Inside The Tools & Techniques That Exposed Facebook Transit Scams And TikTok's Polarization Industry
Show & Tell from IndicatorShow Notes
In this episode of Show & Tell, hosts Craig Silverman and Alexios Mantzarlis from Indicator talk with Clara Jiménez Cruz, co-founder and CEO of Maldita.es, a Spanish nonprofit news organization that uses fact-checking, data journalism, and OSINT to expose disinformation and digital deception. Clara gave a hands-on look at three investigations that exposed how platform systems — not just bad actors — enable scams, monetized deception, and child exploitation.
What You'll Learn: -The Transport Scam Network: How Maldita identified 1,075 Facebook pages impersonating public transit authorities across more than 60 countries. She showed the methodology (Facebook page transparency, ad library domain lookups, and DNS data) that scaled a tip into a global database.
-TikTok's Polarization Industry: How hundreds of accounts used polarizing AI-generated political content to take advantage of TikTok's creator monetization program.
-CSAM on TikTok: How Maldita found more than 5,200 AI-generated videos and 3,600 videos of real minors being sexualized on the platform. Clara revealed how TikTok's automated moderation failed to act on their reports, leading to a Digital Services Act enforcement investigation and a referral to Spanish prosecutors. Building Data Where There Is None: How manual spreadsheet annotation of Facebook page IDs and TikTok account IDs lets investigators track accounts that change names, measure coordinated creation times, and build findings that hold up to scrutiny. Working the Comments: Why looking at comment sections — not just content — is what cracked open the CSAM-to-Telegram pipeline.
About Clara Jiménez Cruz: Clara is co-founder and CEO of Maldita.es, a Spanish foundation and nonprofit news organization she co-founded with Julio Montes Moreno and grew into a powerhouse digital investigative outlet.
Links Referenced in Episode: -Maldita.es transport scam investigation: https://maldita.es/investigaciones/20250716/transport-scam-network-international-facebook/ -Maldita.es TikTok polarization investigation: https://maldita.es/investigaciones/20260126/protests-ai-tiktok-money-polarization/ -Maldita.es CSAM/TikTok investigation: https://maldita.es/investigaciones/20251211/predators-tiktok-goldmine-pedophiles/ -MyOSINT Training free bookmarklets: https://tools.myosint.training/
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