All tasks

Monitoring news and social media at scale

Following news and social media at a scale no one person can read, without building a list that puts people at risk.

Outcome

A focused monitoring log that captures relevant items, preserves source context, and separates a signal worth checking from a claim ready to publish.

Data gate

  • Public: public posts, broadcasts, and news pages can use approved collection, translation, and classification tools.
  • Internal: keyword lists, source priorities, draft findings, and investigation patterns require an approved account or local route.
  • Identifiable: protected source lists, private groups, private links, and profiles of individuals stay out of consumer cloud tools.

Use AI when

  • The monitoring question, source set, time window, and relevance rule are defined first.
  • You need deduplication, translation, clustering, or prioritization for human review.
  • The original URL, timestamp, and capture are preserved.

Do not use AI when

  • Engagement is being used as a substitute for importance or truth.
  • A search query or connector would reveal a protected person or investigation.
  • The model is expected to decide authenticity, intent, or harm without evidence.

Workflow

  1. Prepare: write one monitoring question, approved sources, languages, time window, exclusions, and escalation rule.
  2. Process: collect items with source metadata, remove duplicates, and group them for review.
  3. Verify: open the original, check date and context, seek corroboration, and record uncertainty.
  4. Store or alert: preserve evidence appropriately and send a reviewed alert that distinguishes observation from assessment.

Human verification checklist

  • The original item, account, URL, and timestamp are preserved.
  • Translation and quotation were checked in context.
  • Reposts, satire, recycled media, and coordinated duplication were considered.
  • The monitoring list itself is stored at the right sensitivity level.

If it fails

Narrow the sources and question, inspect false positives, and rewrite the relevance rule. If the tool cannot preserve source context, use it only for discovery and keep the official log manually.

Start next

Use the tools and recipes below only after the monitoring question and data class are fixed. A shared verification workspace can organize review, but it cannot supply the verdict.

Prompts for this task

  • Public material only

    Turn a week of headlines into a digest

    15 minutes · Gives you short sections · Works on a phone

    Answer in [ANSWER LANGUAGE], even if the material below is in another language.
    
    Below is a list of published items from this week: headline, outlet, date, and a link or a short extract for each.
    
    Rules:
    1. Use only the items below. Add no background from your own knowledge.
    2. Group them into themes. Name each theme in plain words.
    3. Merge items that report the same event into one line, and list every outlet that reported it. If two outlets contradict each other, keep both versions in that line and write CONTRADICTION.
    4. Mark SINGLE SOURCE where only one outlet reports something.
    5. Dates may arrive in mixed digits: ١٢٣ alongside 123. Copy each date as it appears in the item.
    6. Do not judge whether a claim is true. If an item does not say who or when, write "the item does not say".
    
    Give me, in this order:
    A. The themes, most reported first. Under each theme, one line per item: what is claimed, which outlet, what date.
    B. Everything marked SINGLE SOURCE or CONTRADICTION, as one list.
    C. What is missing: which of these stories has no follow-up, and which claims nobody has answered.
    D. Five lines a colleague could read aloud in a meeting.
    
    Items:
    [PASTE THE ITEMS]
    How to use it
  • Public material only

    Watch one topic for a week with no budget

    15 minutes · Gives you a checklist · Works on a phone

    Answer in [ANSWER LANGUAGE], even if the material below is in another language.
    
    Build me a weekly routine for watching one topic. I have no paid tool and no budget. I will run every search by hand on a phone.
    
    The topic: [WRITE THE TOPIC IN A FEW WORDS, AND THE PLACE NAME IF IT HAS ONE]
    
    Rules:
    1. You cannot search. Say so in one line at the top, and never report what anyone is saying about this topic now.
    2. Search phrases only. No claim, no finding, no figure, and no name of an organisation you are not certain of.
    3. Public sources only. Nothing that needs a login, a payment or a private group.
    4. Do not ask me about my organisation, my colleagues or our funding. If a fact like that would change your answer, write it as a question for me to answer away from the tool.
    5. Everything must fit inside thirty minutes a week.
    
    Give me, in this order:
    A. Eight to twelve search phrases. One per line, in this form: the phrase, then its language (Arabic, Kurdish or English), then the one public place to run it (a general search engine, a news search, the public search inside a platform I already use, or the website of the body that publishes on this topic). Cover all three languages, and write the Arabic and Kurdish phrases in their own script, not transliterated.
    B. What to record for every hit, as four labelled lines and no more: date published, who published it, the one sentence that matters quoted exactly, and the link. Copy dates exactly as written, including mixed digits: ١٢٣ alongside 123.
    C. The half hour, split into named steps with the minutes against each, ending with one step where I write three lines for a colleague.
    D. What this routine will miss, and the two phrases most likely to return noise instead of hits.
    
    Do not run the searches. Write the routine.
    How to use it
  • Public material only

    Check whether posts only look coordinated

    15 minutes · Gives you short sections · Works on a phone

    Answer in [ANSWER LANGUAGE], even if the material below is in another language.
    
    Below are public posts that look coordinated to me. Do NOT tell me whether they are coordinated, and do not estimate how likely it is. I need to know what to check.
    
    Rules:
    1. Never conclude that coordination happened. That conclusion is mine to reach or to drop.
    2. Replace every account with Account 1, Account 2 and so on. Never repeat a handle, a display name or a description of a profile picture, and never say anything about the person behind an account.
    3. Report only what is in the posts below. Do not add background from your own knowledge.
    4. For every pattern, give the innocent explanation as well. Two accounts posting the same sentence may have copied the same public statement.
    
    Give me, in this order:
    A. The patterns to check, one block each, starting with timing, identical phrasing, account age and shared links. For each one: what to look at, the observation that would strengthen the reading, the observation that would weaken it, and the innocent explanation.
    B. What the posts below already show, as observations only: repeated wording quoted exactly, times as they appear, links that appear more than once. No conclusion.
    C. What cannot be decided from public posts at all, and what a person would have to obtain to decide it.
    D. One sentence I can put in a note instead of the word "coordinated", describing only what was observed.
    
    The posts:
    [PASTE THE POSTS, WITH THE TIME AND THE DATE ON EACH]
    How to use it

Tools that help with this

  • Never for sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq
  • Only approved or redacted sensitive materialHas a free versionWe do not know whether it works in Iraq

Step-by-step guides for this

Last checked: 2026-09-01