Social Media and OSINT: Tools That Drive Modern Investigations

Hot off the heels of Part 1 of our social media OSINT series, this article turns from sources to practice. Social networks generate vast amounts of public information—posts, comments, videos, metadata, and social connections—but volume alone doesn’t create insight. Without tools built to collect, organize, and preserve that data, critical signals remain buried in noise, scattered across interfaces, or lost as content shifts and disappears.

This article focuses on the practical layer of social media OSINT: the tools investigators rely on to extract structured data from the platforms covered in Part 1. Each section highlights one tool for one platform, showing how analysts move from raw online activity to usable intelligence that can be analyzed, compared, and acted upon.

Essential Tools for Social Media OSINT

SL Crimewall

Kicking off the list is SL Crimewall, an all-in-one OSINT investigation platform designed to centralize social media intelligence. Instead of juggling multiple single-purpose tools, analysts can extract data, map relationships, and build timelines in a single workspace. Crimewall supports 500+ open sources, including major social networks and messaging apps, making it the backbone of multi-source investigations.

What SL Crimewall does:

• Extracts public data from major social media platforms
• Maps relationships between accounts, pages, and entities
• Visualizes networks, clusters, and influence paths
• Builds timelines and structured case narratives
• Correlates activity across platforms

twscrape

Next is twscrape, a modern scraping tool built specifically for collecting public data from X. It relies on authenticated sessions rather than deprecated APIs, making it a practical option for working with current platform access patterns. For investigators, it offers a structured way to collect large volumes of posts and account data from one of the fastest-moving social networks.

What twscrape does:

• Collects tweets, replies, retweets, and quote tweets
• Extracts user profiles and account metadata
• Retrieves follower and following lists
• Supports keyword, hashtag, and time-based searches
• Handles rate limits and session management

Meta Content Library

For Meta platforms, the official option is the Meta Content Library. Introduced after the retirement of CrowdTangle, it provides structured access to public posts, Pages, and engagement metrics across Meta platforms. Built for journalists, researchers, and civil society organizations, it supports large-scale analysis of public Meta content.

While access is controlled and functionality differs from CrowdTangle, it remains the most authoritative source for this type of research.

What the Meta Content Library does:

• Retrieves public posts from Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts
• Provides engagement metrics (reactions, comments, shares)
• Enables keyword, topic, and time-range searches
• Supports trend and longitudinal analysis
• Offers API access for approved research users

linkedin2username

For LinkedIn-focused work, linkedin2username takes a narrower but practical approach. Rather than attempting full scraping, it concentrates on extracting consistent profile identifiers from company pages and search results. This makes it particularly useful for mapping professional networks and enumerating employees tied to specific organizations.

What linkedin2username does:

• Generates LinkedIn usernames from company pages
• Extracts public profile identifiers
• Enumerates employees tied to organizations
• Produces clean outputs for follow-up analysis
• Supports corporate and professional OSINT workflows

Instaloader

When it comes to Instagram content collection, Instaloader is a widely used open-source tool. It allows investigators to download public posts and stories along with their metadata, preserving media in original quality. This makes it especially useful for archiving accounts, reviewing posting history, and reconstructing timelines.

What Instaloader does:

• Downloads posts, reels, stories, and highlights
• Captures captions, hashtags, and tagged locations
• Preserves original images and videos
• Extracts timestamps and post metadata
• Archives complete public profiles

TikTok-Scraper

For TikTok, TikTok-Scraper provides a straightforward way to collect publicly accessible data through web-based scraping. It focuses on extracting structured metadata from videos, profiles, hashtags, and trends, helping analysts work with TikTok content outside the app’s fast-moving interface.

What TikTok-Scraper does:

• Extracts public video metadata and descriptions
• Collects engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and comment counts
• Retrieves public profile information
• Supports hashtag, sound, and trend-based collection
• Enables structured data export for further analysis

PRAW

For Reddit investigations, PRAW, the Python Reddit API Wrapper, is the official and actively maintained library for accessing platform data. It offers structured access to posts, comments, and user histories across subreddits, making it well suited for analyzing long-form discussions and community behavior.

What PRAW does:

• Extracts posts and comment threads
• Retrieves complete user comment histories
• Tracks subreddit participation patterns
• Captures timestamps, scores, and metadata
• Supports long-form discussion analysis

Telegram Scraper

For Telegram ecosystems, Telegram Scraper is an open-source tool built on the Telethon library. It’s commonly used to collect messages and media from public channels and groups, allowing investigators to archive conversations and analyze activity across high-volume Telegram communities.

What Telegram Scraper does:

• Extracts full message histories from public channels
• Downloads media files and attachments
• Captures channel and group metadata
• Exports data to structured formats (JSON/CSV)
• Preserves content for offline analysis

DiscordChatExporter

When working with Discord, DiscordChatExporter provides a simple way to preserve conversations in a structured format. It allows investigators to export messages, attachments, and timestamps from servers and channels, making it especially useful when content changes quickly or access may be temporary.

What DiscordChatExporter does:

• Exports channel and thread message logs
• Captures timestamps and author IDs
• Downloads attachments and embedded media
• Preserves server and channel structure
• Generates HTML or JSON exports

OsintTube

Rounding out the list is OsintTube, a YouTube-focused OSINT tool designed to extract structured metadata from channels and videos. Rather than downloading media, it concentrates on pulling information that helps analysts understand how content is published, organized, and engaged with over time.

What OsintTube does:

• Extracts channel metadata and statistics
• Retrieves video metadata (titles, dates, descriptions)
• Supports basic engagement analysis
• Enables structured querying of YouTube content
• Assists with channel-level OSINT research

The Takeaway

Social media OSINT is only as effective as the tools used to work with it. Platforms like X, TikTok, Reddit, and Instagram generate enormous volumes of public data, but without tools designed to extract, organize, and visualize that information, critical signals remain fragmented or disappear entirely. Proper tooling turns scattered posts, profiles, and metadata into structured material that can actually be examined and compared.

Understanding where data comes from is an important first step. Understanding how to work with it—how to collect it reliably, connect it across platforms, and preserve it over time—is what turns raw online activity into actionable, defensible intelligence.

FAQ

1. What kinds of tools do investigators use for social media OSINT?

Investigators rely on platform-specific extraction tools, metadata collectors, and investigative platforms like SL Crimewall to gather, structure, and analyze publicly available social media data.

2. Can these tools collect data directly from social media platforms?

Yes. Each tool in this article works with publicly accessible data from its respective platform, either through official research access (such as the Meta Content Library) or through structured scraping methods.

3. How do investigators correlate activity across multiple platforms?

Platform-specific tools provide depth on individual networks, while investigative platforms like SL Crimewall are used to connect identities, activity, and relationships across sources in a single workspace.

4. Are scraping-based tools still useful when official APIs are limited?

Yes. When APIs are restricted or unavailable, scraping tools remain a practical way to collect publicly visible information, provided they are used responsibly and in line with legal and organizational guidelines.

5. Can social media OSINT tools work with images or videos?

Yes. Many of the tools covered here extract metadata, timestamps, and contextual information from images and videos, supporting timeline reconstruction, content verification, and behavioral analysis.

Want to turn scattered social media data into structured intelligence? See how SL Crimewall brings social media OSINT, relationship mapping, and cross-platform analysis together in a single investigative workspace.