Social Media Forensics - A Holistic Review

The imminent and inevitable exponential growth of Social Media platforms in the near future is undeniable and so is the fact that the Social media ecosystem would be subjected to various security breaches, online deviant activities, terrorist recruitments and operations, or would be a hotspot of various cybercrimes, terrorist recruitments, illegal campaigning or anti-national propagandas more than ever. These lead Social Media platforms into forensic investigation avenues to aid intelligence and LEAs in countering malicious actors, radical groups and terrorist organizations. This paper, therefore, attempts to provide a holistic overview of Social Media Forensics by highlighting the existing issues and contemporary challenges in the domain and presenting a generic taxonomy of these problems. It further provides a brief analysis and research implications with an objective to outline the potential future research directions rising from the issues and challenges therein.