Q. Why is social media vital in vetting applicants for police roles or firearms licences?
A. To understand the importance of social media in vetting, we must first consider the core aim of the process: to assess whether an individual is suitable for a position of trust or responsibility. Traditional vetting methods often rely heavily on references, interviews, and background checks. However, these can provide only a limited view—typically focused on how someone presents themselves in formal or controlled settings.
Social media, on the other hand, offers a window into a person’s wider behaviours, beliefs, and interactions. Given that the average individual spends between one and two hours per day on social platforms, this creates a significant volume of content that can reveal patterns in attitude, judgement, and temperament. These insights can be particularly valuable when evaluating someone’s suitability for roles involving public safety or access to firearms.
Q. Why has social media analysis become so challenging?
A. It is primarily a question of scale. Manual methods cannot cope with the volume of information on social media. The average UK person, for example, has four (some say six) social media accounts. Younger users may have many more accounts on multiple platforms. Statista, the statistics website, estimates the total number of social media users in the UK to be nearly 55 million, which is 79 per cent of the population. It expects the number to hit 65 million by 2027. Finding the right account from this huge number of users is beyond manual processes still commonly in use. It is also difficult for officers to keep pace when new platforms quickly become popular.
Q. Why should open-source intelligence (OSINT) technology have any role in social media vetting?
A. A purpose-built, AI-driven social media intelligence platform uses automation to resolve the problem of scale immediately. AI can monitor billions of open-source data points across all the social media platforms and present easily understood results to vetting teams. No human team can accomplish this unaided. With proven OSINT technology forces can conduct continuous evaluation, rather than lapse into dangerous vet-and-forget approaches.
This technology grew out of the defence community’s desire for an automated solution to ease vetting and increase accuracy. A national vetting agency in the Five Eyes intelligence network uses it to accelerate the processing of more than 5,000 candidates per month.
Q. Is this technology in use with any significant organisation?
A. Yes. This technology grew out of the defence community’s desire for an automated solution to ease vetting and increase accuracy. A national vetting agency in the Five Eyes intelligence network uses it to accelerate the processing of more than 5,000 candidates per month. It has proved to be more than 20 times faster at resolving the online identity of an applicant than manual techniques. The agency saved roughly 35,000 hours in the first four months of operation.
Q. How can we have faith in the accuracy of AI-powered platforms?
A. Organisations can configure the searches according to the sensitivity levels required. They can decide on certain keywords or types of content they want to surface, including words and phrases indicating racial or gender-based prejudice or hatred, extreme political affiliations, endorsement of violence and criminality, and so on. An AI solution can scan images and video for concepts and text or identify logos and badges of proscribed or suspicious organisations. It can also monitor news sites to flag up a candidate’s involvement in unacceptable activity.
Q. How sensitive is this technology?
A. The technology is highly customisable, so vetting officers set the risk indicators they want to look for and the platforms to examine. At Fivecast we don’t define risk, we give our clients the capability and framework to codify what risk means to them. They may decide on a scoring methodology based on the number of times a subject uses certain offensive, racist or extremist terms or language indicating criminal or violent activity or sympathies, and many more. That way they can limit the extent of the information they need to review and ensure only relevant content is analysed.
OSINT platforms are a highly-sophisticated tool, but it is police or vetting officers who make the final decisions to approve or decline a candidate.
Q. How extensive can searches be?
A. Vetting teams can decide if they want to use deep collection across more than 20 platforms. But one of the advantages of an OSINT platform is that it can search into more obscure forums and sites, along with the dark web if vetting teams need to. The technology only summarises what is relevant. It does not bring up information or images that have no bearing on a person’s application for a job or licence.
Q. Is this a total takeover of vetting by technology?
A. OSINT platforms are a highly-sophisticated tool, but it is police or vetting officers who make the final decisions to approve or decline a candidate. They understand the full context and use their professional judgment to review all the information they have – of which social media intelligence is only a part. They can refine their searches or pursue wider inquiries that cross-reference other databases and sources including human intelligence. OSINT technology will not replace professional skill but it will relieve officers of much of the drudgery in vetting, leaving them more time for better decisions.
