With our new Media Application, multimedia research is now natively supported by Open Measures for Enterprise partners.
TLDR
- Partner researchers can now search and browse media and attachments collected by select Open Measures datasets.
- Inline media viewing allows researchers to watch full-length video directly from the application.
- Support for both complex and simple rule building enables research along the learning curve.
Background and Introduction
On a daily basis, billions of users interact with many types of content across social networks. A very significant portion of that content is in the form of multimedia posts (including videos, photos, and attachments). Multimedia content is also sprawling and increasingly difficult to centralize and filter. Now more than ever, researchers need more than text results to visualize data across today’s alt tech landscape.
Key Features
Videos and Images
With the Open Measures Media Application, users can now submit keyword searches and string queries to uncover multimedia content. We’ve added a convenient View Media button to each row so that researchers can call up the original image and watch videos. The Show Record button calls up the raw JSON data to view the entire record so researchers can get the full scope of the document.
Multi-level Search Functionality
We built the tooling with feasibility in mind by allowing researchers to construct complex queries with a simple native query builder UI. This dynamic UI allows researchers to select the fields that they are interested in analyzing and plugin their search directly without any query language expertise required.
More advanced users still have the ability to run searches using the query language they are accustomed to. The UI supports taking the queries that researchers have already derived and plug them directly into this new interface to see associated media.
Inline Video Player
Open Measures collects, process and stores a massive set of video data collected from sources. As a result, we can allow for researchers to watch video media directly from our tooling without the need to navigate to a separate URL or the risk of losing a video because it was deleted from a source.
Safe Search
It’s important to us that our users consent to the explicit, and sometimes traumatic, content found on the crawled datasets. The Media App allows users to blur thumbnail images so that you can filter for multimedia content without being exposed to harmful videos/images before selecting the targeted data.
On the Horizon
Expanding Collected Media
We’re starting with multimedia from three of our most heavily requested sources (Telegram, RuTube, and OK). From here, we will work to add in all of our other sources to give Open Measures researchers the scope they’ll need for deeper comprehensive investigations.
Content Scanning
In the future, we aim to enable users to search within content, transcribing videos and scanning images/memes for text. This will give users innovative and even deeper visibility into the spread of information, regardless of content type.
Conclusion
We’re thrilled to announce the launch of our Media Application, enabling researchers to better contextualize the text results with complementary multimedia results. It’s an exciting moment for the Open Measures community as we expand the toolbox for OSINT research.
Important note: While we continue to prioritize work to expand our public tooling, usage of the Media Application is reserved for Open Measures Enterprise partners. Want access to the Media Application for you or your organization? Schedule a demo today to learn more.