Tools and tips round up: Searching and using Bluesky, new tools from Bellingcat and Henk van Ess, and more

Bluesky is surging, so here's a rundown of tools and search operators to use on the platform.

Bluesky has experienced an explosion in users and traffic, with upwards a of million accounts being created per day. Lots of journalists, researchers, and OSINTers have joined or stepped up their posting. (This is my account.)

Here’s a rundown of tools and Starter Packs that will help you get the most of Bluesky.

OSINT Starter Packs

Starter Packs are user-created lists of accounts that you can follow with a single click. Here are five Starter Packs filled with accounts that talk about OSINT, geolocation, flight tracking, etc.:

1. OSINT and visual investigations, by Alison Killing

2. OSINT, by OSINT-Research

3. OSINT/Flight Trackers, by Evergreen Intel

4. OSINT Ship Enthusiasts, by Intel Night OWL

5. Bellingcat staff and contributors (past & present), by Bellingcat

You can also follow a Starter Pack filled with my excellent ProPublica colleagues!

Bluesky tools and tips

🔵 Tips and tricks for Bluesky search. A blog post from the Bluesky team that offers an overview of search operators. (They’re very similar to Twitter’s.) Bluesky also wrote a post that describes how to connect your account to a personal or organizational domain name.

🔵 This site has a bunch of useful tools, including:

• Import members from one Bluesky list into another, existing list

• Convert a Bluesky List to a Starter Pack; Convert a Bluesky Starter Pack to a List

• Merge Bluesky Starter Packs

🔵 This site also has tools, including:

• A stats report showing Bluesky user activity

• A directory of labeler accounts. As Bluesky explains, “Labels are annotations on users and content. They can be used to hide, warn, and categorize the network.” For example, there’s a labeler you can subscribe to that hides posts that use a gif, a labeler from OpenSecrets that shows the donors to a US government official, and a labeler that tells you if a UK skeeter (mostly in media and politics) attended a British private school.

Here’s what posts from a US Senator look like when you’ve subscribed to the OpenSecrets labeler:

🔵 Another site with cool tools:

• Global Bluesky Stats

• Get stats on a specific user

• A directory and search tool for Stater Packs (there’s also one here)

🔵 Deck.blue is TweetDeck for Bluesky.

🔵 Sky Follower Bridge is a Chrome plugin to help you find and follow people on Bluesky that you follow on Twitter (via the Forensic OSINT newsletter).

🔵 Bluesky Video Downloader lets you, well, download videos from Bluesky.

🔵 Bluesky has a bunch of free APIs, including the firehose of skeets. Here’s the documentation site.

🔵 Henri Beek offered some helpful OSINT tips for Bluesky.

🔵 The Verge published a guide, “Here’s some cool stuff you can do with Bluesky.”

Tools

📍 Henk van Ess launched Prompt Bakery. He says it helps you “Get sharper chatbot responses on PDFs & uploaded docs—just answer a few questions, and get custom prompts for the insights you need!” Read more here.

📍 K2OSINT created a bookmarklet that can check if a domain has an ads.txt file and then search it on Well-known.dev. (This is particularly cool because they created it after seeing my talk about digital ads at the OSMOSIS conference!)

📍 Glimpse is a free (with registration) tool that shows the Google, LinkedIn and Meta ads that point to a specific domain.

📍 The Common Crawl Archive lets you get “a saved copy of most pages on the internet for every week since October 2014 and less regular data since 2008.” (via

Cyb_detective

)

📍 Dmitry Danilov wrote a great LinkedIn post explaining “How to extract followers from a private Instagram account.”

📍 Aida Kokanovic released a YouTube audio download and transcription script. It “allows you to download audio from YouTube videos, transcribe it using OpenAI's Whisper model, and returns the transcriptions in a structured CSV file.” More here.

📍 OSINT Excellence published a “Collection of +25 OSINT Cheat Sheets with practical and useful tips.”

📍 Dan Cardin created Who Am I, a Chrome extension that uses the WhatsMyName, MineSight, and Sherlock datasets to perform username searches.

📍 Osint Rocks is “A free platform with tools for searching by username, phone number (Instagram and WhatsApp check), email, Google account.”

📍 Reddit Archive is a free tool to search Reddit posts.

📍 Benjamin Strick noted that the web version of Google Earth added historical imagery, which used to only be available in the Pro version.

📍 Bellingcat launched the Bellingcat Filename Finder Chrome plugin. You can read more in Galen Reich’s article, “What’s in a Name? Discovering Clues Hidden in Google Maps Image Filenames.”

📍 Aidan Rainey wrote a helpful LinkedIn post about how to use online tools and databases to research older people. (via Ritu Gill/Forensic OSINT)

📍 They also posted a list of useful OSINT tools for YouTube.

📍

Cyb_detective

shared a link to an archive of all the tools built by participants in the Digital Methods Initiative, a great Internet studies program based in Amsterdam.

📍 They also highlighted Superbolt, a new tool from the makers of GeoSpy. It’s an “AI model for precise street-level photo geolocation.”

From me: new investigation and a webinar

📚 Priyanjana Bengani and I recently published an investigation into deceptive advertiser networks on Meta. We found more than 100,000 deceptive US political and social issues ads across over 200 Facebook pages. Some pages falsely claimed to be run by the government and the ads were rife with deepfakes and false claims. Read it here.

🖥️ I’m giving a one hour webinar for the Knight Center on Dec. 3 at 1 pm ET, “Top new and updated digital tools for journalists in 2024.” It’s a run through of free and paid tools to analyze documents, verify images and videos, background individuals, and more. It’s $40 and you can sign up here.

Worth reading

📚 Griffin Gynn wrote, “Threads.net Is Hiding Some OSINT Secrets You Definitely Need To Know”

📚 Niko Dekens wrote, “Crowd-sourced Mapping Tools for OSINT Investigations”

📚 The OSINT Guide wrote, “How to Find Cryptocurrency Wallet Addresses on Social Media Platforms.” They also published, “Analyze Email Headers With OSINT”

📚 Jeremy Caplan wrote, “How NotebookLM is improving”

📚 Chris Welch wrote, “Google Photos will soon show you if an image was edited with AI”

📚 Henk van Ess wrote, “Chatbot Gets Reading Glasses”

Worth watching

🖥️ The presentations from SkopeNow’s OSINT Live event are available here (with free registration). Read a recap here.

That’s it for this edition of Digital Investigations! Thanks for reading. You can find me on Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and LinkedIn.