Introduction to Social Media Investigation: A Hands-on Approach, 1st Edition (2015)

Chapter 18. Other networking sites

Abstract

Earlier in Social Media Investigation, we looked in depth at the major social media and social networking sites online. While these are your best chance to find an arbitrary target, there are thousands and thousands of other social networks online. Some are standalone sites, like Myspace, which serve a general audience. Others are integrated into other applications, like Yelp, which focuses on reviews of businesses but which has a social network feature as well. These sites can be great places to find information about a target. Indeed, if a target is an active participant, it is possible that you will actually find more information about him or her on one of these smaller social networks. The communities that form there tend to be more trusted exactly because they are smaller, and this can lead to freer sharing of information. In this chapter, we look at some of these networks. Our goal is to identify common features and attributes in them, so if you come upon any new network in which your target is a participant, you will have general guidelines to follow to find him or her.

Keywords

Social media

Social networks

Social networking

Earlier in this book, we looked in depth at the major social media and social networking sites online. While these are your best chance to find an arbitrary target, there are thousands and thousands of other social networks online. Some are standalone sites, like Myspace, which serve a general audience. Others are integrated into other applications, like Yelp, which focuses on reviews of businesses but which has a social network feature as well. These sites can be great places to find information about a target. Indeed, if a target is an active participant, it is possible that you will actually find more information about him or her on one of these smaller social networks. The communities that form there tend to be more trusted exactly because they are smaller, and this can lead to freer sharing of information.

In this chapter, we will look at some of these networks. Our goal will be to identify common features and attributes in them, so if you come upon any new network in which your target is a participant, you will have general guidelines to follow to find him.

Chinese Social Networking Sites

There are many social networking Web sites that are not particularly popular in North America and Western Europe, but that have large user bases in other countries. We won't cover those in depth in this book, but it is worth looking at the Chinese market as an example. It has several networks that rival the size of Twitter and Facebook.

Qzone

With 650 million users, Qzone is the most popular social platform in China. In addition to making friends, users can post text entries, like blog posts, photos, and music. They can also read and comment on friends' posts.

Renren

Renren is a traditional social network platform that started off as a near clone of Facebook for the Chinese market. With nearly 215 million users, it is quite popular in China, especially among college students. It has many of the features of a traditional social network, including profile pages and friend lists. It is also very popular—and makes much of its income—as a gaming platform.

Sina Weibo

Often called “Weibo” (pronounced WE-boah) for short, this site is a microblogging platform (“weibo” means “microblogging”) that is similar to Twitter with some aspects of Facebook mixed in. It is very popular in China, where other popular sites like Twitter and Facebook are blocked. Estimates of its user base vary wildly, from 10 million core users to over 500 million registered users. Weibo itself claims 130 million active users¹. It is also a platform where users express concerns with the government, within the allowed confines.

Chinese censorship limits what can be posted on Sina Weibo. The general type of content is similar to what is found on Twitter: Posts have a 140-character limit and hashtags and @mentions are commonly used. The content of posts is closely monitored, however, and posts can be filtered and deleted if they contain certain keywords or links. Accounts with offending material are often deleted. As an example of the extent of this censorship, on June 4, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests that were quashed by the Chinese military, Sina Weibo blocked any posts that contained the words “today,” “tonight,” “June 4,” and “big yellow duck”². This latter block was because the famous picture of a man standing in front of a line of Chinese tanks during the protest had been circulating where the tanks had been replaced with rubber ducks; the image was created in response to Chinese censorship (see Figure 18.1).

FIGURE 18.1 In protest to Chinese internet censorship, this image was created, replacing the tanks in the iconic photo from the Tiananmen Square protest with rubber ducks. The photo was later banned on Chinese internet sites and the words “big yellow duck” were also censored.

Figure 18.2 shows an example profile page from Sina Weibo. You can see it closely resembles a Twitter page, with a background image and profile picture on top, followed by a list of posts underneath.

FIGURE 18.2 A user's page on Sina Weibo. Note that even without understanding the Chinese text, it is easy to identify the structure of the site as very similar to Twitter.

Chinese law states that internet companies are required to ensure that people register with their real names. The Chinese government also closely monitors what people post on social media and puts considerable investigation into people who post information unfavorable to the government.

Political cartoonist Wang Liming was arrested in 2013 for “rumor mongering,” a common charge used to detain people for their social media posts. On Weibo, he forwarded a post about a grandmother who was holding her dead grandson, who had starved in a flooded region of the country. He was detained for “suspicion of causing a disturbance,” according to Reuters³. Maya Wang, an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, was quoted by the media outlet, describing this type of arrest as the communist party trying “to dampen the effectiveness of the internet to embarrass the government and press it to change.”

Wang is not the only one. In 2014, 81 people were detained and 4 arrested for similar reasons, “us[ing] social network services to fabricate and spread rumors, or forward rumors published on foreign Web sites,” according to police⁴.

