OSINT and Online Tracing: Essential Social Media Investigation Skills

Extending from personal fortification to digital amplification, this module trains DIY Detective™ participants in open-source intelligence (OSINT) gathering and multi-platform social media strategies—but through the lens of visual intelligence and hand-drawn documentation that defines this academy. You will master OSINT collection not through database queries alone, but by hand-drawing social media connections, manually sketching timelines from digital footprints, and transforming public data into hand-crafted visual narratives before digital posting. These techniques blend law-enforcement-derived methods with civilian creativity and analog documentation, enabling ordinary citizens to turn hand-drawn evidence from Modules 1–4 into compelling social media content that forces accountability when official investigations stall or fail in citizen-led investigation contexts. The core insight: digital platforms amplify your work, but hand-drawn visual intelligence remains the engine—screenshots and databases cannot replace the pattern recognition that emerges when you manually map connections on paper.

Most assassination attempts and completed assassinations leave digital footprints—social media posts, public records, geotagged images, and overlooked connections—that institutions routinely ignore or suppress due to political sensitivity or jurisdictional limitations. Traditional true-crime consumption stops at watching; mainstream journalism often prioritizes algorithmic content over depth. This true crime investigation workshop rejects both by teaching civilians to harvest OSINT and document findings through hand-drawn maps, sketches, and diagrams before deploying them strategically across platforms. You learn to think slower and see deeper by drawing what you find—manually mapping social connections, hand-sketching timeline overlaps, and creating visual narratives that reveal patterns automated tools miss. Only after this analog analysis do you photograph, scan, and share your hand-crafted intelligence as social media content designed to crowdsource additional leads and expose institutional obstruction.

When cross-border threat networks operate in plain sight online and institutional obstruction depends on public indifference, digital amplification becomes essential—but only when grounded in the visual intelligence methods this academy teaches. You will create branded ambassador accounts, respond strategically to trending assassination discussions with hand-drawn evidence, and produce posts that combine verified OSINT with hand-crafted visuals from prior modules—turning passive scrolling into active crowdsourcing that supports victims’ families through the credibility that analog documentation provides in an era of digital manipulation and AI-generated misinformation. Hand-drawn evidence carries authenticity that purely digital content lacks.