3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Social media is now present globally in everyday life, and in conflicts. With its reach, social media has also become an increasingly meaningful information source for scholars, advocacy groups, intelligence agencies, and others who are interested in shaping public discourse. This course introduces students to social media as part of present day open source information gathering, and how to plan collection and conduct analysis of information from social media. The course covers the operations security considerations, monitoring real time events, verification of online material, basics of social network analysis, and how to work with imagery sourced from social media, including geolocation of imagery. Automation and the limits of it in different phases of the process, and future developments in social media exploitation will also be discussed. During the course, students will conduct a hands-on investigation using social media data.