> [!info] > Input: [[Social Media Account|personal account]], [[Name|full name]] > Output: old full name, old URL > > Types: [[Behavioural Weakness|behavioural]] > Weakness: [[SOWEL-3. Creating Content]] > Functionality: [[SOFL-9. Search]] ### Explanation Beyond a target's own profile, a wealth of evidence about them lives on other pages of the same platform — posts where they're mentioned by handle, comments they left on someone else's content, photos where they were tagged, threads they participated in. The platform's own search is usually the most efficient way to surface this trail: searching for `@username` or the target's display name on VK, Facebook, X/Twitter, Reddit or Instagram typically returns a chronological list of public posts that reference them — often including content the target has since hidden or deleted from their own profile. Pay special attention to mentions from old or low-activity accounts (which the target may not realise reference them), to comments on viral posts (where someone tagged the target to bring them in), and to thread replies (where the target's reply is preserved in the parent post even if their own profile has been wiped). Repeat the search with name variants — old surname, transliteration, leetspeak — to catch traces left under a previous identity. Each platform's search syntax differs and changes over time: VK has the strongest mention-search of the major platforms (intentional, by design); X/Twitter supports `@handle` plus `to:`, `from:`, `since:`/`until:` operators; Reddit returns full user-page comment archives. Some platforms intentionally don't index cross-chat content — Telegram's global search returns matches only from chats you've joined and from public channel names, not from message bodies of groups you don't belong to. Third-party indexers fill that gap: Telesint indexes public Telegram groups and channels and exposes full-text search across the corpus. Combine with [[SOTL-2.8. Check Mentions]] (the focused mention-tracking technique) and [[SOTL-7.1. Check Archives]] for traces that have since been deleted. ### Examples VK ### Tools {{some links to tools}} ### See also - [[SOTL-3.1. Extract Metadata From User-Generated Content]] - [[SOTL-3.10. Analyze Content Tags]] - [[SOTL-3.11. Search Accounts by Biometric Data]]