and medical professionals. They've racked up millions of views and engagements.

Synthetic doctors are outperforming real ones on social media. I found more than 25 AI health accounts with +8.5 million followers.

The Canadian Medical Assoc runs a program featuring real doctors. Its prez told me: "I would say that our following is not as large." indicator.media/p/ai-generat...

Intelligent Machines: All The Clocks Were Wrong | TWiT.TV Disinformation expert Craig Silverman joins the crew to break down why AI makes scams and fake news easier, faster, and nearly impossible to spot—while Big Tech quietly

Apple taps Google to power Siri as @leolaporte.me, @jeffjarvis.bsky.social, @paris.nyc, & @craigsilverman.bsky.social discuss tricky AI scams on Intelligent Machines, covering Meta refocusing on AI hardware and Senate's nonconsensual deepfake bill! twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines/episodes/853

Just a heads up that this is the best time to join @indicator.media as a member because it's 20% off.

We'll keep you on top of OSINT tools/trends, build your investigative skills, and deliver exclusive reporting about digital deception/disinfo. Plus monthly workshops!
Info: indicator.media/upgrade

Research from the ISD last summer found dozens of nudification apps and websites, which collectively received nearly 21 million visitors in May 2025. There were 290,000 mentions of these tools on X in June and July last year. Research by the American Sunlight Project in September found that there were thousands of ads for such apps on Meta, despite the platform’s efforts to crack down on them. “There are hundreds of apps hosted on mainstream app stores like Apple and Google that make this possible,” said Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert who co-founded the American Sunlight Project. “Much of the infrastructure of deepfake sexual abuse is supported by companies that we all use on a daily basis.”

This is everyday, run of the mill misogyny, powered by technology created for and by men. To that end, yes, images like this have always existed on the internet; now they’re just more realistic and terrifyingly simple to come by. Add the anonymity of the internet into the mix and you reanimate the behaviors decades of women’s rights campaigning have rightfully outlawed “in real life.” On the internet, we’re told by Elon Musk that it’s just “speech.” Well, the internet is real life, and if a man can’t undress me without my consent on the street, he can’t do it online either.

Glad @americansunlight.org's research with @indicator.media has been cited in @theguardian.com, along w my comment on the infrastructure of deepfakes.

I've included some of the rest of my comment below - "if a man can’t undress me without my consent on the street, he can’t do it online either." 🙅🏻‍♀️

‘Digital desecrations’: when deepfakes are used to mock tragic deaths and what platforms should do about it Synthetic videos of Renée Good are the latest form of technology-facilitated dehumanization

New: I found more than 20 deepfake videos re-enacting or re-imagining the final moments of Renée Good's life.

These videos mocking a tragic death, which I'm calling "digital desecrations," are the most extreme version of a pervasive trend within generative AI of 'resurrecting' the dead.

Indicator has covered this subject extensively. Here's all of our reporting on AI nudifiers, platform failures, and countermeasures in one place: indicator.media/nudifiers-un...

An 18-month study found that fact-checking on Facebook reduced engagement with false info It also identified weaknesses in Meta's fact-checking program, which faces an uncertain future outside the US

It's been exactly one year since Mark Zuckerberg pulled the plug on the US arm of Meta's fact-checking program.

But the program trundles on everywhere else in the world: I was able to confirm the company has renewed many contracts in 2026, albeit at a steep discount.

One example of how Grok is being used to target women. Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch being sexualised, degraded, and humiliated step-by-step by Grok. All the images accurately reflect the prompts provided.