How a Haaretz reporter infiltrates companies offering disinformation-as-a-service
Show & Tell from IndicatorShow Notes
In this episode of Show & Tell, Craig and Alexios talk with Omer Benjakob, the disinformation and cyber reporter for Haaretz.
Omer worked with international collaborators on a seminal series of investigations into “Team Jorge,” a shady marketing operation that claimed it could help him and his collaborators interfere with an election in sub-Saharan Africa.
He calls the product that Team Jorge and similar companies offer "disinformation-as-a-service" (or DaaS, a term he’s hoping will catch on). We also discussed his more recent collaboration with Libération into a smear operation targeting French mayoral candidates.
What you'll learn: 📍 Insight into why fake accounts are the core element of disinformation-as-a-service,” rather than clickbaity false content. These accounts, or “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.” 📍 How to validate the claims of a shady vendor. To verify Team Jorge could actually do what it pitched, the reporters commissioned a live demo about Emmanuel the emu, a popular TikTok account. They then traced that demo’s results to verify the company’s claims. 📍 How to use AI to support reporting and research. Omer created a bespoke transcription service that can store everything locally on his machine and avoid the privacy risks of saving on the cloud. He also built a searchable repository of screenshots captured during his investigations. A script runs at the end of every day, files every screenshot into a database, runs visual analysis on each file, and lets him semantically search four years of captures.
Thanks to Lead Stories (https://leadstories.com/newsletter), the founding sponsor of Show & Tell. Lead Stories is a global fact-checking organization with journalists working in a dozen languages around the world. Their slogan is "Just Because It's Trending Doesn't Mean It's True." Lead Stories combines old fashion journalism skills with technology to find and debunk false claims on social media. Fact checking is about adding information, not censorship.
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