Title: Networked intermediaries: Exploring the role of OSINT communities in verifying public knowledge on digital platforms
Abstract: During Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, new actors beyond journalism, such as open-source intelligence and investigation (OSINT) communities, mobilized to verify and produce public knowledge on digital platforms. Drawing on the Dynamic Intermediary Model (D[X]IM; Ohme et al., 2025) that conceptualizes triadic communicative constellations, wherein emergent intermediaries (here OSINT communities) provide additional services to content flows on digital platforms, we examined in a case study how two OSINT communities processed and verified digitally disseminated information on three events following the invasion and how they interacted with journalists (Charlton et al., 2024).
Biography: Anna-Theresa Mayer (M.A., LMU Munich) is a research associate in the research group “Digital News Dynamics” at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin and a doctoral candidate at the Freie Universität Berlin. In the research group at the Weizenbaum Institute, she explores digital actors’ understandings of intermediation and the fulfilment of public value-oriented services on digital platforms. Her research interests include digital journalism, public value creation and news on social media.
