SOCMINT: Tools, Tips, & Tricks for Social Media Investigations

For open source intelligence (OSINT) investigators, social media has become one of the richest sources of publicly accessible evidence.

Government agencies today are facing unprecedented pressure to do more with less. Recordkeeping teams, responsible for critical functions like responding to open records requests and FOIA compliance, are increasingly challenged by staff reductions and the ever-growing volume and complexity of digital records.

These days, you'd be hard-pressed to find an business that isn't advertising on social media. But when it comes to financial service providers, social media marketing can become a double-edged sword, or worse a compliance nightmare that results in major fines from the SEC, FINRA or the FTC.

Navigating the landscape of FOIA and open records laws in the U.S. can be complex, especially when it comes to digital records.

If you work in public sector communications or with government social media accounts, you know firsthand that social media is becoming a more divisive, controversial, and toxic space.

Financial industry recordkeeping regulatory requirements like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Rules 17a-3 and 17a-4, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Rules 4511 and 2210, play a crucial role in maintaining the integrity of the U.S. financial markets. These regulations are not just bureaucratic formalities; their oversight involves ensuring that financial services firms adhere to stringent record retention requirements, essential for the transparency, accountability, and trust that underpin the financial system.

If you’re trying to archive your website, whether for litigation readiness, corporate heritage, or you are just trying to make sure your website is compliant with your industry’s regulatory requirements, you will likely encounter a little ol’ file type called WARC (Web ARChive).

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a cloud service comes with a few native tools for short-term back-ups and version control. But if you’re looking to create a legally-admissible, compliant archive of your AEM website content, Adobe itself warns that these features are, “not intended as an audit log or for legal purposes.”

How do Federal agencies like NASA, the Department of Education, and the Department of Homeland Security capture and manage social media records?

On January 7th, 2025, Meta announced they will be making major changes to content moderation policies on all their owned platforms, including Facebook: ending third-party fact-checking in the US in lieu of a new "Community Notes" feature, lifting restrictions on certain content, and allowing more political content in people's feeds, in order to "return to [their] fundamental commitment to free expression."