Open Measures 2022 Retrospective

Since Open Measures strives to be accessible and transparent, here is a look back at our major accomplishments in 2022.

Open Measures strives to be as accessible, transparent, and open as possible in order to support researchers working on the edge of the most dangerous aspects of the modern internet. We are deeply honored and grateful to continue this work alongside our community. Read on for a look back at some of our prouder moments of 2022.

Investigations

We had a busy year of research and investigations:

• We performed a massive investigation that identified several hundred Russian war criminals in Ukraine via open source material.
  • This was part of a larger effort aimed at exposing Kremlin atrocities in Ukraine, in which we made additional contributions to OSINT research community materials related to the invasion.
• We also released an investigation on state information attacks on Telegram.
• And then, there was our report on BitChute’s knowing hosting of Holocaust denial content in violation of the UK’s new policies via OFCOM.

Network Graph Tool

We are in the final stage of development of a live point-and-click network graphing tool for exploring cross-platform threats. This tool is completely cutting-edge across industry and academia and turns flat data into the complex relations that actually better explain online threats. By natively supporting queries across multiple platforms along a range of connections we empower users to spot things like state-backed disinformation and astroturfing as well as key players seeding malicious campaigns across a range of platforms. Network Graph solves numerous open problems in the field of OSINT and enables scholarly and journalistic research into these phenomena. For more on our beta release, read here.

Media Application

We created and deployed a media library analysis tool to search contextualized files from a variety of platforms. Our first moves were to share this tool with teams investigating war crimes and false flags in Ukraine. This has allowed researchers to quickly sort through terabytes of media data, like images and videos, that Open Measures collects from the vast sources we crawl.

Community

Currently Open Measures engages its community across three main mediums: our Substack blog, our trusted Slack server and our public Twitter account. All three surfaces have seen user growth in 2022.

The Open Measures research community published many blog posts this year. Our investigative reporting detailing war criminals we found in VK collections has seen almost 10,000 engagements. 

We are regularly observing testimonials from researchers, activists and other organizations in the community which highlight the utility of our research and tools. These examples show users exploring Open Measures to unlock insight and protect themselves from online hate.

Over the last year, Open Measures was additionally able to offer a wide range of OSINT support to media rooms and journalists across the world exploring threats from the fringe internet. We’ve been teaching specific skills related to search and archive on fringe platforms and providing research support on leads provided by journalists in our community.

New Sources

We are extremely excited about the addition of new sources to the Public API and web app. Check them out here:

• Bitchute
  • 13.5 million comments
  • 4.8 million videos
• LBRY/Odysee
  • 3.6 million videos
  • 15 million comments
• MeWe
  • 115 million posts
• Minds
  • 64 million posts
• Rumble
  • 53 million comments
  • 6.5 million videos
• RUTUBE
  • 340k videos
  • 200k comments
• Telegram
  • 332 million posts
• TikTok
  • 27 million posts
  • 68k videos
• Truth Social
  • 26 million posts
  • 550k users
• VK
  • 400 million posts
  • 7 million users
  • 15k groups
• Wimkin
  • 16.3 million posts
  • 60k users

Gratitude

We are incredibly grateful to our amazing community. We couldn’t have built all that we have without a team of dedicated folks rowing in the same direction. Thank you to our community of researchers and contributors. Looking forward to building more together in 2023!

Identify disinformation and extremism with the Open Measures platform.

Organizations use Open Measures’ tooling every day to track trends related to networks of influence, coordinated harassment campaigns, and state-backed info ops. Click here to book a demo.