by John Unice, Esq.

In just a few years, the use of information-sharing apps and websites has grown exponentially, invading every aspect of our lives, including the corporate environment.

The rise of social media use provides in-house counsel, IT professionals, and law firms high-value opportunities to collect evidence critical to corporate investigations or litigation.

Social media users often extensively document their daily activities, which can ultimately become vital evidence. Consider: an allegedly injured insurance claimant posts pictures of himself playing sports; a manager or executive shares a picture indicative of an illicit relationship with a co-worker, which could be relevant to a discrimination claim; and a driver posts social media concurrent with a car accident at issue in a lawsuit.

These are just a few of the ways that social media collection can provide evidence for your investigation. So how can a company capture this evidence?

X1: More Powerful Than Ever
X1 is a tool bit-x-bit uses for search and collections of social media and web content, and recent technical changes and redesign elements have made it even more powerful and expansive. X1 can capture static snapshots of a single web page for preservation or capture dynamic content for interactive pages such as Facebook and Twitter. The collected data can be provided as PDFs, load files or, in some cases, interactive web pages that can be browsed just like the original. bit-x-bit can help clients leverage recent and near-future X1 updates to discover potentially valuable social media content. Among other changes, we can utilize X1 to:

  • collect, and then analyze, Facebook Group, Pages, and comments data;
  • more quickly capture Facebook data through the use of Google Chrome;
  • capture Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and various web-based email data (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook); and
  • collect YouTube viewing and comment history.

What’s Next?
As X1 evolves to meet the changing of the environment by the social media networks, bit-x-bit continues to utilize it to capture and analyze important evidence for our clients. Please contact bit-x-bit about X1 and how we can use it to assist you with search and collection of social media and web content.