Social Media Analytics driving the revolution for Law Enforcement Agencies

Social Media Analytics for LEA

Social media has become a cesspool of information, a journal of movements, opinions, relationships, and ideologies. This makes Social Media a salient platform for monitoring and analysis of individuals, groups, and events. This information, rather data is of crucial importance to the law enforcement agencies for tracking and monitoring of suspects and criminals.

With almost 462 million people, more than 35% of India's population is online. India has the second-largest number of internet users in the world and it has experienced 30.5 % growth since 2015. The growing users are making it a goldmine of information.

The recent trend of posting live pictures and videos of criminal and disastrous activities has become an instrument of real-time information dispensation of the casualties. This can help the LEA not only in staying updated but also in planning their next course of action.

Social media analytics is a part of OSINT processing, where data collected from publicly available sources are used to create intelligence. Social media, includes all platforms like Facebook, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, Yelp, Twitter, etc. Twitter hashtags and trending videos are high zones of activity which can be monitored by the Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) constantly.

Predicting Mass agitation

People usually turn to social media to advertise any strike, rally or any other important event that requires public turnover. This becomes an area of interest for the LEA because of the constant possibility of these events taking a violent turn and it’s precautionary to monitor them before they get out of hand.

OSINT, especially social media analytics conveys the Time, Date, Location, People of Interest and other various details which can help to monitor and control the law and order situation. It can help us track public opinions and sentiments across various social media platforms. It can also predict the scope and reach of any propaganda or radical movements.

For example- If LEA learns that there are whispers of mass agitation scheduled to happen on a specific day, they can take considerable steps to control the damage while monitoring it to prevent major casualties or damage.

Suspect Profiling

Once the reckoning of an event is known to the LEA, surveillance follows. It is also known as Social Profiling which is the process of constructing a User's (usually a suspect) profile using their publicly and voluntarily shared social data. In general, profiling refers to the data science process of generating a person's profile with AI-based algorithms and technology. It helps in understanding the suspect and its behavioural aspects with the 360-degree assessment.

This includes -

• Monitoring the posts, tweets, etc
• Keeping track of the number of people supporting it and against it
• Capturing the degree of sentiments
• Activities of the concerned individual in lieu of provoking or instigating people
• The general consensus regarding the concerned individual or the content shared by them

How can Innefu help?

Innefu’s InnSight provides OSINT processing, which includes Social Media Analytics. LEA use it for predicting mass agitations and in profiling high profile suspects.

It can extract information based on specific keywords and produce relevant data which can be analysed to predict sensitive events in the future, figure out the people of interest, the main perpetrator and the events that led to it.