The field of social media investigations has “grown up”. Where there used to be a niche community of a relatively small number of people who had free time and a habit of sitting on the Internet for a long time, now there is a wide field of research, users and journalism, and OSINT techniques are applied in various fields. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and start figuring it out yourself. The beauty of open source investigations is that anyone, not just journalists or think tank researchers, can contribute to investigations that uncover criminal activity and help bring perpetrators to justice. When we say “anyone”, we really mean “anyone”: if you have access to the Internet, free time and a stubborn desire to get to the truth, then you too can become an open source investigator. Deciding to pursue a career in this field can be difficult, especially if the field is completely new to you.
It’s normal when a person encounters something new for the first time, then there are various obstacles on the way. Recently, the power of intelligence tools based on open data has been growing, especially based on the data that people carelessly, and most importantly, voluntarily share on social networks and messengers. We bring to your attention an overview of available social network analysis tools for you to familiarize yourself with to understand how vulnerable you are in today’s world. Over time, you will get to know this field better and notice how wide and diverse it is. On the way of research, you will meet researchers who are exclusively engaged in the identification of weapons in videos from conflict zones; others devote their time to tracking planes or ships, others are experts in the field of geolocation, so our portal is launching a section dedicated to research topics, so choose the best niche for yourself and start developing.
A website to download public videos from Facebook. Copy the URL of the video.
Find any additional semantic filters (JSON) to filter. Use this page to test your JSON.
This page tries to be a simple interface to show how the current Facebook search function works.
Check for changes made to your Twitter account status (eg bio, pinned tweets, location, etc.)
Download someone’s tweets, followers and likes in an Excel spreadsheet. Simple and fast to use.
Insert into the search window: geocode:[coordinates], [radius-km]for example: geocode:36.222285,43.998233.2km. Keep in mind that it’s easy to spoof a tweet’s geolocation.
An advanced Twitter crawler written in Python that doesn’t use the Twitter API, allowing you to crawl a user’s followers, followings, tweets, etc., avoiding most API limitations.
A powerful command line tool for Twitter (it’s an open source command line script written in Ruby). Extremely flexible, it can be placed in Bash scripts to automate activities.
Reverse image (video) search and exact download time. Here is Advanced.
YouTube GeoFind; three different search functions: location, topic and channel.
A search engine that searches the subtitles of about 380 (right/left) radical YouTube channels. You ask, for example, “q say” about “voter fraud” in 170,000 videos, and it links you to a specific timecode in the video.
A Python tool for downloading from various sources. Choose video/audio formats, quality, etc. Updated frequently to support analysis of relevant sources (alternative link: youtube-dl.org.)
Location-based search on YouTube, but not clear if it shows where it was uploaded, from which server, or just filters keywords. (Paris in the title appears in Paris.)
Download Facebook, find a similar one in VKontakte (also searches in Odnoklassniki.)
Search for images from the profiles of ordinary VK users (within certain limits.)