Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

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CHAPTER 15
Social media and its role for LEAs: Review and applications
In this chapter we review the current knowledge around social media users, their reasons 
for engagement in social media, and the factors that influence user behavior including 
the trustworthiness of user information. Further, we review a number of potential use-
cases for social media within the context of law enforcement for investigative purposes. 
These include events such as lone-wolf scenarios, hostage situations, and human traf-
ficking. Following this, we discuss public engagement as a crucial issue for garnering 
wide-reaching and on-going support for crowd-sourcing and other applications of social 
media in combating online crime, and crime facilitated through social media use.
FEATURES OF SOCIAL MEDIA USERS AND USE
DIFFERENCES IN DEMOGRAPHICS ACROSS NETWORKS
In employing social media services as a potential intelligence source, it is important 
to understand the composition of the various respective user groups. Below are find-
ings from the latest Pew survey (
Duggan and Smith, 2013
) highlighting the user 
characteristics in the most prevalent examples of social media services:
• 
LinkedIn
is especially popular among college graduates and users from higher 
income households.
• 
Twitter
is frequented mostly by younger adults, urban dwellers, and non-whites.
• 
Instagram
is frequented mostly by younger adults, urban dwellers, and non-
whites; also users that live in urban as opposed to rural environments.
• 
Pinterest
attracts about four times as many women as men and has a slightly 
higher amount of users with higher degrees of education and higher rates of 
income amongst its users.
• 
Facebook
is used more often by women than men, but shows a nearly equal 
distribution across ethnicity groups (white-non Hispanic, Hispanic, black-non 
Hispanic), educational levels, pay scale, and urban versus suburban and rural 
environments.
These disparities demonstrate that social media services differ in the people they at-
tract, especially with respect to the age, gender and educational level of their users. 
This has consequences for the style, frequency of postings and type of content that 
can be expected on disparate services. It also has consequences for the way users 
approach different networks.
Interestingly, users tend to stay with the services they know (
Manso and Manso, 
2013
). This “stickiness” not only creates comparatively stable user groups, but also 
creates challenges for the introduction of new apps (e.g., specialized apps for crisis 
communication).