Best Social Media Investigation Tools

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If you want to explore the world of social media but don’t know where to start, there are some awesome tools you can use that will allow you to discover what is going on around the web. I love being able to uncover people in a certain niche, track changes, browse profiles, and even get more followers. Let me share a few of my favorites with you now! Best Social Media Monitoring Tools for Law Enforcement is probably a great social network monitoring software. That’s exactly why I’m going to tell you about it. My name is Steve Piper and I have been a cop for a little over a decade now. Over the years, there have been a few times when I saw cases that didn’t end well due to the lack of awareness of law enforcement agencies. We weren’t able to catch criminals who were at large because we didn’t have an idea of what was happening in the streets.

Social media monitoring tools for law enforcement are designed to aid law enforcement agencies, government agencies, social media marketers and applied sociologists perform tasks such as monitoring the activities of social groups around the world. In this article, we present a list of top social media monitoring tools for law enforcement that help to perform advanced monitoring, advanced factual data collection, and dissemination of highly accurate information within desired time frames.

OssaLabs

Law enforcement agencies who rely on social media intelligence are better equipped to build stronger ties with communities and their leaders, leading to safer, more secure communities.

With OssaLabs, you’ll be able to keep an eye on all of your social media content in one place, and we’ll let you know when there are important changes happening.

If you don’t have time to watch all of your different accounts or respond to comments or questions in real time, then OssaLabs may be the tool for you!

The OssaLabs social media monitoring tool helps officers:

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  • Discover opportunities for positive outreach in the community
  • Empathize with community members by learning more about their interests and views on important issues
  • Identify new ways to connect with and protect vulnerable populations, such as homeless persons and at-risk youth
  • Understand public perception during periods of heightened tensions to better prepare police teams and avert crises before it’s too late

The OssaLabs Solution

OssaLabs’ Social Impact Pro can assist law enforcement agencies in monitoring social media discussions to understand community attitudes before they become news headlines. This critical insight can help officers get in front of issues and address them more effectively.

  • Discover conversations online and what is trending in the local population
  • Collect data regularly on community attitudes and perceptions about local law enforcement and issues affecting the community as a whole
  • Monitor public discussion to better engage communities on sensitive matters
  • Scan the U.S. map down to the county level to understand where topics are trending

Babel Street

We are proud to introduce Babel Street Tool, the first and only tool of its kind. It is a revolutionary new way of learning languages.

With Babel Street Tool, you can learn any language you want in as little as one week. The tool is 100% natural and organic, so you don’t have to worry about taking any harmful drugs or supplements that might affect your health. You can use it at home, or anywhere else where you feel comfortable learning a new language—whether that’s a coffee shop or your own living room!

This amazing new tool was created by two friends who were looking for a way to learn English quickly when they moved from Spain to Italy. They tried many different methods but none of them worked as well as they wanted them to. That’s when they decided to create the Babel Street Tool!

Babel Street is a free tool that allows you to translate the text with ease.

The Babel Street tool is easy to use and allows you to translate text from over 50 languages. The tool also has a built-in spell checker, which will help you make sure your translations are accurate and correct.

To get started, simply enter some text into the box at the top of the page, then choose your language and click “Translate.” You’ll be given a new page with your translated text!

Capabilities and data sources: Babel Street says that its web-based platform, BabelX, can conduct cross-lingual searches for more than 200 languages and automatically translate posts to English. Babel Street also claims that BabelX can analyze sentiment in over 50 languages.

Babel Street states that its data sources include:

  • Over 30 social media platforms
  • Proprietary third-party and customer datasets
  • Billions of blogs and message boards

Known clients: The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) had a demo with Babel Street in May 2016. In its correspondence with the LAPD, Babel Street stated that it worked with many U.S. law enforcement agencies and fusion centers.

News stories that include information about Babel Street clients:

Digital Stakeout

Capabilities and data sources: Digital Stakeout advertises that it has integrated its tools into its Scout product, which uses data from the Internet, social media, and the dark web to provide users continuous data discovery, user-defined alerts, and custom data visualizations on its platform.

In 2016, Digital Stakeout claimed that its Canvass tool had access to over 550 social networking sites in over ten categories. On its website, Digital Stakeout states it collects information from Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Disqus, and WordPress. Digital Stakeout is a tool that allows you to monitor the digital activity of your competitors. It provides you with a wide range of features that are useful for monitoring the digital presence of your competitors. It helps you track their activities on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram among others. It also allows you to monitor their website’s performance and growth. You can use this tool to gain access to important competitive intelligence about your competitors such as what they are doing online, who is influencing them and what content they are sharing with their audience through these platforms.

Known clients: Digital Stakeout’s clients have included:

Skopenow

Skopenow is a tool that allows you to curate a news feed from your favorite websites. It’s very easy to use, and it’s completely free!

