Unfortunately, a tragic event transpired this morning in Las Vegas leaving three people dead and at least three others injured after a shooting and fiery six-vehicle crash along the Strip. According to reports, at about 4:20 a.m. someone in an SUV opened fire into a Maserati that had stopped at a light. The Maserati moved into the intersection at Flamingo Road and collided with a taxi, starting a chain of crashes that involved four other vehicles. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.
Given the criminal investigation and civil liability implications of this event, we wanted to demonstrate the new important capabilities of X1 Social Discovery to immediately identify, preserve and display geolocated Tweets (and often Instagram posts) at or near the scene immediately before, during and after the incident. X1 Social Discovery is now able to map a given location, such as a city block or even a full metropolitan area, and search the entire public Twitter feed to identify any geolocated tweets that have been made in the past three days (sometimes longer) within that designated area, as well as to capture any new tweets within that area going forward. As illustrated below, this capability is extremely useful for law enforcement, corporate security and civil litigators.
When we learned of the Vegas incident, we mapped the general area of the strip and within seconds, all the recent Tweets from the past several hours were populated within the grid and collected within X1 Social Discovery.
From there, we were able to sort those tweets within the interface and identify some key Tweets made immediately after the incident, such as this post:
We are able to sort and identity the exact time (in GMT) of the posts in question as well as associated metadata.
Here is another post below. Both this example and the one above contain notable intel in the comments, suggesting the possible identity of one of the victims, as well as a reference to another posted picture on Instagram. This reflects the utility of X1 Social Discovery’s ability to collect not just the social media post, but the comments thereto in real-time.
This feature can also be employed proactively, to map an area around a school, an embassy, an oil drilling facility overseas, or other critical infrastructure assets to collect and store any geolocated tweets in real time. But of course in order to take full advantage of this ability to gather key evidence such as the evidence, posted above, you need to own the software at the time of the incident.