Sciextor

Social Media Recon

Social media recon and investigations are the process of using social media platforms to gather information, evidence, and intelligence about a person, an organization, or an event of interest.

They can be used for various purposes, such as law enforcement, journalism, corporate security, or personal curiosity.

The craft of social media recon and investigations requires a combination of skills, such as critical thinking, creativity, curiosity, attention to detail, and ethical awareness.

It also requires a familiarity with the features and functionalities of different social media platforms, as well as the tools and services that can help with the investigation process.

Steps Involved

• Defining the scope and objectives of the investigation. This means identifying the target(s) of interest, the research questions, the relevant social media platforms, and the ethical and legal implications of the investigation.
• Collecting data from social media sources. This means using various tools and techniques to search, filter, and extract public information from social media websites, such as posts, comments, photos, videos, profiles, hashtags, keywords, and accounts.
• Analyzing and verifying the data. This means using various tools and techniques to examine, interpret, and validate the data collected from social media sources, such as sentiment analysis, geolocation verification, reverse image search, metadata analysis, and fact-checking.
• Reporting and presenting the findings. This means using various tools and techniques to organize, summarize, and communicate the results of the investigation in a clear and compelling way, such as visualizations, dashboards, reports, and stories.

Social Media Profiling Tools

Klout: A tool that measures a user’s social influence based on their online activities across various social networks. It assigns a score from 1 to 100 to each user, indicating how influential they are.

Kred: A tool that measures a user’s social influence and outreach based on their online activities on Twitter and Facebook. It assigns two scores to each user: influence (from 1 to 1000) and outreach (from 1 to 12), indicating how influential and generous they are.

Keyhole: A tool that tracks and analyzes hashtags, keywords, and accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. It provides insights into a user’s social media performance, engagement, sentiment, and demographics.

Social Media Verification Tools

WeVerify: A tool that helps journalists and fact-checkers verify the authenticity and reliability of user-generated content on social media platforms. It provides features such as reverse image search, video verification, geolocation verification, and metadata analysis.

Truly Media: A tool that helps media organizations and journalists collaborate and verify the accuracy and trustworthiness of social media content. It provides features such as content aggregation, annotation, verification workflow, and reporting.

InVID: A tool that helps journalists and citizens verify online videos from various sources. It provides features such as video analysis, keyframe extraction, reverse image search, magnifier, metadata viewer, and video rights management.

Amnesty International YouTube DataViewer: A tool that helps users extract hidden data from YouTube videos. It provides features such as video upload date, thumbnails, and reverse image search.

Social Media Reputation Tools

Brand24: A tool that helps users monitor and improve their online reputation on social media platforms. It provides features such as sentiment analysis, influencer scoring, crisis alerts, and competitor analysis.

Reputology: A tool that helps users manage their online reviews on various platforms such as Google, Facebook, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. It provides features such as review monitoring, response management, analytics, and reporting.

ReviewTrackers: A tool that helps users collect and analyze customer feedback from various sources such as social media, surveys, and reviews. It provides features such as feedback management, sentiment analysis, reputation management, and customer insights.