Social media intelligence

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Social media intelligence (SMI or SOCMINT) refers to the collective tools and solutions that allow organizations to analyze conversations, respond to synchronize social signals, and synthesize social data points into meaningful trends and analysis, based on the user's needs. Social media intelligence allows one to utilize intelligence gathering from social media sites, using both intrusive or non-intrusive means, from open and closed social networks. [1] This type of intelligence gathering is one element of OSINT (Open- Source Intelligence). [2]

Contents

The term was coined in a 2012 paper written by Sir David Omand, Jamie Bartlett and Carl Miller for the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, at the London-based think tank, Demos. [3] [4] [2] The authors argued that social media is now an important part of intelligence and security work, but that technological, analytical, and regulatory changes are needed before it can be considered a powerful new form of intelligence, including amendments to the United Kingdom Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. [3]

Given the dynamic evolution of social media and social media monitoring, our current understanding of how social media monitoring can help organizations create business value is inadequate. As a result, there is a need to study how organizations can (a) extract and analyze social media data related to their business (Sensing), and (b) utilize external intelligence gained from social media monitoring for specific business initiatives (Seizing). [5]

Governmental Use

In Thailand, the Technology Crime Suppression Division not only employs a 30-person team to scrutinize social media for content deemed disrespectful to the monarchy, known as lèse-majesté but also encourages citizens to report such content. Particularly targeting the youth, they run a "Cyber Scout" program where participants are rewarded for reporting individuals posting material perceived as detrimental to the monarchy. [6]

Instances in Israel involve the arrest of Palestinians by the police for their social media posts. An example includes a 15-year-old girl who posted a Facebook status with the words "forgive me," raising suspicions among Israeli authorities that she might be planning an attack. [6]

In Egypt, a leaked 2014 call for tender from the Ministry of Interior reveals efforts to procure a social media monitoring system to identify leading figures and prevent protests before they occur. [6]

In the United States, ZeroFOX faced criticism for sharing a report with Baltimore officials showcasing how their social media monitoring tool could track riots following Freddie Gray's funeral. The report labeled 19 individuals, including two prominent figures from the #BlackLivesMatter movement, as "threat actors." [6]

In the UK, the Association of Chief Police Officers of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland emphasized the significance of social media in intelligence gathering during anti-fracking protests in 2011. Social media analysis closely monitored protests against the badger cull in 2013, with a 2013 report revealing a team of 17 officers in the National Domestic Extremism Unit scanning public tweets, YouTube videos, Facebook profiles, and other online content from UK citizens. [6]

Effects on Political Opinion

During the 2016 United States presidential election, the Senate Intelligence Committee released reports containing information about Russia’s use of troll farms to mislead black voters about voting. [7] Also, German researchers in 2010 analyzed Twitter messages regarding the German federal election concluding that Twitter played a role in leading users to a specific political opinion. [8]

In a broad sense, social media refers to a conversational, distributed mode of content generation, dissemination, and communication among communities. Different from broadcast-based traditional and industrial media, social media has torn down the boundaries between authorship and readership, while the information consumption and dissemination process is becoming intrinsically intertwined with the process of generating and sharing information. [9]

An example of how SOCMINT is used to affect political opinions is the Cambridge Analytica Scandal. Cambridge Analytica was a company that purchased data from Facebook about its users without the consent or knowledge of Americans. They used this data to build a "psychological warfare tool" to persuade US voters to elect Donald Trump as president in the 2016 election. [10] Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower, reported that personal information was taken in early 2014, and used to build a system that could target US voters with personalized pollical advertisements. More than 50 million individuals' data was exploited and manipulated. [11] [12]

Law Enforcement

In September of 2023, the Philadelphia Police Department began using social media to track and stay one step ahead of criminal activity to stop meetups and potential robberies. This new approach has made officers utilize another tool in their field by being able to find new information as quickly as possible. [13] [14]

Marketing

SOCMINT collects data from both organizations and people on an individual level. It has a variety of different purposes, and though its main goal is to improve national security advancements, there are several other benefits as well. This intelligence can identify patterns, predict trends, gather information in current time, etc. [15] In addition, these aspects have allowed for both improvement within businesses and help for law enforcement. [16]

Artificial Social Networking Intelligence (ASNI) refers to the application of artificial intelligence within social networking services and social media platforms. It encompasses various technologies and techniques used to automate, personalize, enhance, improve, and synchronize user's interactions and experiences within social networks. ASNI is expected to evolve rapidly, influencing how we interact online and shaping their digital experiences. Transparency, ethical considerations, media influence bias, and user control over data will be crucial to ensure responsible development and positive impact.

