Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit: Social media

20 April 2023 5 minutes Author: Cyber Witcher

Internet

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.

Facebook

Skopenow

Search for name, phone, e-mail.


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Who posted what?

Finds Facebook posts.


click here

Facebook Live Map

Live broadcasts around the world.


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Facebook Video Downloader

A website to download public videos from Facebook. Copy the URL of the video.


click here

New-fb-search

Find any additional semantic filters (JSON) to filter. Use this page to test your JSON.


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Graph.tips

This page tries to be a simple interface to show how the current Facebook search function works.


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Botometer

Checks the activity of the Twitter account and evaluates its statistics.


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Spoonbill

Check for changes made to your Twitter account status (eg bio, pinned tweets, location, etc.)


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Twlets

Download someone’s tweets, followers and likes in an Excel spreadsheet. Simple and fast to use.


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Onemilliontweetmap

Map of tweets by location up to 6 hours ago, searchable by keywords.


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Social Bearing

Statistics and analytics for tweets and timelines of these posts.


click here

Treeverse

Very useful сhrome extension to visualize Twitter conversations.


click here

Twitter

Twitter Video Downloader

Download video from Twitter.


click here

Twitter List Copy

Visualize the spread of statements and fact-checking.


click here

Twitter advanced search

Search by date, keywords, and more.


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Twitter location-based search

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.


click here

Twint

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.


click here

T

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.


click here

Twitter Follower Collector

Clears followers of any Twitter account.


click here

InVID verification plugin

The InVID plugin provides an advanced Twitter.


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Hoaxy

Copy public Twitter lists to your own existing lists.


click here

YouTube

Amnesty YouTube Dataviewer

Reverse image (video) search and exact download time. Here is Advanced.


click here

YouTube Geofind

YouTube GeoFind; three different search functions: location, topic and channel.


click here

YouTube Metadata

An alternative to Amnesty’s YT viewer with a little more information.


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RadiTube

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.


click here

Youtube-dl

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.)


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YouTube location-based search

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.)


click here

Vkontakte

Search4Faces

Download Facebook, find a similar one in VKontakte (also searches in Odnoklassniki.)


click here

Vk.watch

VK.watch is an OSINT tool for finding information about VKontakte people.


click here

FindClone

Search for images from the profiles of ordinary VK users (within certain limits.)


click here

TikTok

TikTokApi

An unofficial API shell for TikTok in python.


click here

TikTok Downloader

Download TikTok videos.


click here

Search4Faces

Search a database of 84 million TikTok accounts.


click here

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