> [!info]
> Input: [[Social Media Platform|platform]]
> Output: [[Technique|technique]]
>
> Types: [[Technical Weakness|technical]]
> Weakness: [[SOWEL-15. Tolerating Privacy Gaps]]
> Functionality: [[SOFL-22. Accounts]]
### Explanation
Social media platforms continuously add features — stickers, group-invite links, "people you may know," presence indicators, share dialogs — without consistently auditing how each one exposes user identifiers. Each new feature is a potential leak: an endpoint that returns more data than the visible UI, an embed that carries the creator's ID, an invite link that resolves to a profile.
Pick a platform and walk through its surface methodically — invite flows, content-creation flows, account-recovery flows, public APIs, deep-link handlers, embedded widgets. For each one, ask: does it return an identifier, a creator, a timestamp, or a pivot to another platform that isn't visible in the normal interface? Document everything you find.
The output of this technique is a new OSINT technique you can apply to any target on that platform. Many of the techniques already in SOWEL — including the Telegram sticker- and invite-link examples below — were originally discovered this way.
### Examples
- [How to find a Telegram sticker creator's account](https://t.me/HowToFind/70)
- [How to use Telegram group join links to extract his creator's ID](https://telegra.ph/How-to-find-the-owner-and-administrator-of-a-Telegram-channel-11-02)
### Tools
- [FindStickerCreatorBot](https://t.me/FindStickerCreatorBot)
### See also
- {{internal links to similar techniques}}