Google provides many free services and has built an entire media brand with its vast variety of products. Along with data collection, Google also owns two advertising services, Google Ads, and Google AdSense. Surprisingly, most of its revenue comes from advertising, not direct sales of its services or products. Google makes money by selling advertising services to advertisers. They provide ad space to websites on Google, and target ads to consumers of Google services and products. Google can market ads using SOCMINT to collect data from its users and generate revenue. [17]

Research shows that various social media platforms on the Internet such as Twitter, Tumblr (micro-blogging websites), Facebook (a popular social networking website), YouTube (largest video sharing and hosting website), Blogs and discussion forums are being misused by extremist groups for spreading their beliefs and ideologies, promoting radicalization, recruiting members and creating online virtual communities sharing a common agenda. Popular microblogging websites such as Twitter are being used as a real-time platform for information sharing and communication during the planning and mobilization of civil unrest-related events. [18] [2]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social media</span> Virtual online communities

Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. Social media refers to new forms of media that involve interactive participation. While challenges to the definition of social media arise due to the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some common features:

  1. Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.
  2. User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions—is the lifeblood of social media.
  3. Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.
  4. Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.

Social search is a behavior of retrieving and searching on a social searching engine that mainly searches user-generated content such as news, videos and images related search queries on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Flickr. It is an enhanced version of web search that combines traditional algorithms. The idea behind social search is that instead of ranking search results purely based on semantic relevance between a query and the results, a social search system also takes into account social relationships between the results and the searcher. The social relationships could be in various forms. For example, in LinkedIn people search engine, the social relationships include social connections between searcher and each result, whether or not they are in the same industries, work for the same companies, belong the same social groups, and go the same schools, etc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Facebook</span> Social networking service owned by Meta Platforms

Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities. Since 2006, Facebook allows everyone to register from 13 years old, except in the case of a handful of nations, where the age limit is 14 years. As of December 2022, Facebook claimed 3 billion monthly active users. As of October 2023 Facebook ranked as the 3rd most visited website in the world with 22.56% of its traffic coming from the United States. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.

Facebook has been the subject of criticism and legal action since it was founded in 2004. Criticisms include the outsize influence Facebook has on the lives and health of its users and employees, as well as Facebook's influence on the way media, specifically news, is reported and distributed. Notable issues include Internet privacy, such as use of a widespread "like" button on third-party websites tracking users, possible indefinite records of user information, automatic facial recognition software, and its role in the workplace, including employer-employee account disclosure. The use of Facebook can have negative psychological and physiological effects that include feelings of sexual jealousy, stress, lack of attention, and social media addiction that in some cases is comparable to drug addiction.

Social network advertising, also known as "social media targeting," is a group of terms used to describe forms of online advertising and digital marketing focusing on social networking services. One of the significant benefits of this type of advertising is that advertisers can take advantage of the users' demographic information, psychographics and other data points to target their ads appropriately.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social media marketing</span> Promotion of products or services on social media

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. Although the terms e-marketing and digital marketing are still dominant in academia, social media marketing is becoming more popular for both practitioners and researchers. Most social media platforms have built-in data analytics tools, enabling companies to track the progress, success, and engagement of social media marketing campaigns. Companies address a range of stakeholders through social media marketing, including current and potential customers, current and potential employees, journalists, bloggers, and the general public. On a strategic level, social media marketing includes the management of a marketing campaign, governance, setting the scope and the establishment of a firm's desired social media "culture" and "tone".

Since the arrival of early social networking sites in the early 2000s, online social networking platforms have expanded exponentially, with the biggest names in social media in the mid-2010s being Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. The massive influx of personal information that has become available online and stored in the cloud has put user privacy at the forefront of discussion regarding the database's ability to safely store such personal information. The extent to which users and social media platform administrators can access user profiles has become a new topic of ethical consideration, and the legality, awareness, and boundaries of subsequent privacy violations are critical concerns in advance of the technological age.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Filter bubble</span> Intellectual isolation involving search engines

A filter bubble or ideological frame is a state of intellectual isolation that can result from personalized searches, recommendation systems, and algorithmic curation. The search results are based on information about the user, such as their location, past click-behavior, and search history. Consequently, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles, resulting in a limited and customized view of the world. The choices made by these algorithms are only sometimes transparent. Prime examples include Google Personalized Search results and Facebook's personalized news-stream.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">User profile</span> Data about an individual user

