They're counting on you not being able to name it.
Paste any message, offer, or conversation. See the manipulation and the good faith both — and learn to tell them apart yourself.
Paste anything — an email, a message from a dating site, a contract, a corporate apology, news, even a video. The Bullshit Finder reads it against both halves of the Field Guide: 161 ways we mislead one another, and 161 ways we speak in good faith. It names what it finds on each side and weighs them into one honest score — because the absence of a lie isn't the same as the presence of truth. Why this matters →
And the ugly? That's the part no one advertises — the real work of learning the language, until you can read it yourself.
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Paste video file metadata to check for signs of AI generation, deepfakes, or manipulation. Right-click any video file → Properties, or use a tool like MediaInfo.
Two companion references in one. The Bullshit Field Guide names 161 patterns of manipulation, deception, fallacy, and bad faith — what they look like, how they work, how to protect yourself. The Good-Faith Field Guide names the 161 reciprocals: the honest practices that answer them, each rooted in its etymology and wired to the others. 322 patterns in all — because you need the good to read the bad.
Want the complete two-part Guide as a formatted PDF you can save, print, or share? All 322 patterns — 161 of bad faith and 161 of good — with etymologies and the connecting matrix.
📖 Get the complete two-part Field Guide — $29.99 →A preview from each part of the Field Guide. The complete reference — all 322 patterns with etymologies and the connecting matrix — is the downloadable PDF above.
Combines a romance scam with a fake investment platform. "Fattens the pig" with small profitable-looking trades before encouraging larger deposits that can never be withdrawn. Protect yourself: if a romantic interest introduces you to an investment platform, it's a scam — always, no exceptions.
Creates artificial time pressure to stop you thinking, researching, or consulting others. Protect yourself: any deal that disappears because you took time to think was never a good deal. Walk away and see if it comes back.
Sets an extreme starting number so any later offer feels reasonable by comparison. Protect yourself: research real value independently before you ever see their price. Your own research is the anchor that protects you.
Denies the behavior, attacks the person who raised it, then claims to be the real victim. Protect yourself: when someone goes from denial to counterattack to victimhood in rapid succession, that's the pattern — and it tells you more about them than about you.
An endless series of questions disguised as genuine curiosity, designed to exhaust you and make you look unreasonable for disengaging. Protect yourself: if the questions never end and your answers are never acknowledged, they're not curious. State your position once and disengage.
Treats any inconvenient finding — a ruling, report, or study — as automatically invalid by alleging the source is "politically motivated," without ever engaging the substance. Protect yourself: ask whether the critic engages the actual evidence, and whether they'd apply the same motive-skepticism to a source they agree with.
Every pattern of bad faith has an honest counterpart — the practice it corrupts. The full Good-Faith Field Guide names all 161, each woken by its etymology and wired to the others.
answers Language Corruption, Dog Whistle, Sanitized Hierarchical Vocabulary
Uses words for what they mean, in the open, so anyone can follow — no jargon-as-fog, no coded second meanings. Suggested practice: ask whether a smart outsider would read your meaning as you intend it. If a word's doing quiet work its surface hides, replace it with the plain one.
√ Latin com-pati, "to suffer with" — the structural opposite of manipulation, which suffers at you or extracts from you
Meets another's difficulty by joining it rather than using it. Where exploitation reads weakness as opportunity, compassion reads it as a call to stand alongside. Suggested practice: when you notice someone's vulnerability, ask what it would mean to suffer with them rather than gain from them.
√ Old English stede + fæst, "standing fast" — answers Pressure Sale, Moving the Goalposts
Standing firm in what is right under pressure to move — the constancy that outlasts manufactured urgency and threat. Suggested practice: when you feel hurried or a goalpost shifts under you, slow down and name the original terms. Time bears more truth than pressure does.
…and 314 more in the complete two-part Field Guide.
BullshitFinder.fyi is a tool for identifying manipulation, fraud, logical fallacies, and bad-faith tactics in everyday life. Paste any email, chat message, social media post, sales pitch, or news article and get an instant analysis of what's really going on.
It doesn't just tell you something's wrong — it tells you exactly WHAT technique is being used against you, by name, with an explanation of how it works.
The Video Checker analyzes video file metadata and visual characteristics to help determine whether a video is authentic, AI-generated, or manipulated. In an era of deepfakes and AI-generated content, knowing what you're looking at matters.
We live in an age where the average person encounters dozens of manipulation attempts every day — scam emails, misleading ads, political spin, online trolls, predatory contracts, romance scams. Most people know something feels "off" but can't articulate what.
BullshitFinder gives you the vocabulary and the framework to name what's happening. Because once you can name it, you can stop it.
This tool is built on the principle that authentic exchange — where both parties genuinely benefit — is the only sustainable model. Everything else is extraction. The Bullshit Finder helps you tell the difference.
The Bullshit Finder is part of the TransformativeArts Framework (TAF), developed over fifty years of work in education, psychology, and creative expression. TAF holds that the deepest part of every person is good, and that manipulation tactics exploit our best qualities — trust, compassion, curiosity, generosity — against us.
Understanding how these tactics work isn't about becoming cynical. It's about protecting your ability to trust genuinely by learning to recognize when that trust is being exploited. That's why the Finder now reads both halves of every message — the good faith as well as the bad. You can't truly recognize manipulation without also recognizing what honest communication looks like; the contrast is what makes the difference visible. Naming the good is how you learn to protect it.
BullshitFinder.fyi is a product of Shiny Penny Productions L3C, based in Burlington, Vermont. Built by Scott Thomas Carter, M.M. (Eastman School of Music), drawing on five decades of teaching, creative work, and the lived experience of knowing exactly what it's like when the systems that should protect you are running on bullshit instead.
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