Other Sites

There are many popular social networking sites with millions of users. Some of these are general interest sites and others are dedicated to a particular topic.

This section will look at Ning, a roll-your-own social networking site; Myspace, once the most popular social networking site on the Web, which still has tens of millions of users; and three examples of popular topic-specific social networking sites: Yelp, Goodreads, and Ravelry.

Note that these are simply interesting examples of other social networking sites; they were not chosen because they are more likely to reveal information about an arbitrary target. Hopefully, the discussion of each will paint a picture of general strategies for finding information across a wide range of sites.

Ning

As social networks became increasingly prominent online in the mid-2000s, people were starting up their own networks all the time. Some were imagined as potential competitors to the big social networking sites, like Myspace and Facebook. Others were designed to support a specific community of users who wanted a more tailored experience than was available through a big networking site.

Ning was created to fill this latter need. It is a platform on which anyone can create their own social network. Users can register a social network and Ning hosts the site and provides the software and support to make it run. Within each site, users have an experience much like on any social networking site. They register for accounts; create profiles; blog; share photos, videos, and updates; and interact in discussions with other users.

Networks on Ning come and go. Some are created and used and then fade away. Others remain strong and have persisted for years. Over its life, estimates indicate that there have been roughly 2 million Ning sites created and that there are in the neighborhood of 100,000 active networks. Some of those have over 1 million users. Others have a tiny user base of less than 100 people. Overall, Ning claims to have 60 million active users across its sites⁵.

Figure 18.3 shows an example of a user profile (for our example user, Malcom) on a Ning site. One of the more popular sites hosted on the platform is DIY Drones, a site dedicated to amateur UAV (short for “unmanned aerial vehicle”) building with nearly 57,000 members. This page shows Malcom's profile within DIY Drones. On the left of Malcom's profile page is basic information about him, including his demographic information and friend lists. The center column shows posts and comments he has made within the community.

FIGURE 18.3 A Ning profile page on the network DIY Drones.

The design of individual Ning sites may vary, but they often use a common template for the overall structure. DIY Drones does this; see Figure 18.3.

To find someone on a Ning site, you can search for them using their name in the search box at the very top right of the page. Another feature of interest to find someone is the “Members” link on the navigation bar toward the top of the page (the third option from the right in Figure 18.3). This provides a full list of members of that site with links to their profile pages. Figure 18.4 shows the Members page for DIY Drones.

FIGURE 18.4 The “Members” page of a Ning Web site.

Ning does not provide a searchable list of all their sites or users. Thus, if you are looking for a target, you cannot simply search for them across all Ning platforms. However, if you encounter a Ning site, you will be able to identify it by a “Powered by Ning | Mode Social” banner at the very bottom of the page. If you see that, you know you should be able to find a member list and expect a certain type of profile.

One final note: Ning site creators can control the privacy for their sites. This might mean that you cannot access information within a Ning site without having an account. Unlike many larger social networks, registrations for Ning sites may be held for approval to ensure you are an interested and valid member of the community.

Myspace

In the early days of social media, Myspace was an important player. Before Facebook came on the scene, it was the dominant social networking site. In the mid-to-late 2008s, after losing much of its user base to Facebook, the site went through several transformations. The “new” Myspace profile page is shown in Figure 18.5.

FIGURE 18.5 Malcom's Myspace profile page.

Even though the site has been through many iterations, users who had accounts in the early days still have accounts on the new version of the site. In fact, Myspace took advantage of this to entice users back to the site by emailing them old photos of themselves that they had posted on the site long ago⁶.

Myspace now has about 36 million users. To find people on the site, you can search by their actual name or a common username using the search box toward the upper left (see Figure 18.5).

Because the Myspace audience tends to be younger, many stories of people being investigated through the site relate to interaction with younger people. In 2009, a South Carolina swimming coach was arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Using fake accounts he created on Myspace, he befriended two 13-year-old girls and enticed them to send him sexually suggested photos⁷.

He is not alone. A Los Angeles-area man was arrested after he also created fake profiles on Myspace between 2009 and 2014, which he used to have sexually explicit conversations with underage girls. He sent and received explicit photos with the teens and tried to arrange meetings⁸. According to the charges, he did meet with some of the girls, resulting in charges of committing lewd acts upon a child.

Not to leave those two men in small company, yet another man, a Jacksonville Florida man collected sexually explicit photos from over 200 underage girls by posing as a teenage boy on Myspace⁹. After receiving the photos, he threatened the girls, claiming he would post the photos online unless they sent him more. He was arrested and charged and will soon face trial.

Yelp

Yelp started off as a question-answering site but quickly became a place for reviewing restaurants and local businesses. It is now extremely popular and powerful in that space. The site has tens of millions of reviews, and a study showed that a one-star rating change on Yelp could lead to a 5-9% change in business for a local company¹⁰. That power has led companies to carefully monitor their ratings and reviews. Some companies also monitor the people who write them (more on that shortly).

