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Brett Burney reviews X1 Social Discovery, which tackles the nuances social media collection in a logical fashion.

Brett Burney, Legaltech News

September 9, 2016    | 0 Comments

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Over the last couple of decades, we've become skilled at collecting, preserving and producing email. But email doesn't hold a flicker of a candle to what people post, state, admit and display in social media. So why aren't there more products that comprehensively collect, preserve and authenticate the snowballing mounds of social media data?

The ideal method is to utilize the application programming interface (API) offered by social media publishers so that all the public-facing information and accompanying metadata can be collected. Bonus if the product can preserve information for searching, reporting and exporting.

And there, I've described X1 Social Discovery—a desktop software for Windows that every litigator should include in their technical tool belt. The application itself only requires 200MB, but you'll need a minimum of 100GB to collect all the metadata and visual content you'll be pulling down. The company actually recommends using a 1TB external hard drive for your storage repository.

Released in July 2016, Version 5 of X1 Social Discovery added collection tools for YouTube, Instagram and Tumblr. The software already collected from Facebook and Twitter as well as webpages and email from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, and IMAP accounts.

Once you provide "Investigator Details," you can set up a "Case." You can have as many Cases as you like, but only one can be actively collecting data at a time. Under each Case are the "Collections" for each social media source.

Aside from logging into private or client accounts, for the majority of matters, you'll use an "Examiner Account" to only collect publicly available information. This is a dummy account set up in Facebook and Twitter that doesn't have any friends or followers—you don't want any connections that could interfere with the information being collected.

To start a Facebook Collection, supply a user ID (usually the name at the end of a URL) and set up an "oldest post limit" if needed. For Twitter, furnish a Twitter username and select whether you only want tweets going forward, or past history. X1 Social Discovery then starts collecting and indexing. Each Collection takes a few minutes to several hours, depending on how much you're grabbing. You can set a schedule for how often collections check for new posts or information.

The interface of X1 Social Discovery is impressive and logical. Collections are listed on the far left—click a name and their feed appears in the middle panel. When you select a post or tweet, the content pops up in the Preview Pane on the right. I found myself simply scrolling through feeds in chronological order, but there are multiple sort options and filters available. Since Facebook and Twitter can track an individual's physical location, those geo-pinpoints can also be viewed on a map.

Most importantly, X1 Social Discovery collects an extensive amount of metadata for every item that can gets presented in a pop-up box. All this corroborates the origin of a post or tweet, along with an MD5 hash for verification. When you find specific posts, tweets, and items that are relevant to your investigation, you can tag those digital needles in the social media haystack.

A "Case Report" supplies a comprehensive summary of all items indexed in a Case along with any tags. There's also an "Export Record" option when you need a copy of a single tweet or post. Lastly, a "Deliverable" can be generated in HTML or PDF format that assembles all the metadata and linked content into a producible package. You can customize how much metadata is included for each source.

A single license of X1 Social Discovery is affordable and necessary for the smallest domestic issue all the way up to the largest civil litigation matter.