Monitoring Multiple Areas With Twitter

Monitoring an area or areas is a key task that any OSINTer should be comfortable with.  Today we are going to be talking about how to do a geo-search within Twitter, and then a useful website that we can use to monitor multiple areas at once.

Most people are familiar with how to conduct a search in Twitter, and the Twitter advance search functionality, but are not as familiar with their geo-search functionality. 

Let's say we wanted to look for tweets in NYC about shootings or guns. We could do a keyword search with the terms gun AND violence AND nyc but we might get a lot of noise from people across the globe using those keywords.  We can refine our search by combining our keyword "guns AND violence" within a geo-bubble on Twitter. This is done through the geocode search and looks something like this:

geocode:lat,long,Xkm  (notice that there are no spaces after the comma)

As you can see the geocode search is fairly simple to set up.  All you need is the lat long for the area you are concerned about and a radius in KM. 

 Let's use the coordinates for the Empire State Building, (40.748461995445986, -73.98561409349246) as our center point.  

Our geocode search would look like this:

geocode:40.748461995445986,-73.98561409349246,6km

However, running that search will just return tweets within that area.  We now need to add our keywords to our search as well. If we use guns and violence from before our complete search would look like this:

guns AND violence geocode:40.748461995445986,-73.98561409349246,6km

Try it for yourself and look at the difference!

Now that we know how to do a geo-search in Twitter, let's talk about having multiple geo-searches streaming all at once. The site we are going to use for this is gigatweeter.com

Gigatweeter will allow you to stream the results of up to five different Twitter searches at once! NYC is a huge city with many different boroughs.  What if we wanted to look into car accidents on 678 in Queens, the GW bridge by Washington Heights, and the Holland Tunnel?  If we got the related lat/longs for those areas we could quickly monitor Twitter for people posting about accidents, traffic jams, and much more!

Want to learn more about OSINT, and how to use it?! Reach out to DRS today and see what type of training we can provide to you and your organization!



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