Arbiter is a cross-platform investigation tool that helps local journalists trace narratives, networks, and influence operations across nine major social media platforms, from X and TikTok to Reddit and Telegram. Built by the nonprofit SimPPL to fill the void left by CrowdTangle’s 2024 shutdown, the project will advance new methods for cross-platform retrieval, theme discovery, and AI agent evaluation, then pilot the toolkit with local newsrooms covering the U.S. midterms to produce evidence-backed investigations of digital manipulation. Every output includes its full reasoning and source posts as a verifiable evidence chain, equipping reporters without technical backgrounds to investigate stories that today move faster than any single newsroom can follow.
Arbiter2026-2027
