A large release of important documents once meant teams of journalists staying back, working through piles of records late into the night.
Today, it triggers something closer to a public audit. The January 30 publication of more than three million documents related to convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has mobilised thousands of online users into doing their own digging. They range from massively popular political livestreamers such as Hasan Piker and Dean Withers, to crowdsourced intelligence communities on Reddit.
These netizens are combing through documents, comparing excerpts and trying to piece together what the archive does (and does not) reveal.