First, let's look at an overview of the site. Yelp has over 130 million unique users each month. Figure 18.6 shows Malcom's Yelp profile page. It has his personal information in the column on the left, his reviews in the center (currently, there is only one), and a list of friends and groups on the right.

FIGURE 18.6 Malcom's Yelp profile page.

Yelp can provide interesting insights into a person's habits and location. By looking at all the places a person has reviewed, you can get a sense of the neighborhoods they spend the most time in and cities they visit often. You can also find the types of venues they care about. One user may review a lot of bars and restaurants, while another may review playgrounds and children's activity centers.

To find people on Yelp, first click the “Find Friends” tab that is under the search boxes at the top. There, you can search for people by name or by email address. Furthermore, if you log in with a Facebook account, Yelp can search for your Facebook friends in their network. If you cannot locate a target this way, a social search is possible. As mentioned above, people's friend lists are public and browsable, so if you can find an associate of the target, you may be able to locate the target through this list.

Because Yelp has become a powerful influence on people's interest in businesses, it has also become a place where people can be punished for their reviews. One story that made headlines is that of an inn that told wedding parties that they would be charged $500 for every negative review a guest left for them on Yelp¹¹. The venue was inundated with bad reviews in response to the story, as outraged Web users made their feelings known. However, there are many stories of people being specifically targeted for their comments.

One article details case after case of people writing negative reviews and threatened with lawsuits¹². A woman was threatened with a suit after writing a negative review of a car repair shop; a dentist threatened to sue a patient for a bad review. Some suits were dropped, but not all. A woman in Virginia wrote a negative review of her contractor, who in turn sued her for $750,000. He was awarded $250,000¹³. The trial was complicated—there appeared to be lies in the Yelp review, including accusations that the remodeler stole jewelry from her home. Eventually, the reviews were taken down and both sides walked away without being awarded any damages.

However, many businesses who may want to file suit cannot, because Yelp users are anonymous in many cases. A California bankruptcy lawyer wants to sue a user for defamation as a result of a negative review, but that user's real identity is not known. Instead, the lawyer is suing Yelp in an effort to compel the company to turn over the true identity of the user¹⁴.

Goodreads

For readers, social media has always been a place to share thoughts about the books they are reading. Goodreads was put together for people to share those books and their thoughts about them and to keep lists of books to read later.

The social network on the site helps people see what books their friends have added to the lists along with ratings and reviews of books they have finished. It also has discussion boards for individual books or for online reading groups.

The site has around 650,000 users—very small compared with the mammoth social networking sites discussed earlier in this book, but quite large for a topic-specific social network.

Figure 18.7 shows Malcom's Goodreads profile page. It includes some basic demographic information and lists of books he has made along with ratings and reviews.

FIGURE 18.7 Malcom's profile on Goodreads.

If you have an account, you can find people in the “Friends” section of your profile page. They can be searched by name or email address. The site also supports importing friends or contacts from Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Facebook, and Twitter. People's friend lists are public, so it may be possible to find a target through an associate's account.

If the books a person is reading are of interest, Goodreads can be a useful source of information. You can find a person and see all the books they have read or plan to read.

Ravelry

If the target of your investigation is a knitter or crochets, you will probably find him or her on Ravelry. With 4 million users, it is among the largest of the topic-specific social networking sites online.

Figure 18.8 shows Malcom's profile on Ravelry. It has basic demographics along with site-specific information on the right.

FIGURE 18.8 Malcom's profile on Ravelry.

Users on Ravelry post knitting and crocheting patterns and discuss projects. There are active forums on the site as well. An individual's forum posts can be found by clicking on the number of posts shown in the right of their profile (e.g., in Figure 18.8, Malcom's profile says “0 posts” at the bottom of the first column of links on the right).

The people search section of the site allows you to find people by username or full name. Users' friend lists are also public (e.g., in Figure 18.8, Malcom has “0 friends” shown on the right), allowing for social searches for a target.

Essentially, this site would be useful for a target whom you might investigate through an online forum about knitting. It provides additional information through the projects and friends that are part of the site.

Conclusions and Guidelines

It is totally possible that your investigation target is not much of a reader and is not a knitter. The target may not post restaurant reviews and may have never set up a Myspace profile. However, looking at all these different sites can lead to a set of guidelines that can be useful when investigating on one of the many smaller social network sites:

1. Finding people works in ways similar to those discussed for other networks: Knowing a target's username and email address can help if they have a common name or if they use a pseudonym on a site.

2. Social searches are effective on almost every site: If you can't find the target, try searching through his or her associates. Friend lists are often public and browsable.

3. Content is king: The most valuable information you find on these sites will not be the basic profile information (which tends to be limited to demographics or data specific to the site's topical focus), but the things people say in discussions, posts, and comments. These can reveal a lot about them (their preferences and their behavior, in particular).

4. Look broadly for social networking sites: There is valuable information to be found even on smaller sites, and there are thousands of them. Know your target's interests and look for what's out there online to attract them. If you can locate them in a smaller network, you are likely to find a lot of good data.