🔔 New publication alert: My article on the prospects of visual investigative journalism was just published with open access in Digital Journalism👇

i made a version of wikipedia you can doomscroll
xikipedia.org

I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI – and it only took 20 minutes I found a way to make AI tell you lies – and I'm not the only one.

I got a tip that all over the world, people are using a dead-simple hack to manipulate AI behavior. It turns out changing what AI tells other people can be as easy as writing a blog post *on your own website*

I didn’t believe it, so I decided to test it myself www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Graph of new public github repositories by year, titled "Open-source activity by newsrooms is in decline"

The open-source culture that defined an earlier era of online journalism has collapsed, writes @kleinmatic.bsky.social and @palewi.re:

source.opennews.org/articles/jou...

As goes the Washington Post: US democracy takes another hit under Trump Jeff Bezos’s axing of more than 300 jobs at the storied newspaper has renewed fears about the resilience of America’s democracy to withstand Trump’s attacks

As goes the Washington Post: US democracy takes another hit under Trump

A Journalist Who Looks for Clues in Plain Sight

Whoa - The @nytimes.com's Visual Investigations unit has grown to a 21-person team per fresh interview with @trbrtc.bsky.social:

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/i...

Min løsrivelse fra USA begynder her. Hvad der sker, når man fjerner amerikansk tech fra sit liv 30 dage uden amerikansk tech. Hvad kan gå galt?

Den neste måneden kommer ikke Zetland-journalist @astakongsted.bsky.social seg inn på jobben, verken fysisk eller i avisas digitale system (slack, e-post, telefon). I serien "Killswitch" skal hun etter planen leve helt uten amerikansk tech www.zetland.dk/historie/seP...

A scrappy story-sharing tool with local newsroom DNA gains traction Plucky Wire was incubated in an unlikely place for a journalism technology: the tiny Granite State News Collaborative. Now, it's being used by hundreds of outlets countrywide.

everyone in local news says collaboration is key. they also say it can be a pain.

enter Plucky Wire, a scrappy startup incubated @granitestatenc.bsky.social.

www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/a-sc...

Ah, thanks for the heads up and for doing that! Localized mine to Norwegian before it will see an early sunset :)

For all the proper news nerds on Bluesky I set up a version of the essential Twitter bot by @kleinmatic.bsky.social: posting whenever a news org opens a new public repo on GitHub👇

When just showing the video isn’t enough: Minneapolis shooting puts news organizations to the test When everyone has seen the same videos, what service do news sites provide?

In the aftermath of Good’s killing by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, it’s clear some news organizations were better equipped than others to analyze the visual evidence provided from bystander videos. www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/when...

Highlighting this list: bsky.app/profile/did:...

Briefing: Liam Neeson narrated an antivax documentary Plus: tools for analyzing Reddit and visualizing network graphs.

Thank you @craigsilverman.bsky.social for highlighting my Nieman prediction for 2026 in this briefing. A top tip for the year to come is following @indicator.media to build your visual investigative skills → indicator.media/p/briefing-l...

A visual verification tax comes due "You either invest in visual verification capabilities now or pay the price in credibility later."

“You either invest in visual verification capabilities now or pay the price in credibility later,” @stalebg.bsky.social writes.

www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/a-vi...

AI Slop Is Spurring Record Requests for Imaginary Journals The International Committee of the Red Cross warned that artificial intelligence models are making up research papers, journals and archives

If my reading is correct, UVaLibrary.bsky.social estimates that 15% of questions it receives are about references made up by ChatGPT.

This represents a huge waste of time for its staff as “it is much harder to prove that a unique record doesn’t exist” → www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-s...

"The paramedic who filmed the video was later found with a bullet in his head in the mass grave."

Visual investigations become a mainstay of news "Visual investigations are poised to move from niche desks to standard operating procedure in newsrooms in 2025."

"Journalists will need to pair technical verification with contextual analysis to uncover what visual material reveals, what it excludes, and how it shapes competing narratives," @stalebg.bsky.social writes.

Each year, we ask some of the smartest people in journalism and media what they think is coming in the next 12 months.

Now you can follow this year's Nieman Lab Predictors to keep up with their insights in 2025:
bsky.app/starter-pack...

Advanced Solar Geolocation Tutorial: Proof of Concept 1 Recently, I worked with Bellingcat to develop the Shadow Finder. Previously, people mostly combined the sun and a location to find the…

Advanced Solar Geolocation Tutorial:
For everyone who works with geolocation or chronolocation, I wrote a guide for new method to locate images based only on the time and *a part* of a shadow.
In this scenario, object heights and full shadows are not necessary anymore.
medium.com/@gaborfriese...

Media industry platform adoption of Bluesky moving at lightning pace; the @financialtimes.com has a proper handle and is already using bluesky posts in their stories

New bot alert 🤖🚨This tracks the use of bluesky across a range of international news outlets, showing which skeets are embedded in articles. Check it out at @citations.bsky.social

There’s now a way for journalists to verify their Bluesky accounts through their employers (while still keeping control of them) It may be too late for @edwardrmurrow.cbsnews.com, @huntersthompson.rollingstone.com, or @mikewallace.60minutes.com, but today's reporters have another way to prove who they are on the rapidly growing...

New by me —>

There’s now a way for journalists to verify their Bluesky accounts through their employers (while still keeping control of them)

www.niemanlab.org/2024/12/ther...

Historical maps help us understand how countries have developed over time YouTube video by Stockholm University

Stockholm University's amadestam.bsky.social & team are making an "historical Google Earth" by digitizing 1.8 milion aerial photos from 60 countries (comissioned by 🇬🇧 between '39-'99). Potentially a very valuable source for doing historic visual investigations/OSINT: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABvM...

Denne kontoen følger med på hvilke skeets som siteres i skandinaviske nettaviser 🤖

Sill Sill streamlines your Bluesky and Mastodon feeds to give you a clear picture of what's happening.

Excited to announce the public beta for Sill, my new link collection tool for Bluesky and Mastodon! Sill connects to your accounts and watches your timelines for new links. It then aggregates those and shows you the most popular links in your network. Yes, it's like Nuzzel. Sign up at sill.social!

Traffic from Bluesky's @bsky.app to @theguardian.com is already 2x that of Threads

In its first week on the platform & with 300k followers, Bluesky traffic from @theguardian.com posts is already higher than it was from TwX in any week in 2024, where the account had 10.8m followers, but🧵

Et skjermbilde fra TV 2s sending. Jarle Roheim Håkonsen holder opp en stor plakat hvor det står "Avtale mot bruk ac deepfakes stortingsvalget 2025"

TV 2 melder at samtlige stortingspartier har underskrevet en avtale (i regi av IKT Norge) om å ikke bruke "deepfakes" i forbindelse med stortingsvalget neste år. Det skal også omfatte "humor og satire".

I made a starter pack for journalism thinkers on Bluesky. Let me know who I've missed! go.bsky.app/aWdSPb

New feed on open source journalism 📍

For more on verification, visual investigations, open source investigations and OSINT – mostly in a journalistic context– start here (will be updating! ⚠️)

go.bsky.app/JqCpSro