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

Chapter 3. Types of personal information

Abstract

Social media sites provide such vast amounts of information about people that it can be overwhelming at times. Depending on your investigation, you may want different types of information. One helpful way to deal with everything that's available is to divide the information into different types.

This chapter defines the major categories of information that are available on social media and shows examples of how it appears on various sites.

Keywords

Social media

Social networks

Personal information

Social media sites provide such vast amounts of information about people that it can be overwhelming at times. Depending on your investigation, you may want different types of information. One helpful way to deal with everything that's available is to divide the information into different types.

This chapter will define the major categories of information that are available on social media and show examples of how it appears on various sites. Later in the book, we will see specifically how to access this data on some of the most popular social media sites.

Basic Demographics

Nearly every social media site has some profile page for its users, and that page has some essential demographic information. Age, gender, location, and a short personal description are all very common. Some sites have very long personal profiles, while others have very brief personal profiles.

Figure 3.1 shows the “About” page on Facebook, which contains the background information for users. The figure shows the overview, but on the left-hand site is a list of subcategories. On Facebook, you will often find a user's current location and a list of all the other places they have lived. You can get education history, work history, contact information, family members, political preferences, relationship status, religion, and more.

FIGURE 3.1 The “About” page on Facebook has a lot of demographic information.

On the other hand, the microblogging site Twitter has very limited demographic information. Figure 3.2 shows all of what is available on Twitter: a name, city, and a short self-written bio.

FIGURE 3.2 The biographical information available on Twitter is very brief.

Dating sites offer a third example where demographic information is especially plentiful. Figure 3.3 shows only a small fraction of the information provided on OkCupid. You can see data about Malcom's height, weight, build, diet, smoking and drinking habits, exercise regimen, religion, personal preferences for dozens of things, and so on. This makes sense in a dating site where people often want to quickly make decisions about what they share in common with a stranger. If you want as much straightforward background as possible, your best bet is to locate your target on a dating site.

FIGURE 3.3 Dating sites like OkCupid have extensive demographic information for users.

Social Connections and Associates

The “social” part of social media implies that people are interacting with others and, indeed, social media profiles can be an excellent tool for identifying a person's friends, family members, and associates. Most sites support the creation of explicit social connections with other people. These tend to come in two forms: friending and following.

When one person friends another, a request is sent from the person to the potential friend. If the potential friend approves the request, then the two people are linked to one another. Friending generally implies a mutual relationship, and it requires both people to acknowledge the relationship.

Following, on the other hand, can be a one-way relationship. A person follows someone on social media when they are interested in what that person posts. The person being followed does not have to approve the relationship in most cases, nor is there a requirement or expectation that the follow is reciprocated. Certainly, two people may choose to follow one another, but unlike “friending,” it is not required.

A person's social connections, regardless of how they are created, are often visible on social media. Usually, a list of friends or followers is linked from a user's profile. This list tends to have a profile photo and name for the person. Figure 3.4 shows a user's friend list from Facebook. Clicking on the names of these friends will take you to their profile page.

FIGURE 3.4 A friend list on Facebook (names and faces are blurred for privacy).

Twitter uses a follower system. For any given user, you can see lists of who he follows and who is following him back. Figure 3.5 shows the list of people that Malcom is following. Twitter uses a more extensive set of information for each person on this list, including their name, bio, profile picture, and “cover” image (a background photo).

FIGURE 3.5 On sites where people follow each other, like Twitter, lists for “Following” and “Followers” are often available.

Aside from the lists of social connections, a person's photos can reveal who they spend time with. Many sites support photo sharing and allow you to browse a person's photos. If you are interested in a person's social habits, you may find success in looking at who appears frequently in photos with the target.

Similarly, most sites allow people to like or comment on posts. When you read a target's posts, look at who frequently likes them or offers a reply. This can be an indicator of who the target is especially close with (not only online but also offline).

Location Data

One interesting development in social media is geotagging, which allows people to associate GPS coordinates or other location data with their posts. Many networks support this, and later chapters in this book will explain when and how to access this information on each site. In addition, there is an entire chapter dedicated to explaining location information.

In this section, we will look at just a few examples of how this data appears. In Figure 3.6, which shows a Twitter post, the location information appears under the text of the post. “Washington, DC” indicates the location.

FIGURE 3.6 A Twitter post with location information underneath the text of the post (Washington, DC).

Figure 3.7 shows how location information appears on Facebook. In this case, it has the name of a place (Whole Foods Market Georgetown). Moving the mouse over the place name brings up a preview of the Facebook page for that place.

FIGURE 3.7 A Facebook post with location information.

Some social media sites are dedicated to sharing location information, including Foursquare (discussed in depth in a future chapter). Figure 3.8 shows the profile for a Foursquare user. This lists every place the user has logged as somewhere he has visited. While we only see the top of the list in this figure, the interface allows you to scroll through the full list of everywhere the user has ever logged in.

FIGURE 3.8 The beginning of a user's list of places he has visited, along with dates, comments, and address information for each place.

There are also sites that will aggregate location information for a given user and show it on a map. Figure 3.9 shows a heat-map produced by the site GeoSocial Footprint.¹ When given a person's Twitter username, this site collects GPS coordinates from every available post and plots it on a map. Red areas are visited more often than green ones. The small red flags on the map can be clicked to bring up the actual Twitter post that was made at each location.

FIGURE 3.9 A map generated by GeoSocial Footprint, showing the locations Malcom visits most often.

There is so much that can be done with location information. It can tell you where a person claimed to be, when, and what they were doing there. It can also help you establish patterns of behavior, which is discussed more in the next section.

