Project 4β Teams Up with Follow the Money to Empower Watchdog Journalism

Gabija Birgile

2025-11-06

2 min read

We’re excited to announce a new collaboration between Oxylabs’ pro bono initiative, Project 4β, and Follow the Money (FTM) – an independent European platform for investigative journalism. Through Project 4β FTM gets free access to Oxylabs web intelligence collection solutions, supporting data-driven investigations that expose corruption, financial misconduct, and abuse of power across Europe.

About Follow the Money

Follow the Money is an investigative news outlet for radically independent journalism, whose aim is to uncover the truth in the interest of society. As a unique watchdog in European media, FTM digs where others don’t, holding power to account – political, financial, and the hidden influence of lobby groups. The team prioritizes long-term, deep-dive investigations over daily headlines, focusing on corruption, corporate influence, Big Tech regulation, climate and energy policy, the financial and defense sectors, and more. Their conviction: investigative journalism in Europe isn’t a luxury – it’s essential to a healthy democracy.

Advancing Watchdog Journalism Through Public Web Data

Through this partnership with Project 4β, FTM gains access to Oxylabs’ Web Scraper API, Web Unblocker and residential proxies enabling efficient collection of large-scale public web data from hard-to-reach sources. This support helps FTM focus on the journalism itself – analysis, verification, and impact, rather than the technical hurdles of data gathering.

At Follow the Money we not only scrutinize financial flows, but follow many data trails. It is becoming harder to get the data we want, but Oxylabs provides us with an excellent and easy to use platform to scrape the data we need, even data that is hard to reach. We already used their suite for several investigations, saving us a lot of time in the process. So we can focus on following the money, and the data, to hold powerful people and organizations to account.

Dimitri Tokmetzis, Senior investigative journalist at FTM

Join 4β

Project 4β supports researchers, watchdog newsrooms, and civil society groups that rely on lawful, open access to public web data. We believe this access is essential infrastructure for accountability, scientific progress, and democratic resilience – turning dispersed information into verifiable evidence.

Our partner network spans researchers from leading universities, including Stanford University, Northwestern University, and the University of Edinburgh, and investigative organizations such as Bellingcat, Global Witness, The Pulitzer Center, and Debunk.org, We provide free access to our web intelligence collection solutions and expertise so their teams can responsibly collect and analyze large-scale public web data and spend more time on impact.

If your newsroom, research lab, or NGO is exploring how web intelligence could strengthen your work, we’d love to hear from you via 4beta@oxylabs.io or through our form.

Forget about complex web scraping processes

Choose Oxylabs' advanced web intelligence collection solutions to gather real-time public data hassle-free.

About the author

Gabija Birgile

Senior PR Manager

Gabija Birgile is a Senior PR Manager at Oxylabs. After working in a PR agency and juggling various projects for quite some time, she wanted to try a role in the tech industry. Making a positive impact with her work was always on top of her mind, so managing "Project 4β" pro bono partnerships now definitely does the job. If you have a project in mind, drop her a message at 4beta@oxylabs.io.

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