You can start by adding sites that you want to include in your feed. If you know the URL for the site, or if you’ve bookmarked it, then all you have to do is copy and paste the URL into Skopenow. You can also search for sites using Skopenow’s search bar—just type in a word or phrase (like “Skopenow”) and hit enter. Skopenow will show you a list of results, which makes it easy to find the site you’re looking for.

Once you’ve added some sites, they’ll appear on your homepage with links to their actual pages. You can click each link to go directly to that website’s homepage if you want more information about what they’re posting about today.

Capabilities and data sources: Skopenow claims that its tools have the capacity to:

  • Automatically find, extract, and analyze data from social media anonymously
  • Conduct behavioral recognition analysis through image and text analysis, subject monitoring, and comprehensive search results
  • Notify users via automated alerts when there are developments in a subject they are tracking
  • Create interactive visualizations by merging location data from consumer reports, social media posts, and metadata

Skopenow claims to have access to:

Known clients: The LAPD had a demo with Skopenow in June 2019, and multiple trials between November 2018 and July 2020. According to correspondence between the LAPD and a Skopenow representative, the company’s public sector clients included:

  • Broward County, FL
  • Martin County (state unknown)
  • Morristown Police Department (state unknown)
  • The U.S. Secret Service
  • The U.S. Postal Inspection Service

Cobwebs

Cobwebs investigation tool is a new tool for investigation of websites. It helps check all the links on a website and check if they are still working or not. This can be very useful in situations where you want to find out if a website is still running, or if it has been closed down by its owner because of some reason.

The way Cobwebs works is as follows: first, it retrieves all the links on a website and stores them in an array; then it uses a regular expression to check if they are valid or not (i.e., whether they point to another page). If they don’t point to another page (i.e., they are dead links), then Cobwebs returns an empty array; otherwise, it returns an array with all valid links from the original one.

Cobwebs was created using Python 3 and uses the BeautifulSoup library for scraping data from web pages.

Capabilities and data sources: Cobwebs developed a tool, Tangles, which it touts as an all-in-one investigative platform to collect, store, and analyze digital evidence. The tool’s purported capabilities include:

  • Real-time monitoring of posts, geo-locations, keywords, and interactions between social media users
  • Analysis of sentiment in targets’ online activity
  • Measurement of the strength of social media connections
  • Predictive insights through their AI-powered statistical analysis

Cobwebs claims to source its data from throughout the Internet, including social media and the deep and dark web, but does not name any specific platforms or data sources.

Known clients: According to the company, the Hartford Police Department (CT) has used its products.

Media Sonar

Media Sonar is the next-gen media monitoring platform that helps you stay on top of your competitors, customers, and industry trends. We’re excited to help you find the stories that are relevant to your business, so you can make better decisions and get ahead of everyone else.

Media Sonar is a tool that helps you discover the best influencers in your industry. It shows you who’s talking about your brand and how they’re doing it, so you can see what strategies are working and which ones aren’t.

It’s easy to use—you just enter a few keywords, and Media Sonar will show you a list of people who are talking about those topics on social media. You can then click through to see what they’ve said, or follow them directly from inside the app.

And it works for more than just finding influencers! You can also use it for tracking competitors’ mentions, listening to social media trends and more.

Capabilities and data sources: The company claims that its platform can compile a full digital snapshot of an individual’s online presence, including all related personas and connections, using over 300 data sources and two billion public records.

For more general searches, Media Sonar allows users to create custom alerts to notify them of developments in topics of interest across 100,000 data sources on the Internet.

Media Sonar claims that its products can cull through these data sources — containing two billion records compiled from public records — as well as “crowd-sourced data” and more, including:

  • 3,000 news sources
  • Social media platforms, including access to Twitter (Media Sonar was banned from accessing Facebook data in 2017)
  • Reddit, 4chan, 8chan, and “niche blogs and forums”
  • Comprehensive access to the Dark Web, including sources like TOR, i2p, and Telegram

Known clients: The LAPD purchased Media Sonar licenses using funds from a 2021 UASI grant.

Dataminr

Capabilities and data sources: Dataminr is an AI-based platform, partly owned by Twitter, that is used to monitor and track events and topics using social media posts. The service uses an algorithm to filter through all publicly available posts made on a given day. Dataminr’s First Alert product provides users with breaking and urgent news alerts. Dataminr touts that its alerts can surface breaking news stories before any news source reports on it.

Dataminr has access to:

  • Social media platforms such as TikTok, Snap, and Facebook
  • Twitter, through its partnership with the platform
  • Message boards such as Reddit
  • Blogs

Known clients: Dataminr conducted a trial with the LAPD from March to May 2016. According to news sources, Dataminr’s clients have included:

Conclusion:

Social media monitoring tools have been around for a few years now, so you might be wondering how they can help law enforcement. Hint: The answer is simple. Social media monitoring tools help law enforcement agencies monitor the public, so they can identify threats and gain valuable intel before a crime occurs.

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