The European External Action Service (EEAS) recently published the “OSINT Toolkit to Detect and Analyse IBD-focused FIMI”, redacted by EU DisinfoLab. Following this work and an in-person launch event in Brussels a short while ago, EUDL now invite anyone interested to a webinar in which some of the report’s findings will be discussed and brought to an even wider audience.

The report addresses the intersection of Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) with Identity-Based Disinformation (IBD) and provides guidelines for conducting public-interest open-source intelligence (OSINT) investigations.

Moreover, it develops a toolkit that includes a catalogue of OSINT tools for tasks such as archiving digital evidence, assessing coordination between actors, verifying the authenticity of content and perpetrators, tracing the source of attacks, and evaluating the overall impact of disinformation operations.

In detail, the use of several of our verification plugin features (as developed in InVID, WeVerify and vera.ai) is detailed as a way to

  • assess coordination through temporal and relational indicators through suspicious accounts;
  • verify (in)authenticity through reverse image searching, AI-generated content detection, as well as image forensic and metadata analysis;
  • trace sources through network analysis.

The report furthermore seeks to raise awareness within the OSINT community about adopting an identity-focused lens while equipping victims and activists with tools to detect and analyse incidents, highlighting the practical value of the vera.ai project.

To bring the work and research findings to a larger community, EU DisinfoLab is thus pleased to invite anyone interested to attend a webinar with the report’s authors Maria Giovanna Sessa and Raquel Miguel Serrano (EU DisinfoLab) to present the guidelines and toolkits. The event takes place on 12 December 2024 from 14:30-15:30 CET and will be moderated by Beatriz Marin-Garcia.

Prior registration is required. You can do so here.

Looking forward to welcoming many of you on 12 December!

Author: Inès Gentil (EUDL)

Editor: Jochen Spangenberg (DW)

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