Attribution tools
Table of contents
Individuals tracking
StalkScan
StalkScan uses the Facebook API to access all public content of a Facebook profile.
While mainly used to raise individuals’ awareness of their digital shadow, it is a useful forensics tool to quickly collect data on suspicious accounts.
Companies
SecurityTrails
SecurityTrails collects and enriches DNS data to allow interlinking and historical analysis of domain names.
Content propagation
In order to attribute responsibility, it is often necessary to track the origin of some content.
WhoPostedWhat.com
WhoPostedWhat.com enables search on Facebook within date boundaries.
Political advertising
Who Targets Me
Who Targets Me is a UK-based initiative created in 2017 by Sam Jeffers and Louis Knight-Webb. Its software monitors the use of political advertising on social media and aim at increasing political ads transparency and democratic trust, as well as providing recommendations to both platform operators and regulators on these topics..
It takes the shape of a browser extension available on major browsers.
As of 2019, the extension identifies political ads from major parties in the UK and throughout the EU, as well as in Canada, the US, Australia, Brazil, Ukraine and Israel.
Citizens using the extension automatically collect anonymous political advertising data, which is then analyzed “to explain the strategies campaigns are using to win votes”. As a result, users can find out which actors are using Facebook to display political ads. When such ads are displayed on their feed, Who Targets Me offers “a personalised breakdown of those posts [and] information about why you were targeted with [it]”.
As of June 2020, it has been installed by over 30,000 people in more than 100 countries and 20 languages.
