A public-education project on synthetic media — built to outlast its founders.

Generative models have collapsed the cost of producing convincing imagery, audio, and video to roughly zero. The cost of verifying any one piece of media has not fallen at the same rate. The asymmetry between generation and verification is the structural problem of the next decade — for researchers studying detection, for organizations protecting wire transfers and reputations, and for individuals whose faces and voices are now training data for the next attack.

imadethisup.org exists to make the field's primary research, standards, and case data readable in one place, traceable to source, and free of charge. Every claim links to a primary source. Every recommendation is defensible against current authority on the date of publication. The project's only economic model is its parent nonprofit's general funding — there is no advertising, no paid placement, no sponsored content, and no behavioural tracking. Corrections are reviewed weekly and welcomed at info@imadethisup.org.

The site is anonymously edited by thought leaders from across the cybersecurity, digital-forensics, and policy industries. We have made a deliberate choice not to put names on the masthead. Editorial anonymity reduces the surface for retaliatory targeting of contributors who write critically about specific incidents, actors, or vendors; it shifts attention from the editor to the citation. Reasonable people disagree about this trade-off. We accept the trade.

Anonymity does not extend to accountability. Every claim is attached to a primary source readers can verify. The site, the parent organization, and the contact channel are public and unambiguous. Requests for correction are taken seriously and processed weekly.

We prefer, in this order: peer-reviewed papers (publisher canonical PDFs and arXiv preprints); official statutes and agency documents; standards-body publications; and originating news investigations. We do not rely on aggregator summaries when the primary source is reachable.

Where the field has moved past a previously cited finding, we either update the citation or remove the claim. Where a claim cannot be sourced to authority that holds up today, we omit it rather than soften it. The full bibliography is at /references.

Editorial content on imadethisup.org is released under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0: free to copy, redistribute, and adapt for any non-commercial purpose, with attribution to imadethisup.org / Global Cyber Institute. Source code is released under the MIT License. For commercial reuse — including for-profit press, training data, or paid education programs — write info@imadethisup.org.