A user profile is a collection of settings and information associated with a user. It contains critical information that is used to identify an individual, such as their name, age, portrait photograph and individual characteristics such as knowledge or expertise. User profiles are most commonly present on social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn; and serve as voluntary digital identity of an individual, highlighting their key features and traits. In personal computing and operating systems, user profiles serve to categorise files, settings, and documents by individual user environments, known as ‘accounts’, allowing the operating system to be more friendly and catered to the user. Physical user profiles serve as identity documents such as passports, driving licenses and legal documents that are used to identify an individual under the legal system.

Social media mining is the process of obtaining big data from user-generated content on social media sites and mobile apps in order to extract actionable patterns, form conclusions about users, and act upon the information, often for the purpose of advertising to users or conducting research. The term is an analogy to the resource extraction process of mining for rare minerals. Resource extraction mining requires mining companies to shift through vast quantities of raw ore to find the precious minerals; likewise, social media mining requires human data analysts and automated software programs to shift through massive amounts of raw social media data in order to discern patterns and trends relating to social media usage, online behaviours, sharing of content, connections between individuals, online buying behaviour, and more. These patterns and trends are of interest to companies, governments and not-for-profit organizations, as these organizations can use these patterns and trends to design their strategies or introduce new programs, new products, processes or services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social media analytics</span> Process of gathering and analyzing data from social media networks

Social media analytics or Social media monitoring is the process of gathering and analyzing data from social networks. It is commonly used by marketers to track online conversations about products and companies. One author defined it as "the art and science of extracting valuable hidden insights from vast amounts of semi-structured and unstructured social media data to enable informed and insightful decision-making."

Corporate surveillance describes the practice of businesses monitoring and extracting information from their users, clients, or staff. This information may consist of online browsing history, email correspondence, phone calls, location data, and other private details. Acts of corporate surveillance frequently look to boost results, detect potential security problems, or adjust advertising strategies. These practices have been criticized for violating ethical standards and invading personal privacy. Critics and privacy activists have called for businesses to incorporate rules and transparency surrounding their monitoring methods to ensure they are not misusing their position of authority or breaching regulatory standards.

The commercialization of the Internet encompasses the creation and management of online services principally for financial gain. It typically involves the increasing monetization of network services and consumer products mediated through the varied use of Internet technologies. Common forms of Internet commercialization include e-commerce, electronic money, and advanced marketing techniques including personalized and targeted advertising. The effects of the commercialization of the Internet are controversial, with benefits that simplify daily life and repercussions that challenge personal freedoms, including surveillance capitalism and data tracking. This began with the National Science Foundation funding supercomputing center and then universities being able to develop supercomputer sites for research and academic purposes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social media in the 2016 United States presidential election</span>

Social media played an important role in shaping the course of events leading up to, during, and after the 2016 United States presidential election. It enabled people to have a greater interaction with the political climate, controversies, and news surrounding the candidates. Unlike traditional news platforms, such as newspapers, radio, and magazines, social media gave people the ability to comment below a candidate's advertisement, news surrounding the candidates, or articles regarding the policy of the candidates. It also allowed people to formulate their own opinions on public forums and sites and allowed for greater interaction among voters. The accessibility of information online enabled more voters to educate themselves on candidates' positions on issues, which in turn enabled them to form unique opinions on candidates and vote on those opinions, ultimately impacting the election's outcome.

A social bot, also described as a social AI or social algorithm, is a software agent that communicates autonomously on social media. The messages it distributes can be simple and operate in groups and various configurations with partial human control (hybrid) via algorithm. Social bots can also use artificial intelligence and machine learning to express messages in more natural human dialogue.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feed (Facebook)</span> Feature of the social network Facebook

Facebook's Feed, formerly known as the News Feed, is a web feed feature for the social network. The feed is the primary system through which users are exposed to content posted on the network. Feed highlights information that includes profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays, among other updates. Using a proprietary method, Facebook selects a handful of updates to show users every time they visit their feed, out of an average of 2,000 updates they can potentially receive. Over two billion people use Facebook every month, making the network's Feed the most viewed and most influential aspect of the news industry. The feature, introduced in 2006, was renamed "Feed" in 2022.

