Content laundering is a known method for spreading misinformation. This tactic is used by propagandists in different countries and languages. The Information Laundromat allows you to track networks of disinformation and identify unobvious connections between propaganda resources.
Information laundering, although relatively new, is already well established. term. As with money laundering, the task of information laundering is to hide the original source, to present dubious or false information as reliable, biased as independent and objective. Laundering often looks like this: a message is published on social networks or on forums, artificially promoted there, and then, having passed through several sources in varying degrees related to the news agenda, the (dis)information is somewhat modified, becomes similar to news and ends up in the media, naturally, without indicating the original source. But there are also more complex schemes, one of these in detail described specialists from the BBC's counter-disinformation team.
The Information Laundromat developed by the George Marshall Foundation's Alliance For Securing Democracy (ASD) to analyze information laundering networks. The tool helps analyze the content and metadata of sites distributed on the Internet. The work is based on search engines, the Copyscape plagiarism checking tool and a database GDELT, which significantly expands the capabilities of analytics. GDELT tracks global news in more than 100 languages.
This tool can analyze a link, title or piece of text, and help find websites with similar or identical content and/or architecture.
How does this work
- You enter the URL (list of addresses), title, or piece of text you want to check.
- The system analyzes and evaluates the similarity of your original content with other sites if you are checking the content, or the site structure if you are checking the sites.
- On the results page, sites where similar content was found are sorted by the percentage of similarity to your original source.
- When checking sites, three levels of comparison are offered, the analysis of which can help to understand whether the sites are part of the same network.
False positives as well as false negatives are possible, we saw them in testing, but this only occurs with a short or super popular query that reduces relevance. If you're looking for a quote, the search will be fairly accurate.
The Information Laundry is truly multilingual. A choice of languages is available, including less common ones, for example, Maltese, and a choice of country (domain zone).
An undoubted bonus of the tool is that it can be used not for the intended purpose of the authors, but, for example, to track fraudulent networks. It is also partially suitable for vulnerability analysis.
In addition, it is an open source solution that posted on GitHub. This means you can rework the code, implement your own customizations, and perhaps even improve the tool. However, it is not at all necessary to modify the code; you can simply use it from your work machine or deploy it in the cloud, but this will require relatively advanced skills in working with code and cloud systems.
Conceptual and technical limitations
- The presence of a result in the SERP does not tell us about the intentions of the publisher and does not directly indicate the connection of any site with the laundering network. It is necessary to take into account the context and double-check the results of automatic searches. The Information Laundromat search results themselves are a starting point for further research, not the ultimate truth.
- Since the system uses third-party developments (Google, Bing, etc.), the quality of the results depends on changes in the work of their search and other algorithms, this should also be kept in mind.
- The Laundromat does a great job with media, but the results associated with social media posts are quite lackluster.
- When connected via a VPN, the site may not work, there are restrictions for unregistered users, and it is very difficult to obtain registration. Therefore, it seems more efficient to launch the project locally, on your own machine.
Based on the results of our testing, we can draw the following conclusion: The Information Laundromat is an excellent working tool for a journalist or researcher not only of propaganda, but also of any other information actively disseminated on the Internet. However, it should be borne in mind that the system is not intended to search for the original source, but rather to search for already laundered stories and sites that distribute them. The search for the original source can be organized using other tools, such as TGStat, advanced search or Google custom cars.
