Craig Silverman

But then the election gave the left its story.

BuzzFeed's Craig Silverman found that in the last three months of the campaign, the top 20 fake election stories on Facebook drew 8.7 million shares, reactions, and comments.

The top 20 real stories from major news outlets drew 7.4 million.

In an interview two days after the election, which I'm quite sure he wishes he could take back now, Zuckerberg waved it off.

That's amazing.

Craig Silverman is an investigative journalist and the co-founder of Indicator, a newsletter that investigates digital deception.

The last time he was on Hyperfixed, we were looking into a scam involving AI-generated obituaries, and Craig helped us understand both why they exist and where they're coming from.

He also found the name and contact information for one of the scammers involved.

And that's, again, the trailer for the PBS Frontline show called Scammed, which aired on September 29, 2026.

I think it's available to anyone in the U.S. I'm not sure about our listeners outside the U.S., but all the links to Becky's book and the Frontline show and my interview with Su Lin Wong and And there was a previous show I did in January of 2023 talking about fraud, outright explicit fraud, intentional fraud within Google's ad business that was reported by Craig Silverman at ProPublica.

You can dive into that as well.

All of that is on the episode page on the Tectonic website, tectonic.fm, T-E-C-H-tonic.fm.

I am Alexis Maniscalco.

And I'm Craig Silverman.

Indicator.media is a resource for professionals and citizens who want to investigate and understand digital deception.

If this is the first time that you're hearing about us, we hope you'll check out our investigations and our workshops.

In this world of fake news and alternate facts, this week we meet someone who has dedicated his career to working out the truth.

Craig Silverman joins us from Canada where he is the co-founder of Indicator, a news research and capacity building service dedicated to understanding how the information ecosystem works or maybe we should say doesn't work.

But thanks for joining us, Craig.

And we really look forward to getting an idea of the work you're doing and its impact in our long interview later in the show.

This, this is why we are all here, and I hope the toolkit helps with that.

It's the open source mindset, isn't it? And, um, as Craig Silverman mentioned last week in, in his talk, uh, he mentioned that, uh, the indicators, uh, toolkit search, um, also includes the Bellingcat tools and Bellingcat toolkit, um, which is amazing.

Shows kind of how we are kind of willing to share the resources that we've collected, uh, with other organizations as well.

Um, and, uh, Craig gave that a shout-out in, in last week's talk, which you can listen back to on our RSS feed or by searching Stage Talks with Bellingcat.

This would be a very useful tool.

And Craig Silverman writes a little bit about it on LinkedIn, as well as linking you to the latest posts of his own newsletter, his own content platform, if you will.

So definitely check that out.

He has a couple of different highlights in his indicator briefing as well that are worth mentioning and taking a look at.

But if you're using good techniques, empirically validated techniques, it at least gives you, you know, maybe a 60% chance of success versus just a coin flip if you were just going in purely cold and had no idea.

When I talked to Craig Silverman, the, the investigative journalist, he-- we were talking about the risks of, you know, confirmation bias and, and such creeping into your a-approach and your view of people, and it's like, you know, the-- it seems like a lot of the art would be avoiding, you know, your own biases and, and trying to keep a clear head, and then B, also knowing the softer skills of how to approach people and, you know, try to, try to manage the situation to get... you know, achieve your objective.

It seems like there's so much skill in that, in that area as well.

Yeah, and it's good, it's good confirmation, right? It can be good confirmation, right? So like this, this sort of characteristics to linguistic style research.

You're listening to a stage talk titled Using AI in Investigations to Uncover a North Korean Hiring Scam.

This week, we were joined by investigative journalist Craig Silverman.

Craig took us inside his investigation of a sophisticated North Korean hiring scam, from fake recruiters and job interviews to malware, online identities, and cryptocurrency.

And through that example, demonstrated how AI can help investigators uncover connections, analyze evidence, and work across vast amounts of online information.

Happy Thursday, all.

Thanks for joining this week's Stage Talk.

Today, we're joined by the wonderful investigative journalist, OSINT expert trainer, and Indicator co-founder Craig Silverman.

At the moment, it feels like the world is being pushed towards using AI as a next step in innovation across almost every industry.