How SOCMINT Evolved: From API Access to Manual Tradecraft (opens in new tab)

The history of social media intelligence divides cleanly at 2023. Before that year, SOCMINT operated on a durable infrastructure: programmatic API access to Twitter’s firehose, permissive scraping conventions across Facebook and Instagram, and a generation of open-source tooling built on top of both. Researchers at universities, investigative journalists at underfunded newsrooms, and independent OSINT practitioners could run network analysis, map influence operations, and geolocate content at...