Introduction to Social Media Investigation: A Hands-on Approach

If you’re interested in using social media as an investigative tool, Introduction to Social Media Investigation will show you how! Social networks and social media, like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, are some of the most popular services on the Web, with hundreds of millions of users. The public information that people share on these sites can be valuable for anyone interested in investigating people of interest through open, public sources.

Social media as an investigative device is in its infancy and not well understood. This book presents an overview of social media and discusses special skills and techniques to use when conducting investigations. The book features hands-on tutorials and case studies and offers additional data-gathering techniques.

Presents an overview of social media sites, information types, privacy policies, and other general issues relevant to investigating individuals onlineDiscusses the special skills and techniques needed when conducting investigations using social mediaIncludes hands-on tutorials and case studies using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media sites using proven investigative techniquesShows how to gather additional data using advanced techniques such as crowdsourcing, data mining, and network analysis

Section I: Introduction 1. Introduction 2. The Basics of Social Media Section II Techniques 3. Social Connections 4. Privacy Settings 5. Finding People on Social Media 6. Types of Personal Information 7. Location Section III: Major Social Networking Sites Hands-on tutorials, with case studies demonstrating how to apply the above techniques to specific sites. 8. Facebook 9. Twitter 10. FourSquare 11. Pinterest 12. LinkedIn 13. Google+ 14. Tumblr 15. Instagram 16. YouTube Section IV: Smaller Sites 17. Forums / Question Answering 18. Networking sites 19. Image and video sharing Section V: Getting More Data 20. Apps and API access 21. Crowd sourcing 22. Inferring traits from profiles 23. Ensemble Learners 24. Getting Started with RapidMiner