Social Media Investigations
Social media posts are becoming common sources of evidence across a wide variety of legal matters.
Quick and cost-effective — social media investigations are growing in popularity as more and more parties to lawsuits and government inquiries are building cases using information from social media sites.
BIA has been performing social media investigations in a secure and legally defensible manner since the formation of the first social media platforms and continues to lead the industry in social media investigations – using proprietary and accepted methods, backed by court testimony.
Social Media Investigations Used Across Several Areas
Don't do a background check or insurance claim analysis without one.
There are specific correct methods for performing social media investigations – beginning with the information-gathering process and through the analysis of data and artifacts captured from social media networks so that the objects captured can be used in court as evidence.
Watch this video and learn how BIA's Social Media Investigations™ services help you find the smoking gun.
8 Reasons to Use BIA for Your Social Media Investigations
- Handled by licensed private investigators and digital forensics professionals.
- Gather, analyze and report on data from multiple social media platforms.
- Preserve unique metadata, important for validating posts as digital evidence to be used for legal purposes.
- All items are digitally fingerprinted and maintained with the appropriate chain-of-custody.
- All artifacts are processed for easy load into litigation review platforms, such as Relativity and Reveal.
- BIA uses industry-leading investigative tools and methods, compliant with Federal Rule of Evidence 902(14).
- Testimony, written certifications and evidence authentication provided upon request.
- Optional proactive monitoring of social media accounts for changes to posts such as edits and deletions.
BIA's Social Media Investigations
Social media investigations are used for insurance claim analysis, employee hiring, plaintiff fact checking and more.
Insurance Claim Analysis
Reduce your risk. Stop insurance fraud. To help lower insurance claims payouts, make sure you have skilled personnel checking social media sites. Social media investigations are an important part of the claims analysis process and can help bring a speedy end to fraudulent insurance claims.
Here’s just a sampling of where such research can help reduce your claims payout:
- Personal injury
- Construction defects
- Employment claims
- Mergers & acquisitions
Employee Hiring & HR Activities
Background checks are performed when new candidates are hired. But those checks typically miss critical social information.
Here’s just a sampling of how such research can help inform your hiring decisions:
- Determine whether the candidate is the right cultural fit
- Provide details for executive leadership hiring decisions
- Help avoid embarrassing situations with new hires
- Prevent sex discrimination lawsuits
Plaintiff Fact Checking
Many times, attorneys find themselves in a challenging position when taking on a new case and a new client. It is often too late for attorneys to remove themselves from the case once they find out the client has lied or miscommunicated substantive issues that, if known, would have otherwise prevented their taking the case.
Here’s just a sampling of where social media research can help fact-check plaintiff claims:
- Did the incident occur as described?
- Are there hidden facts that should be brought to light?
- Were any known associates not disclosed?
- Could there be criminal issues that complicate a civil case?
Capture & Monitoring
BIA offers both static data capture of social media sites or proactive monitoring.
BIA provides a case-centric workflow from preliminary research and data collection through to reporting and production. All data is delivered in a searchable native format while preserving critical metadata, which is not possible through image capture or printouts.
We also have the capability to conduct proactive monitoring capabilities for social media, geostreaming and websites to capture changes to posts such as edits and deletions.
How Our Social Media Investigations Work
Four core steps to fast and effective social media investigations.
1
2
Search
BIA is able to perform broad, unified searches across multiple accounts, social media streams and websites. Linked content is automatically indexed and searched, and the results are aggregated for sorting, tagging, and exporting consistent with standard eDiscovery or investigative workflows.
3
Authentication
MD5 hash values of individual items are calculated upon capture and maintained through export. Automated logging and reports are generated. Key metadata unique to social media and web streams are captured through deep integration with APIs.
4
Production
BIA maintains the data in a searchable native format from collection through production, providing a complete platform to review, code and tag social media in the same manner as email, electronic documents and other ESI.Ready to speak with our social media investigation experts?
Our professionals are ready to listen and understand your needs so that they can provide you with the best advice.
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