How KFile and Andrew Kaczynski Uncover Politicians’ Digital Histories

The useful part

"Generally, if you see him showing up on caller ID, you know it's not a good thing," says a political strategist who has dealt with Kaczynski for over a decade. "But he stabs you in the front rather than in the back." Kaczynski has been so successful for so long that many wonder why other reporters don't try to imitate him. "That sort of reporting is a dying art, and I don't really understand why — it seems like a gold mine, honestly, for reporters," says the strategist.

How it works

• His continued success comes despite — or perhaps because of — the deterioration of internet search.
• So maybe that gives me a competitive edge, but is it good that search doesn't work?
• "But time heals all wounds." Smith says the work involves far more than just trawling old posts.
• His new search tools have made KFile's work better and faster, like programs that can search across transcripts on YouTube or export 10,000 tweets to an Excel spreadsheet.
• "It's an extremist salsa business account — I don't know how else to describe it," he says.

What to take from it

"I'm still a little annoyed at him because he quit on Yom Kippur while I was at temple and got out of the building before I got back," says Smith. "We now live in a time where clips circulate out of time and where the timeline is no longer chronological," says Smith. People can obviously decide for themselves what they think about their statement saying that they no longer believe the things they said a couple years ago." He adds, "I don't think I've done a story on somebody that tweeted something when they were even in college.

Example or evidence

• "I'm trying to stay ahead of people by building tools to compare this stuff.
• His team, which today consists of Kaczynski and CNN reporter Em Steck, has responded by building proprietary tools to sort and filter data — by name, date, phrases — in a way that YouTube and Twitter and...
• Kaczynski's singular talent has made him a hot commodity among news outlets, but he recently decided to stay with CNN for the next few years.
• These obstacles come at a moment when there's more information on the internet than ever.

Details worth keeping

KFile Is (Still) a Politician's Worst Nightmare Photo-Illustration: Discovery, X Last October, CNN's Andrew Kaczynski uncovered deleted Reddit posts that showed former Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner discussing his Totenkopf shortly after Platner claimed that he had only recently learned that the tattoo on his chest resembled the Nazi symbol. "Everybody now has this enormous digital trail — social media, old websites, videos, podcasts, message boards, public records, archived pages," says Kaczynski.

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