Many years ago, we were brought in to help with a civil lawsuit to look to see if there would be any surprises our client’s client might have out in the public domain.
Once we had the green light to start our research, we soon found one of the social media profiles of our client’s client. We went through our verification process and our confidence was high that the account was indeed theirs.
When we find an account, we document what we observe. Once that source is exhausted, we search for other accounts on other platforms.
On type of tool we use check to see if usernames/handles we come across exist on other platforms are username search engines. In this particular instance, when we ran the tool we had several hits to explore.
One thing about these tools like NameChck, Whatsmyname or Sherlock is that you get false positive results, so you have to visit the site, like Twitter, to make sure an account exists in the first place.
Here’s where a bias came in. As we made our way through the results, we came across a a particular platform that we’re very familiar with. At that moment the thought entered our head that went something like “They don’t look like they’re into X” or “They don’t look like they do X.” This is cognitive bias.
It was at that point we stopped ourselves.
We knew nothing about this person. With social media, what people post is only a small curated look into their lives. Even if something about a person makes the news, good or bad, that’s only a snapshot into their life.
As soon as we realized what happened, we course corrected.
If you run into a situation like this, you have the potential of missing out on hitting pay dirt in your research.
Sometimes you won’t know that you have a bias toward something until you run into it.
In other words, check yourself.
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