Social media reach is a media analytics metric that refers to the number of users who have come across a particular content on a social platform such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Spotify and many more have their own individual ways of tracking, analyzing and reporting the traffic on each of the individual platforms. Each platform allows their users, from everyday citizens to public figures and companies, to create posts and content, to be active on the platform and to interact with other users. These platforms are also a main source of communication between companies and their target audiences. By conducting research, companies are able to utilize analytical information, such as the reach of their posts, to better understand the interactions between the users and their content.

In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected without their consent by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, predominantly to be used for political advertising.

Social media use in politics refers to the use of online social media platforms in political processes and activities. Political processes and activities include all activities that pertain to the governance of a country or area. This includes political organization, global politics, political corruption, political parties, and political values.

Social media was used extensively in the 2020 United States presidential election. Both incumbent president Donald Trump and Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden's campaigns employed digital-first advertising strategies, prioritizing digital advertising over print advertising in the wake of the pandemic. Trump had previously utilized his Twitter account to reach his voters and make announcements, both during and after the 2016 election. The Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden also made use of social media networks to express his views and opinions on important events such as the Trump administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the protests following the murder of George Floyd, and the controversial appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

References

  1. ↑ Norton-Taylor, Richard (April 24, 2012). "Former spy chief calls for laws on online snooping". The Guardian. Retrieved February 22, 2013.
  2. 1 2 3 Senekal, BA (2018), Socmint: die monitering van sosiale media vir gemeenskapsveiligheidsdoeleindes binne 'n grootdataraamwerk in Suid-Afrika met spesifieke verwysing na Orania, LitNet Akademies 15(3).
  3. 1 2 Omand, David; Bartlett, Jamie; Miller, Carl (2012). #Intelligence. London, England: Demos. ISBN   978-1-909037-08-3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. ↑ "Warning over net surveillance move". The Sunday Sun. April 24, 2012. Retrieved February 22, 2013.
  5. ↑ Mayeh, Maral; Scheepers, Rens; Valos, Michael (January 1, 2012). "Understanding the role of social media monitoring in generating external intelligence". ACIS 2012: Location, Location, Location: Proceedings of the 23rd Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2012: 1–10.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 "Social Media Intelligence | Privacy International". privacyinternational.org. Retrieved November 27, 2023.
  7. ↑ "Report: Russia still using social media to roil US politics". AP News. December 18, 2018. Retrieved November 20, 2023.
  8. ↑ "Social Media As An Intelligence Goldmine". Cyber Security Review. March 15, 2016. Retrieved November 20, 2023.
  9. ↑ Zeng, D.; Chen, H.; Lusch, R.; Li, S. (November 2010). "Social Media Analytics and Intelligence" (PDF). IEEE Intelligent Systems. 25 (6): 13–16. doi:10.1109/MIS.2010.151. ISSN   1941-1294.
  10. ↑ Lapowsky, Issie. "How Cambridge Analytica Sparked the Great Privacy Awakening". Wired. ISSN   1059-1028 . Retrieved December 4, 2023.
  11. ↑ Cadwalladr, Carole; Graham-Harrison, Emma (March 17, 2018). "Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved December 4, 2023.
  12. ↑ "History of the Cambridge Analytica Controversy | Bipartisan Policy Center". bipartisanpolicy.org. Retrieved December 4, 2023.
  13. ↑ "Looting in Philadelphia: How social media is playing a key role - CBS Philadelphia". www.cbsnews.com. September 29, 2023. Retrieved November 27, 2023.
  14. ↑ Terry, Roger. "Social Media Marketing Agency". tmcnet.com. Retrieved March 21, 2023.
  15. ↑ "Social Media Intelligence: Opportunities And Limitations". CES Working Papers. 7 (2A): 505–510. 2015. ISSN   2067-7693.
  16. ↑ "What is Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT)? | Brand24". October 27, 2023. Retrieved November 27, 2023.
  17. ↑ Kang, Hyunjin; McAllister, Matthew P. (June 23, 2011). "Selling You and Your Clicks: Examining the Audience Commodification of Google". TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society. 9 (2): 141–153. doi: 10.31269/triplec.v9i2.255 . ISSN   1726-670X.
  18. ↑ Agarwal, Swati; Sureka, Ashish (November 21, 2015). "Applying Social Media Intelligence for Predicting and Identifying On-line Radicalization and Civil Unrest Oriented Threats". arXiv: 1511.06858 [cs.CY].


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