Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

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CHAPTER 15
Social media and its role for LEAs: Review and applications
further considered the disclosure of information as a personal choice, while users in 
Eastern countries saw it rather as a forced choice.
Disclosure and falsification of private information are thus linked to demograph-
ics and trust (
Joinson et al., 2010
), but are also a question of the larger environment 
in which the user operates.
RELEVANCE TO LEAs
In the acquisition of intelligence, LEAs may want to utilize this information in their 
models and assumptions. If different demographics vary with respect to the reasons 
and ways they employ social media, LEAs need to consider these disparities when 
tracking and garnering intelligence from groups of interest. Further, because offline 
relationships often precede online relationships, inferences can be made about an 
individual's social circle. Understanding the normal pattern of engagement with so-
cial media for a particular user may also prove to be an indicator of critical changes 
in attitudes. For example, gradual changes in language may indicate radicalization, 
while a single threatening post out of the blue may warrant more attention than if an 
individual posts such comments on a continuous basis, but are clearly not serious. 
In this respect it is important to know that such behaviors are also impacted by per-
sonality and cultural differences, which makes the application of a single standard 
of “normal” versus “problematic” online behaviors questionable. LEAs need to be 
able to match online profiles with real people. In this respect, knowing the attitudes 
toward the falsification of personal information across user groups is vital to appraise 
likelihood as well as possible motivations to differentiate “normal” from possibly 
“problematic” behaviors.
LEA USAGE SCENARIOS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA
The continued growth in popularity and diversity in the behaviors exhibited by social 
media users as discussed in the section “Features of Social Media Users and Use” has 
led to a wide range of events, and prospective scenarios upon which there is potential 
for LEAs to leverage available information to improve their investigative capability.
In this section, we put forward a number of relevant and current use-cases for the 
potential application of social media in specific law enforcement centric scenarios. 
In the previous section, we have seen how the use of social media varies across dif-
ferent demographics and cultures as well as the reasons for and types of usage. The 
expectations and behaviors displayed also differ across cultures, gender, personality 
traits and emotional states while how much trust users put in information found on-
line and what they decide to disclose about themselves all affect how LEAs need to 
structure their intelligence gathering processes and the assumptions they make about 
the data they find. Here we apply that knowledge into practical examples of how and 
why LEAs would engage with social media and what they can expect to get out of it 
in terms of enhancing investigative capability and effectiveness. Five scenarios are 

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