Indicator is a 2026 global winner of the World Association of News Publishers Digital Media Awards 2026 in the "Best in Countering Disinformation" category.
Indicator’s reporting on AI nudifiers received the inaugural CJF Hinton Award for Excellence in AI Safety Reporting
If you’ve been paying attention to the world of misinformation and disinformation for the past decade, you know the names of Craig Silverman and Alexios Mantzarlis.
Joshua Benton
Senior Writer, Nieman Lab
Alexios Mantzarlis
I am a recovering fact-checker and tech worker. I care about how we generate, verify, and disseminate facts at scale to support healthy democratic societies.
More about Alexios
Craig Silverman
I’ve spent more than 15 years researching and reporting on how our information environment is being manipulated. I’m obsessed with learning and teaching new digital investigative and OSINT techniques.
More about CraigUpgrade your skills and knowledge
An Indicator membership provides essential intelligence to make you a better investigator, researcher, reporter, or trust and safety professional.
Indicator is trusted by professionals worldwide to keep them on the cutting edge of digital investigative techniques and to understand trends and threats in digital deception and information integrity.
Member Benefits
A membership provides access to all of our content, guides, and research plus a monthly workshop.
Intelligence & Reporting
Exclusive reporting and investigations that expose deceptive operations and reveal the actors manipulating the information environment.
Systemic audits of digital platforms that seek to quantify company compliance with stated policies, executive commitments, and regulatory requirements.
Skills
A monthly workshop that offers live walkthroughs of investigations, tools, and techniques. Plus, access to our full archive of workshop videos, slides, and transcripts.
Hands-on guides to OSINT and digital investigative tools and techniques that help both professionals and motivated citizens become better investigators.
Coming up: access to two self-paced online courses on OSINT and investigating digital safety.
Founding Members only: A 30 min one-on-one or small group consultation or presentation per year delivered by Craig or Alexios.
Tools
OSINT Navigator, a database that allows investigators and researchers to search through thousands of open source intelligence tools to find the right one for your investigation.
Interactive dashboards that we build as part of our investigations, including the AI Notes dashboard and Grok, is this true? trackers.
Coming up: a suite of tools to power your investigations with AI part of a dedicated Lab tier, and structured access to the data underlying our investigations.
What Indicator members say
If you aren't following the work of Craig Silverman and Indicator you should be -- amazing info, tools & tips coming out all the time about managing this disordered information universe we're inhabiting.
Nicole Blanchett
Associate professor, Toronto Metropolitan School of Journalism
Alexios and Craig have built something exceptional with The Indicator. For folks serious about strengthening their OSINT skills and closing gaps that enable malign actors, their workshop is a must-attend!
Ruben Gomez
Researcher and former trust & safety worker at Reddit and Twitter/X
Packed with sharp insights on disinformation, open-source investigations, fact-checking, and media manipulation and analyzing ads campaigns. A mix of weekly briefings, deep-dives, and practical guides for anyone working with information online.
Alicja Pawłowska
OSINT analyst
Take your investigations to the next level
The indicator lab
The Indicator Lab gives you access to investigative agents, always-on monitoring, and the expert support to make AI work for you. Track a ship. Watch a website for changes. Research a company. Monitor a social media profile.
The Indicator Lab’s suite of tools and professional support integrates AI into your investigative workflow. Unleash agents that are grounded in established OSINT methodologies, can access the OSINT Navigator database of tools, and that use exclusive skills based on Indicator's ever-growing library of investigative guides and techniques. All of this, plus guidance from Indicator and AI-powered investigations expert Tom Vaillant, who built the tools.
Use your existing AI subscription to run the core Lab tools, or operate everything on your own machine with a local model with one easy installation. Learn more.
Investigative Agents
Your agents help you collect data, background a person or online account, analyze a crypto wallet’s transactions, and more. You approve the plan and methodology, and oversee the entire process.
One agent pushes the investigation forward. A second agent checks the claims, looks for contradictions, and flags information worth a second look.
Plug it into Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI application. You can even run a local model on your machine. No technical skills needed.
Monitoring & Data
Use agents to monitor changes to web pages, social media accounts (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, X), aircraft, ships, keywords, and government sites.
New information and updates get screenshotted, sent via email, and stored in a database that you or your agent can search through records.
Agents can also pull information from corporate registries and other public data sources.
Expert Guidance
Learn from Tom’s experience using AI for investigative reporting via monthly workshops, Office Hours, and the dedicated Lab newsletter.
Whether you’re already experimenting with AI or want to try it out, we’ll get you set up and thriving.
Our Impact
Holding platforms & people accountable
Indicator’s reporting has driven platforms to remove 670 accounts, pages and channels, along with 6,032 individual policy-violating items; the total reach of the associated networks was roughly 2.8 billion views. Check out more details on our impact here.
