Keeping a U.S. University Secure via Real-Time Social Media Monitoring and Threat Assessment
The Client
The client is an American higher education institution and member of its home state’s university system, a postsecondary organization encompassing a dozen schools and serving more than 400,000 students.
In April 2023, a student posted a threatening tweet toward the campus community. The student was arrested, but in the incident’s wake the institution became very concerned about future threats and negative social media conversations about the university. The university asked Fullintel to implement an enhanced social media monitoring system to gauge sentiment and help ensure a secure campus environment.
The Challenge
The client communication’s team’s goal was to track anyone discussing the university and its campus community on all relevant social platforms, including Discord, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
The team needed to be alerted in real-time to any potential threats to keep the community safe – not an easy proposition when monitoring several thousand posts per day on popular social and discussion platforms.
The project included the following objectives:
Full-spectrum platform coverage
Develop and implement a robust monitoring system that scans social media platforms for posts and comments containing threats of violence against any university community member, as well as content that may be detrimental to the university.
Real-time threat detection and severity triage
Proactively detect and categorize threats based on severity, while establishing clear response and escalation protocols for each threat severity level.
Immediate notification to stakeholders
Provide real-time notifications and alerts to university management and local police for immediate action.
Ongoing accuracy evaluation
Continuously monitor for accuracy and effectiveness and evaluate outcomes to make necessary adjustments .
Fullintel’s social media monitoring and crisis management services were well-positioned to meet this challenge through real-time alerts, daily analysis reports, and human-curated monitoring of all relevant social channels.
Fullintel proposed a comprehensive, human-curated, real-time social media threat detection and alert system including real-time alerts and weekly reporting. This proposed system needed to operate around the clock, every day of the week – even holidays.
The Solution
Fullintel proposed a comprehensive, human-curated, real-time social media threat detection and alert system, combining human social media curation, real-time alerts, and weekly reporting powered by qualitative and quantitative metrics including sentiment and reach. To avoid excess noise or missed posts, monitoring is conducted manually with some automated assistance — the hybrid approach that delivers deep intelligence from LinkedIn and other platforms unavailable in automated SaaS tools, and enables much faster, more accurate threat assessment in situations where seconds can make a huge difference.
- No dedicated threat-monitoring system
- No severity triage or escalation protocol
- Reactive response after a threat surfaced
- No structured way to alert police or leadership
- 24/7 human-curated monitoring across 7 platforms
- Three-tier red/orange/yellow threat classification
- Real-time phone/email alerts to leadership and police
- Weekly curated Excel reporting for executive review
Automated monitoring with human curation: continual 24/7 automated content feeds from social channels are ingested and validated by an expert Fullintel analyst to assess the level of potential risk.
Manual monitoring: Fullintel analysts comb through social media channels to fill any gaps that may have been missed, including manually monitoring the university's Discord channels for potentially threatening conversations.
Owned media monitoring: all private and direct messages and comments received by or posted on the social media pages handled by the university are monitored and analyzed.
Real-time alerts: the university is promptly alerted via phone call or email if any posts or comments contain threats of violence against a community member, or content that negatively impacts the university.
Weekly curated reporting: a weekly, Excel-formatted wrap-up of the week's social content facilitates convenient tracking for university executives on occurrences with a negative tone or potential threat.
The Deliverables
Fullintel analysts track social media posts and comments using multiple monitoring platforms to assess sentiment, with a particular focus on negative sentiment, and to identify any changes in attitude toward the university. Working closely with the institution's emergency management services, campus police, and communications staff, Fullintel developed the system's threat classification framework alongside the metrics used to measure it.
Threat classification & alerts
- Red alerts: threats to public safety, sexual violence, or property — immediate phone call plus detailed follow-up email
- Orange alerts: hate speech, suicidal ideation, or targeted harassment — immediate phone call plus detailed follow-up email
- Yellow alerts: general negative commentary or hazing mentions — detailed email only, no phone call required
- Comprehensive sentiment analysis combining automated algorithms with analyst-generated sentiment data
Measurement & reporting metrics
Fullintel uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics for media measurement:
- Quantitative metrics: number of posts, audience drivers
- Qualitative metrics: post/comment sentiment, sentiment trends over time, alert/threat categories
- Analysts manually verify and classify automated sentiment data into one of the three threat-level categories
- Weekly, Excel-formatted curated wrap-up report for university executives
The Result
Fullintel's human-driven content collection, curation, and analysis — combined with a unique reporting approach that classifies threat levels by type and contacts the university with real-time threat alerts as required — now gives the institution a clear view of the nature of social conversations about the university, potential threats, and potential bad actors.
Human curation and analysis allows the inclusion of important LinkedIn content, a platform not readily available on standard SaaS media monitoring tools, and helps better separate relevant signals from noise. This also helps the university detect threats and keep stakeholders informed in a timely manner, while dismissing innocent content that could be erroneously flagged as a threat under a fully automated approach.
The university now relies on Fullintel's real-time alerts in the event of any potential threat or excessively negative commentary, which are communicated to stakeholders who then initiate appropriate response procedures. The communications team also relies on weekly, human-curated media analysis reports to track and analyze potential issues on an ongoing basis.
Thanks to Fullintel's diligent reporting, the university met its core objectives: implementing a robust social media monitoring system; proactively detecting and categorizing threats by severity with clear response and escalation protocols; establishing real-time alerts that spur immediate action; and continuously monitoring for accuracy and effectiveness, making adjustments as needed. The red/orange/yellow alert categorization enables university officials to navigate and respond to social posts and comments in a structured manner, aligned with the severity and urgency of each alert.
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