Do You Really Know How to Investigate on Twitter?
Twitter is one of the best social media, that helps investigators to find information.
People share not just their opinions there, but locations, assets, affiliations, and life updates. A few years ago, I was tasked to identify a person behind an anonymous account, and in a matter of a few hours, I knew where the person lived, their gender, family relationships, political affiliation, and future plans. To do that, I used many third-party websites, that allow an investigator to pull and analyze Twitter data.
Twitter allows using an advanced search on their website, but most of the time, it’s not enough to gather all relevant details. With the help of OSINT analysis tools, investigators can comb through Twitter posts and other online activity to gather valuable data that can help them locate people and solve cases.
Twitter Analytics
Foller: the tool provides locations, time of registration, following and follower count, tweets analysis, hashtags, topics, mentions, and posting time, which allows investigators to understand a potential location based on a time zone.
Tinforleak: the website provides the same information as above and the reports are sent via email
ThruthNest: a thorough tool with a lot of data on Twitter users
Twitonomy: the website shows a lot of detailed information about a user, including a detailed list of following and followers, most mentioned or retweeted users. The data can be downloaded for easier analysis. The tool also allows to keep multiple lists of users and check their tweets as they come in.
Tweet Beaver: the website has many different services that allow to look up users data and download it. Some of the services help compare the behaviors of two users toward each other.
All My Tweets: all tweets, likes, following, and followers’ data on one page
Followerwonk: search for users based on keywords, comparison of users against each other, activity spikes analysis, followers’ data
TweepDiff and Twiangulate: the best tools to find connections that different users have in common
Social Bearing: a search engine for users, keywords, tweet maps, and other analytics
Location
Tweeplers: the tool provides a real-time map of tweets. Locations can be as precise as possible, including a specific address
OneMillionTweetMap: a map tool that allows searching based on a keyword, a hashtag, or a Twitter username. It has a time filter and sentiment analysis.
Tweet Mapper: the tool shows geolocation for every tweet if a user enabled it.
Trendsmap: a global map of trending users, hashtags, and words
Tweet Map: trending hashtags and tweets using different languages and specific locations
Other Tools
Botometer: a tool that helps to recognize if a Twitter user is a bot
Hoaxy2: a tool helping to visualize how information spread on Twitter
Twdown: downloads videos from Twitter or converts them to MP3
Spoonbill: check any modifications and changes to the following accounts
Aware Online: advanced Twitter searches, including different languages
Intel Techniques: many advanced searches on one page
TweetDeck: one of the best tools to monitor tweets, hashtags, or keywords in one place
Twipho: an image search on Twitter
Twlets: a Chrome extension that can download all user’s data in an Excel file
Nitter: view users without logging in to Twitter
Username Checks
Many people reuse their usernames on other websites and social media. Username Search tools can do a web-wide search and find where it was used before.
Examples of username search tools available online:
