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Retruth Reconnaissance: A Digital Forensic Analysis of Truth Social

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Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime (ICDF2C 2023)

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Abstract

Truth Social is a social media platform founded by former President Donald J. Trump as an alternative to mainstream social media platforms. Like other alt-tech social media, such as Parler or MeWe, Truth Social’s looser content moderation rules may encourage more extreme user-based content. This includes biased language- posts with racist, sexist, ableist, or other discriminatory intent- and calls for violence. Digital forensic analysis can be useful in such cases, where law enforcement seeks to prevent or investigate extremist threats associated with a platform. This research fills a gap in the extant literature by offering a novel forensic analysis of Truth Social, based on established techniques. First, using mobile devices, account and application metadata was discovered. Next, network traffic analysis using a desktop computer revealed plaintext usernames and passwords. A detailed depiction of the forensic analysis performed for this paper is presented to aid future investigators.

BiT Lab || Baggil(i) Truth (BiT) Lab.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Truth Social’s direct messaging feature became available 12/19/2022.

  2. 2.

    Truth Social became available in the Google Play store 10/13/2022.

  3. 3.

    This held for the Cellebrite images, 135 MB to 25 MB.

  4. 4.

    This technique is commonly called “Copyleft.”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Engineering, Division of Computer Science, Center for Computation and Technology, Baggil(i) Truth (BiT) Lab Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA

    Joseph Brown & Ibrahim Baggili

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  1. Joseph Brown
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  2. Ibrahim Baggili
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Correspondence to Joseph Brown .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Albany, Albany, GA, USA

    Sanjay Goel

  2. Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Alegre, Brazil

    Paulo Roberto Nunes de Souza

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© 2024 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Brown, J., Baggili, I. (2024). Retruth Reconnaissance: A Digital Forensic Analysis of Truth Social. In: Goel, S., Nunes de Souza, P.R. (eds) Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime. ICDF2C 2023. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 570. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56580-9_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56580-9_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-56579-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-56580-9

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