OSINT: Advanced Twitter Searches

Another popular social media platform which you should include in your online investigation (OSINT) is Twitter. Currently more than 500 million Tweets will be posted every single day. There are a few ways if you would like to collect information from a suspects Twitter profile.

Twitter Advanced Search

If you are interested in recent posts on Twitter, you can use Twitter’s advanced search feature where you can search for specific people, keywords and locations.

http://www.twitter.com/search-advanced

Normally people don’t have their real name on Twitter. It is more common to use a nickname as a profile name. Therefore it’s more difficult to search for a particular person if you only have his or her real name. The “Who to follow” feature of Twitter (http://twitter.com/#!/who_to_follow) actually gives you the option to search for a real name. If you are not 100% sure about the name “Followerwonk Bios” (http://followerwonk.com/bio) can help you with finding the correct Twitter profile. Last but not least you could browse through the Twitter Directory (https://twitter.com/i/directory/profiles) which might be a bit of a pain.

Search by location

Twitter allows you to search for Tweets which were posted close by a specific GPS location. Use the following syntax to get a list of all tweets within your radius:

https://twitter.com/search?q=geocode:59.3325800,18.0649000,1km
Date Range Search

If a suspect has thousands of Tweets it might be worth to apply a date range filter. Even if you need to collect all the tweets you can actually seize them year by year.

https://twitter.com/search?q=gfrom:NICKNAME since:2010-01-01 until:2010-12-31
https://twitter.com/search?q=gfrom:NICKNAME since:2011-01-01 until:2011-12-31
https://twitter.com/search?q=gfrom:NICKNAME since:2012-01-01 until:2012-12-31
First use of a hashtag

It might be just out of own interested, but do you know who first used the hashtag #yolo? Check this out:
http://ctrlq.org/first

First Follower

A first follower of a person can be of interested. It might be a good friend, a family member or a person that showed how Twitter works:
http://socalrank.com/firstfollower

Deleted, Suspended, and Missing Tweets

Twitter does not store deleted or suspended messages (at least to for public). If you are interested in an already deleted tweet, it might be worth checking the web archives mentioned in one of my previous posts. To make advantage of cached website searches you need to look for the twitter URL of your suspect, e.g.: site:twitter.com/NICKNAME.

3rd party Twitter search tool

One of the most comprehensive search tools in terms of Twitter searches is called IntelTechniques Twitter Search Tool by Michael Bazzell.

Another good source is called GeoSocial Footprint. This service shows a geo footprint of a twitter user. It shows geo tags on a map of a users last 200 tweets (if location info was added to a tweet).

Sleeping Time is another great source of information. It actually takes tweets of a suspect and provides the average time period that this user sleeps (= does normally not post any tweets).

Followers in common

If you look for a solution to search for mutual followers of two Twitter profiles you should try Twiangulate.

Latest trends on Twitter

Trend indication from Twitter feeds is visualized on a map on Trendsmap.com.

Advanced Twitter Analytics

If you are interested in deeper Twitter Analytics and you are not aversed to pay any money, you might check out the following two websites:

  1. Mention Map (mentionmapp.com)
  2. Twitonomy (twitonomy.com)

Both websites provide you with advanced visual analysis of Twitter profiles.

Resources
  • A lot of useful information can be found in the book “Open Source Intelligence Techniques” by “Michael Bazzell“.

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