Sarah Thompson | Lead Stories

Sarah Thompson lives with her family and pets on a farm in Indiana. She founded a Facebook page and a blog called "Exploiting the Niche" in 2017 to help others learn about manipulative tactics and avoid scams on social media. Since then, she has collaborated with journalists in the USA, Canada and Australia. Since December 2019, she has worked as a Social Media Authenticity Analyst at Lead Stories.

Sarah is also a fiber artist and designer. Although these pursuits may seem unrelated to investigations; patience, persistence, pattern analysis, and willingness to pick through a complicated tangle all come in handy no matter if the weaving is her own, or someone else's doing.

She became involved in Social Media investigations quite by accident in the spring of 2016 when a chance encounter with a click-bait publisher captured her attention. He had infiltrated several equestrian Facebook groups with spam-bots designed to look like equestrians. The discovery of additional branches in his network and that he was from Macedonia quickly turned curiosity into a passion for open source investigations.

Extra info:

• Blog: https://exploitingtheniche.wordpress.com/