What is a Social Media Forensics Expert?

A Social Media Forensics Expert is a specialist who analyzes and interprets data from social media platforms to uncover evidence and insights for various legal and corporate purposes.

Social Media Forensics Experts work with top social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok. They employ advanced tools, techniques, and experience to track, recover, and analyze digital footprints and activities. Their expertise is crucial in vetting potential candidates for executive roles by scrutinizing their online presence and interactions, ensuring that their social media history aligns with the company’s values and does not pose any reputational risks.

In the corporate environment, these experts investigate whether employees’ social media posts demonstrate hostility towards their employers. They analyze patterns of behavior and content to identify potential threats, breaches of confidentiality, or negative influences on workplace morale.

During voir dire, Social Media Forensics Experts assist legal teams in evaluating potential jurors. By examining jurors’ online activities, they can identify any conflicts of interest, biases, or predispositions that might affect their impartiality in assessing evidence during trials.

Additionally, Social Media Forensics Experts play a vital role in civil litigation cases as expert witnesses. In trademark infringement cases, they can provide detailed analyses of how and where a trademark has been misused online, strengthening the plaintiff’s case. In online defamation cases, they trace defamatory content back to its sources, establish the extent of its dissemination, and evaluate its impact, providing critical evidence for the court.

Types of Cases We’ve Worked Upon

• Sentiment Analysis of Facebook and Twitter posts involving a particular company and topics.
• Infiltration of Private Facebook Groups in order to determine what was being said and planned about an organization by hostile people.
• Investigation of a damaging Tweet posted by a banking executive could have been an accident or if it was intended to defame a member of the board.
• Determination of the number of impressions generated by hundreds of social media posts by multiple different influencer accounts on Instagram and YouTube in order to find out how many times an infringing trademark was seen by consumers. 
• Analysis of Tweets and their timestamps in assessing claims in an academic sexual harassment case. The Tweets were screenshot very close in time and used in a harassment claim – but, how did the person(s) who obtained the screenshots know about the recently-registered account, and know when the Tweets were to be posted in order to grab images of them within seconds and minutes of them being posted? 
• Analysis of Tumblr blog posts published prior to a teenager’s death to determine their date of publication and to document all of the posts before potential spoliation. A special program was custom-written to pull hundreds of posts, extract the publication date from within each page’s HTML code, display it on the surface of the post at the top of the page, and save the post as a PDF. (Analysis of the sequence of dates changed a legal strategy that was used in the case.)
• Investigation into the identity of anonymous social media accounts and accounts using aliases. In one case, we successfully peeled back the layers of time in order to uncover the identity behind an account conducting extortion and to locate their physical street address.
• Documentation of a defamation campaign that was conducted by a competitor of a business who pretended to be a customer and wrote negative claims about the business on multiple review websites and Facebook groups.
• Valuation of a YouTube account that grew by tens of thousands of subscribers and viewers through posting defamatory materials. 
• Determination of how much a monetized YouTube channel was making and a projection of how much the channel would be likely to make over the next 5 years if it continued operating as it had over past years.

Services Offered by the Social Media Forensics Expert:

• Social Media Investigations
• Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Posts
• Documentation of Social Media posts and evidence preservation for litigation.
• Calculation of how much some social media was viewed based on public-facing metrics including likes, video views, comments, and shares.
• Estimation of the number of fake/artificial followers of a social media account.
• Attempt to determine the identity of persons operating social media accounts.
• Analysis of biases based on previously published social content
• Deductions based on engagement and analytics
• Social Media Expert Witness services

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