How Journalists can use the internet to mine data

1. GREGORY GONDWE
BLANTYRE
MALAWI

2. Who understands it?
What is it then?

3. Creative and innovative ways
to find information on a
source or someone you’re
investigating

4. Involves using freely available search
tools to more usefully sift through
publicly-accessible information that’s
online.
What you actually do with that information
is, of course, entirely up to you.

5. Evil or Illegal
or Both

6. “Social media sleuthing is not
hacking and is not illegal but the
most important aspect of social
media sleuthing is to be a
journalist, not a stalker.” -
Michael Salzwedel, Social
Weaver, 2018.

7. According to Salzwedel
People leave digital footprints or
fingerprints which are not easily visible
Social media sleuthing is a helpful
approach that journalists can use to find
information.

8. What are the Platforms that journalists can
use to find public information of people on
social media

9. For journalists, it answers the big
picture questions about who you are
looking into or monitoring.

10. Example,
What Can You look into ?

11. A source,
 Their past relationships and friendships,
People they have met up with,
Places they have been,
Where they have worked,
The stories they’ve read and shared.

12. During the 2018 African Journalism
Investigative Conference Michael
Salzwedel from shared simple tools for
journalists to use to dig deep into
people’s social media background.

13. Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) OSINT
Framework
A tool that collects and brings data from public sources.
Provides access to free tools and reasonably priced
resources.
Useful tool for finding valuable information by querying
free search engines such as Google, and other resources,
and tools publicly available on the internet.

14. How it works:
 Person’s registered companies.
 Framework has an option of “business records” when you click on it, it
opens up another menu which will include annual reports, employee
profile, general info, company profiles and more.
 Clicking on “company profile” will lead you to a number of tools such
as UK Data, UK Companies list, Vault, Owler (R), Kompass
International where you can search for the company profile.

15. Fishing for names, fishing for nicknames
 IntelTechniques, an OSINT has been taken down
 Namecheckr is a website that, simply, checks a lot websites for usernames.
 Backgrounding - Tom Mpinganjira
 Namecheckr will find all the profiles on Twitter, Tumblr, etc., etc., etc.
 Try it with all the various emails and usernames he has.

16. Pipl
It is a free to use, large people search engine,
A person’s real identity behind their email address,
social media usernames or phone number.
Everything about a person, including personal,
professional, demographic, and contact
information.

17. How to use it,
Copy and Paste or Type - phone number,
email address, name or username of the
person you’re looking for and the
platform will bring up any information it
finds.

18. Facebook
Stalkscan
Free tool that shows all public information of any
given Facebook profile.
Displays public information from Facebook’s
official graph search.

19.  Attention!
 As of June 6th, you can scan only your own profile with this tool.
 After two years and 28M+ StalkScan sessions, Facebook decided to make the
Graph Search less transparent.
 As usual, they did this without any communication or dialogue with activists and
journalists that used it for legitimate purposes.
 The creepy graph search itself still exists, but is now less accessible and more
difficult to use.
 Make sure to check yourself with this tool, since your data is still out there!

20. The results depend on:
Privacy settings.
If the information is set to ‘friends only’
it will only show up for Facebook friends.

21. How to use Stalkscan
Pick a Facebook account you would like to
sleuth,
Open the profile (on Facebook),
Facebook then has a profile code/number for
the account in the link, copy that link into
Stalkscan,

22.  Stalkscan then gives you different tabs including:
 Available options (you can set the year of the profile you like to search through,
search through their past relationships, age, friends. co-workers)
 Tags,
 Pictures,
 Places,
 People,
 Interests,
 Comments
 Liked posts

23. Tweetdeck
Set up columns to monitor sources,
Monitor specific hashtags,
Refine columns (e.g for verified accounts only,
popular tweets only, monitor mentions of
users by other users).

24. FollowFly will sort by likes or retweets, but
only for the last year. And only for accounts,
not hashtags or anything.
SocialBearing will go back 3,200 tweets… but
you have to sit there clicking a button to load
200 tweets a time.

25. Social bearing
Provides free Twitter analytics and
searches for tweets, timelines & twitter
maps.
Find, filter and sort tweets or people
through engagement, influence, location,
sentiment and more.

26. Mentionmapp
Visualise your social network,
Discover connections and influencers,
Make anyone the centre of your attention (even
sources or those you are investigating), to quickly
see who they have the most interactions with.
Mention, shows where/how you have been
mentioned

27. OTHER TOOLS
MapChecking calculates the size
of an area,
How many people may be standing in it
- based on how thick the crowd is
Used for crowd estimation, like at
protests and such.

28. HaveIBeenPwned checks if
your email has gotten got in a
hack

29. Privacy tools
 SelfControl
 Tor
Hides your web browsing
Private windows, hide your browser history
Google and other trackers are still very aware of
what you’ve done

30. Tor
Protects protestors, secret agents, and
journalists from being censored or killed
Tor is the strongest tool for privacy and
freedom online.
It is free and open source software
maintained by the Tor Project and a
community of volunteers worldwide.

31.  https://socialweaver.com/
 https://osintframework.com/
 https://www.namecheckr.com/
 https://pipl.com/
 https://stalkscan.com/
 http://followfly.co/
 https://socialbearing.com/
 https://mentionmapp.com/
 https://www.mapchecking.com/
 https://haveibeenpwned.com/

32. GOD BE WITH
US ALL!