Social Links
Revolutionising OSINT Investigations with AI

Since the advent of the Internet, the amount of online information a person generates has grown exponentially. According to Statista, in 2022, the global volume of data created, copied, and consumed reached 97 zettabytes. By 2025, this figure is expected to double. In the meantime, analysing, detecting, and preventing cyberthreats in the current digital space still takes a considerable amount of time. This makes the investigation process a daunting task and a real challenge.

To address this problem, a robust solution is needed. This is where open source intelligence (OSINT) tools come into play. In the past, investigators and law enforcement agencies mainly had to process and analyse information manually, which occupied up to 80 percent of their time. But with modern OSINT tools having built-in AI modules, the whole investigation cycle can be carried out more quickly, efficiently, and accurately.

Meet Social Links—an OSINT solution for conducting in-depth investigations across 500 open sources, including social media, blockchains, messengers, and the Dark Web. Since the company’s establishment, its core goal has been to reduce the time needed to conduct an investigation. By harnessing AI, Social Links helps analysts resolve cases faster, allowing valuable time to be focused on decision-making rather than routine work.

With the world having become highly interconnected, a lot of digital content is now created on social media. Recent research shows that every minute, Twitter users send 347.2k tweets, Facebook users share 1.7M pieces of content, and Instagram users post 66k photos. In this data-saturated environment, AI-driven OSINT tools allow investigators to extract and analyse a large amount of situational evidence and build a suspect’s complete digital footprint.

Social Links’ next-generation OSINT solutions can process and analyse all kinds of user-generated content and open data, including text, video, audio, speech, and geolocations. They empower investigators and law enforcement agencies to map out subtle interconnections and clear, detailed patterns.
One case successfully demonstrates the possibilities and benefits of Social Links’ AI processing tools. Investigators needed to analyse a live, six-hour-long Twitch broadcast for specific clues that could lead to the user’s de-anonymisation. In these circumstances, it is difficult to predict the nature of the signifier—it might emerge from the speech, be reflected in a nickname, or come from a background image such as a visual location that can be plotted. This crucial information could appear at any second, so close concentration is essential.

To do this analysis manually, investigators would need to spend at least six hours watching the whole stream and flag anything suspicious or telling. “Social Links’ AI models can efficiently handle a lengthy manual task in minutes. This is because they can maintain comprehensive focus throughout the process, meaning not even a millisecond is overlooked,” says Andrew Kulikov, co-founder, Social Links.

Other SL Professional features that significantly enhance and simplify the workflow are Named Entity Recognition (NER) and ChatGPT. The former relies on machine learning to automatically process extensive volumes of text and extract specific entities. The latter allows analysts to summarise texts and conduct sentiment analysis. As a result, investigators can quickly understand the general tone of a text as well as the author’s attitude towards a subject and vice versa. All of this is extremely helpful in conducting know your customer (KYC) procedures and background checks.

As it stands, the main obstacle to the widespread integration of AI with OSINT investigations is an ethical question— how much work can you delegate to a machine in the error-sensitive discipline of investigation? Social Links has an elegant solution. The company doesn’t trust the machine to make the final decision but gives analysts the information needed for gaining deeper insights into the case and making better decisions faster.