A new tool searches your LinkedIn connections for people who are mentioned in the Epstein files, just in case you don’t, understandably, want anything to do with them on the already deranged social network.
404 Media tested the tool, called EpsteIn—as in, a mash up of Epstein and LinkedIn—and it appears to work.
“I found myself wondering whether anyone had mapped Epstein’s network in the style of LinkedIn—how many people are 1st/2nd/3rd degree connections of Jeffrey Epstein?” Christopher Finke, the creator of the tool, told 404 Media in an email. “Smarter programmers than me have already built tools to visualize that, but I couldn’t find anything that would show the overlap between my network and his.”
- Archive: http://archive.today/AIkL2
- Github: https://github.com/cfinke/EpsteIn
One of the commenters on the site did point out that it’s a defamation lawsuit waiting to happen.
Though defamation requires the claim to be both a lie, and made publicly (and have caused “legally redressable injury”, whatever that means, IANAL). The tool needs to be run locally, and specifically tells you that it’s searching by name and that others with the same name will be found in the results, and that’s why it gives the context and lists where in the files it came up.
So the tool itself most likely isn’t defamatory, but anyone that uses is better be damn sure that they have the correct person if they start publicly talking or writing about what it finds.