OSINT: A Remedy for the Ills of Conspiracy Groups

There’s perhaps a tendency to downplay the negative impact of conspiracy theorists. We often look upon proponents of these wild ideas as credulous discontents, whose silly—or half-crazed—beliefs are ridiculous, but not really a cause for serious concern. And in any case—some might add—are we in a position to say what people should and shouldn’t believe, even if we think they’re deluded?

The problem is that conspiracy groups—and the beliefs they promote—can detrimentally impact societies in a serious way, in light of which there is a duty to keep such things in check. So in this article, we’re going to look at the ramifications of such groups and beliefs, and discuss how OSINT can provide a powerful response to counter the issue.

Conspiracy Groups and the Threats They Pose

Let’s just kick off with a quick definition. Conspiracy groups are communities who share and promote unverified or false beliefs about clandestine plots orchestrated by powerful entities, such as governments, corporations or secret organizations. It’s fair to say that such groups need to be monitored, as they are not merely benign clubs—they can actually hold various threats to society.

Civil Unrest

When people are in the grips of fervent belief, and when those beliefs are largely focussed on abuses of power, radicalization can spill over into actual civil disruption. This is not to say that all protests are bad of course—but when unrest leads to the breakdown of law and order, the destabilizing effects are clearly not healthy for society. 

As a case in point, the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021, were in part agitated by the infamous, cult-like conspiracy group, Q-Anon. The riots resulted in one death, hundreds of injuries including 140 police casualties, and $30M dollars-worth of property damage. 

The Spread of Disinformation

We live at a time when information can spread like wildfire, through social networks and media outlets. And it can be extremely challenging to sift the truth from a distorted version of it, or even an outright falsehood. But disinformation isn’t merely an abstract problem—by spreading pernicious beliefs, conspiracy groups can ultimately stoke antisocial behaviour and instability.

Reputational Damage

By definition, the beliefs of conspiracy groups implicate prominent organizations, institutions, companies, and individuals, in some shocking activities. The defamation resulting from the spread of such implications can hit companies hard financially, plague careers, and do all kinds of damage. 

Using OSINT to Counter Conspiracy Groups

Given that online chats, communities, and forums are the lifeblood of conspiracy groups, OSINT tools and techniques can offer a highly effective point of entry for researching and investigating such groups and their activities. Here are some ways in which our flagship solution, SL Crimewall, can make headway into such cases.

Infiltrating Groups

While a lot of these groups do not have an obvious public presence on mainstream social media for instance, with the right search techniques, it’s possible to fish them out (from both the Surface and Dark Web) and even gain access. For these purposes, Crimewall offers a range of highly effective, advanced methods, including [Google] Advanced Search, [Twitter] Advanced Search, and [SL Darknet] Search in Deep Web.

Social Graphing

Conspiracy groups can be extensive in scale and have a complex form, with people’s involvement ranging from peripheral to central. By elaborating social graphs, Crimewall users can get a user-friendly picture of a given group. Such graphs allow researchers to conduct in-depth link analysis, map out group structures and hierarchies, and gain actionable insights.

Narrative Analysis 

Crimewall’s advanced features leverage large language models to make very light work of text analysis, giving clear results in an instant, and providing insights into huge quantities of content. The Named Entity Recognition (NER) feature allows users to quickly extract semantic objects from a given text, while the ChatGPT suite of tools provide powerful topic extraction, summarization, and sentiment analysis options for understanding vast amounts of textual content without needing to read through it all.

Timeline Construction

While it’s crucial to understand how profiles, posts, and other data points are connected in terms of authorship or association, the time at which certain interactions or connections occur may also be critical for understanding events, verifying hypotheses, and more. Well, an intuitive Timelines feature for organizing data chronologically is soon coming to SL Crimewall—watch this space!

Fake Profile Analysis

Those who spread conspiracy theories and pernicious disinformation are often smart enough to not do so under their own name—rather, sock puppet accounts are created for this purpose. The advanced search capabilities of Crimewall support a range of techniques for deanonymizing fake profiles.

Further Countermeasures

Unearthing and analyzing conspiracy groups is a huge step in combatting them, but to actually work against their impact in the public sphere, further actions are needed.

Raising Awareness

Engaging in public debate is a good way to debunk conspiracy theories, and discredit their proponents. Public educational projects are one potential platform for offering effective counternarratives that can quell disinformation.

Promoting Transparency

Governments and companies need to take proactive measures to regain the trust of their citizens or customers. By focussing their practices and PR on transparency and accountability, organizations can challenge the disaffection that leads many to buy into conspiracy theories.

Working with Platforms

All mainstream social media platforms have policies aimed at cracking down on the spread of disinformation. By keeping their eyes peeled and reporting profiles or groups that raise red flags, all users can contribute to the data authenticity of their informational environments.

If you’d like to learn more about how Social Links tools can be used to counter disinformation, get in touch. Simply follow the link below and we’ll set up a personalized meeting where you can get answers to your questions and see our solutions in action.