This document provides guidance on social media sleuthing tools that journalists can use to find publicly available information about people online. It discusses tools for searching platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and other sites to discover details about a person's relationships, locations, interests and digital footprint. The document emphasizes that social media sleuthing is not hacking or illegal if used to gather openly accessible information, but cautions journalists to avoid stalking or invading privacy. A variety of free and paid search engines, analytics platforms and privacy tools are described to help journalists conduct open-source intelligence investigations online.

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!