Open Measures 2022 Retrospective

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 in the interest of public safety.

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 alleged Russian war criminals in Ukraine via open source material.

  • This was part of a larger effort aimed at exposing Kremlin-backed 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.

• We also reported on BitChute knowingly hosting 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 Graph for exploring cross-platform threats, a cutting-edge tool across industry and academia that turns flat data into complex relations that better explain online threats.

By natively supporting queries across multiple platforms along a range of connections, we hope to empower users to spot things like state-backed disinformation and astroturfing and to identify 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 our Media Application, 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, within Open Measures' datasets.

Community

Currently, Open Measures engages its community across three main mediums: our blog on Substack, 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 alleged war criminals identified from our VK datasets has seen almost 10,000 engagements. 

We regularly observe testimonials from researchers, activists, and other organizations highlighting the utility of our research and tools. These examples show users exploring Open Measures to unlock new insights and defend themselves against online hate campaigns.

Over the last year, Open Measures was also 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 searching and archiving information on fringe platforms as well as 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

  • 340,000 videos

  • 200,000 comments

• Telegram

  • 332 million posts

• TikTok

  • 27 million posts

  • 68,000 videos

• Truth Social

  • 26 million posts

  • 550,000 users

• VK

  • 400 million posts

  • 7 million users

  • 15,000 groups

• Wimkin

  • 16.3 million posts

  • 60,000 users

Gratitude

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