Forensic Analysis of User Interaction with Social Media: A Methodology

The increasing use of social media, whereby users interact online, ensures that it will provide a useful source of evidence for the forensics examiner. Due to the dynamic nature of this environment, current approaches for its analysis are not without their limitations. This paper posits a novel inter-disciplinary methodology for the forensic analysis of user interaction with social media. In particular, it presents an approach for the quantitative analysis of user engagement to identify relational and temporal dimensions of evidence that will be relevant to an investigation. In this way, it may be used to support the identification of individuals who might be ‘instigators’ in a criminal event orchestrated via social media, or a means of potentially identifying those who might be involved in the ‘peaks’ of activity. In order to demonstrate the applicability of this methodology, this paper applies it to a case study of users posting to a social media Web site.