2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

Following Virtual Footprints: Vetting in the Age of Social Media
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BEST PRACTICES 2012
By Kate Lanahan, Law Librarian, Supervisory Librarian, US Department of Justice and
Jennifer L. McMahan, Deputy Director, Library Staff at U.S. Department of Justice
Cyber-vetting has become a common practice for employers vetting job candidates,
as well as those performing security background checks. As law librarians, we scour the
internet, including social networking sites, in the course of doing due diligence research on
companies and people, such as expert witnesses. Commercial services have sprung up
that will perform this kind of research for a fee. You can also get reports through vendors
such as Lexis and Westlaw, and there are some free aggregators such as PeekYou.com
and Pipl.com that will identify social networking sites where you might find information on
a person. However, given the vast number of social networking sites (see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites) and the variety of
search mechanisms in each, there is no way to get a comprehensive report on a person’s
social networking activities. To be thorough, it might be necessary to search each site
individually. This article will present some tips and tricks for finding information using
selected social networking sites, as well as general internet search engines.
With over 900 million users, Facebook is a good place to start. If you don’t have an
account or don’t want to search while logged in to your account, you may get discouraged
visiting Facebook.com. There is no obvious search mechanism on the homepage, but
there are currently a few ways to go around that. At the bottom right side of the
homepage are links to “Find Friends” and “People.” Selecting these links allows you to
search or browse for people on Facebook by name. Similarly, selecting the link for
“Pages” allows you to search or browse for companies or public figures. It may be difficult
to find the person you’re looking for if they have a common name and you are searching
without being logged in to an account. Facebook limits the number of results you can
view when not logged in and may limit other content as well. If you find the profile of the
person you’re looking for, take note of the name used. Does the profile use a middle
name or maiden name (e.g., Hillary Rodham Clinton)? If so, you will want to keep this in
mind for searching on other sites. Using Facebook’s own search mechanisms can be
frustrating because you have to complete security checks by unscrambling text captchas.
Also, the searches lead you to profile pages and not necessarily posts that users make on
other pages. Keep reading for tips on how to find those posts.
While many Facebook users have profiles that are “locked down” so only friends can
see the content, Twitter users are often informal and unconcerned about who may be
reading their tweets. Still, some users do have privacy settings for their feed and you
may not be able read them. The first step is to find a user, which can look impossible if
you visit Twitter.com and are not logged in. Currently there is no link from the homepage
that allows you to search Twitter without an account. Instead, go to
http://twitter.com/#!/search-home. The search page has a link to search operators that
you can use to search the site (e.g., searching @[twitterusername] will bring up any
references to the Twitter user). But before you can search a username, you need to
figure out what it is. You can also search for a person’s given name. The search results
will be in two categories: people and tweets. On a person’s profile page, their Twitter