Within the context of pursuing a broad and effective open-source intelligence (OSINT) program, Gab is an essential social media platform for intelligence teams to understand and monitor.
Recently, a member of our Tradecraft team did a deep dive into Gab, analyzing its origin, structure, user base, and content as well as providing some predictions about what the future may hold for this social media platform. The findings of this deep dive are available in an industry brief that also delves into why Gab has become a hotbed of conspiracy-mongering and violent extremist views and fringe conspiracy theories.
MONITORING THE SOCIAL MEDIA LANDSCAPE
It’s well-known that intelligence teams are challenged by the sea of exponentially increasing open-source data that must be monitored to uncover potential risks and threats. Added to that challenge is the trend of platform transitions that we’ve covered in detail as part of our open-source intelligence best practices series. Exploding numbers of social media platforms have given rise to POIs, threat actors and groups moving between online communications channels and social media platforms at warp speed. There’s an increasing requirement for analysts and intelligence teams to be able to track these movements and monitor POIs and issues across many diverse platforms.
Gab is one such platform that needs to be monitored for movement and tracking of risks and threats that may have migrated from other platforms. Despite its relatively small user base, Gab can be a vitally important source of data and insights for law enforcement, national security, corporate security, and other investigative teams. As detailed in the industry brief, monitoring of Gab is particularly pertinent for intelligence teams focused on monitoring threats from violent right-wing extremism to detect potential risks to community, company, or executive safety.
THE ROLE OF OSINT
Advanced Open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques and technology can play a pivotal role in addressing the challenge of managing the exploding volume of online data in general and, more specifically, identifying risky content on social media platforms such as Gab. Fivecast ONYX provides a customizable risk detector framework which, combined with AI-enabled capabilities for image, logo, text, and phrase detection, can be configured to collect only the data most relevant to an investigation to quickly zero in on potential risk indicators across masses of multi-media content. Additional analytics capabilities including network identification and sentiment and emotion mapping act as a force multiplier for intelligence analysts, driving investigation efficiencies and successful mission outcomes. Cover more, miss less – contact us for a demo.