Behavior Patterns

During investigations that run deeper than collecting demographic information or photos, discovering behavior patterns can be important. That may be what a person does, when, and with whom. It could be the way they interact with others or the tone of voice they use. Ultimately, your questions will drive the investigation you do; but in this section, we will look at a few examples of how you can find behavior patterns in social media.

Consider our example user Malcom. His Facebook profile shows a map of all the locations he visits (more detail on accessing this is available in the Facebook chapter of this book). Figure 3.10 shows us a map of those locations and the number of times he has posted from each. There are four posts from Elephant & Castle, a bar and restaurant near his office. Clicking on that location brings up a list of posts he has made from there. You can click through those posts, and what you will notice if you try this yourself is that he posts from this location every Friday after work.

FIGURE 3.10 Malcom posts from Elephant & Castle every Friday after work.

Turning to Malcom's Instagram feed, which is made up entirely of photos he has taken, we can see a few things in the pictures he has posted. He likes to go out and tell people about it, and he seems to really like his dog. The biographical descriptions from a number of his social media profiles mention his dog, Barley. She is clearly a big part of his life (Figure 3.11).

FIGURE 3.11 Malcom's Instagram feed, where half the pictures are of his dog.

Discovering a man loves his dog is not an earth-shattering revelation, but it is an insight nonetheless. As we will see in many stories throughout this book, one will often discover that a man loves his girlfriend, or his guns, or his drugs, or is lying to his boss and then is taking off work to play volleyball. Depending on your goals, those revelations can be quite important.

Posted Content

Last, but not least, is the category that encompasses most of what people share. The content of people's posts—that is, the text they write, what it says, the content of their photos and videos, and the ratings they assign—is really the most valuable thing you can find in a deep social media investigation. It tells you what people are doing, what they care about, who they interact with, and why. It not only can provide deep insight into the psyche but also can be useful simply because people tell you exactly what they think or what they do.

Indeed, when we hear stories of people being sued, fired, questioned, or arrested because of social media, it's almost always because of the content of their posts.

Let's look at a few examples.

Social Media Posts That Backfire

Taylor Harrison

A Florida man posted frequently on Facebook about his drug dealing.² It turns out police were checking his page and collected a lot of information about him from it. He was arrested and charged, and the Martin County Sheriff's Office made its own Facebook post about him (see Figure 3.12 for the actual Facebook post).

FIGURE 3.12 A post from the Martin County Sheriff's Office about a suspect's selfies gone wrong.

WHEN SELFIES BACKFIRE

These are photos of 21-year old Taylor Harrison of Port St. Lucie bragging on his Facebook page about his life as a drug dealer and how easy it is for him to sell drugs in front of our deputies.

The first photo Taylor took himself as he pulled alongside one of our deputies. The second photo is a selfie of Taylor with stacks of drug cash and drugs that he says he sells. Notice next to his car, is a patrol car.

The third shot is a MCSO undercover camera capturing Taylor selling drugs to one of us. He tells us, he is the best around!

The photo to the right is Taylor's booking photo at Martin County Jail after being arrested for…you guessed it, selling drugs to our undercover narcotics detectives.

Since Taylor was kind of enough to share photos of us on his Facebook page, we thought we would share these photos of Taylor on our page.

In a similar case, another man was arrested for stealing several guns from a pawnshop when he asked for ammunition³ to go with them on Facebook.

Justine Sacco

One of the most high-profile cases of someone being fired for a tweet was that of PR executive Justine Sacco.⁴ In December 2013, she tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!” (Figure 3.13). She made the post before boarding a 12-hour flight to South Africa. While she was disconnected during the flight, Twitter erupted with angry replies. Upon her arrival, she was fired.

FIGURE 3.13 “The tweet heard round the world” that got Justine Sacco fired.

Scott Walker

She is far from the only one, though. An aide for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's 2012 campaign tweeted a series of racist tweets against Hispanics⁵ (Figure 3.14 shows a couple), and when they came to light in the media, she was also fired.

FIGURE 3.14 The racist tweets that got Gov. Walker aide Taylor Palmisano fired.

Katie Duke

Less obviously offensive posts can also lead to bad results. Nurse Katie Duke was fired from New York-Presbyterian Hospital after posting this photo on Instagram with the caption “Man Vs 6Train… the After. #lifesaving #EMS #NYC #ER #Nurses #Doctors #nymed #trauma #realLife” (Figure 3.15). While her post did not violate any rules, her supervisors said the post was “insensitive.”

FIGURE 3.15 This Instagram post with its caption led to the firing of the nurse who shared it.

The Importance of Content

The point of looking at all these examples is not to say “bad things happen when you misbehave online.” Rather, you have to look at the content of the posts people are making. What people actually say reveals the most about them and their actions. These examples demonstrate that some of the greatest insights that come from investigating people on social media do not come from canned profile fields or analysis of travel locations (although they can also be useful, too).

What You (Probably) Won't Find

There is so much you can get from social media, but there are some things you should not expect to be able to access as someone approaching the websites as a normal user (as opposed to approaching the social media companies with a court order, which is outside the scope of this book).

First, you will not have access to truly private conversations. Email, instant messaging, and private or direct messages sent on social media simply cannot be accessed by third parties. You may see some people having conversations in public parts of social media. For example, they may have discussions on Twitter or through comments on a post on Facebook. These are visible to anyone and are indeed quite common. However, when people use explicitly private channels to communicate, you will generally not be able to get access.

You also won't be able to see things a user has deleted. Sometimes, social media companies keep copies of deleted content. As a regular user, though, you simply won't be able to see or bring back these deleted posts.

Conclusion

There are many types of information that come from social media. Major categories include basic demographic information, social connections, location information, patterns of behavior, and the content of the posts themselves. Future chapters will detail where and how to find all this data, but keeping in mind what type of information will help your investigation can guide your searches in the social media space.