Social media for intelligence: practical examples of analysis for understanding
Jonas Alastair Juhlin, John T. E. Richardson · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2016
Social media has become a dominating feature in modern life. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google have users all over the world. People from all walks of life use social media. For the intelligence services, social media is an element that cannot be ignored. It holds immense amount of information, and the potential to extract useful intelligence cannot be ignored. Social media has been around for sufficient time that most intelligence services recognize the fact that social media needs some form of attention. However, for the intelligence collector and analyst several aspects must be uncovered in order to fully exploit social media for intelligence purposes. This paper will present Project Avatar, an experiment in obtaining effective intelligence from social media sources, and several emerging analytic techniques to expand the intelligence gathered from these sources.