How do you find someone's social media accounts? Max Intel searches all major platforms — Twitter/X, Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky and 30+ more — from a name, email, phone number, or photo, and helps surface hidden or forgotten accounts. Free, no signup. To find accounts by email or a username, start there; to find them from a face, use the reverse-image tools.
How Do You Investigate Social Media Profiles Using OSINT?
Max Intel's Social Media OSINT tool provides specialized search for every major platform. According to DataReportal's Digital 2025 report, there are over 5.24 billion social media users worldwide (63.9% of global population), with the average user maintaining accounts on 6.7 platforms. The NATO Open Source Intelligence Handbook identifies social media analysis as a primary OSINT collection discipline.
Twitter/X Investigation
Tools include TweeterID, Tweet Map, and Twitonomy. According to X's 2024 transparency report, the platform processes over 500 million posts per day, making it a primary source for real-time intelligence. Advanced search supports date filtering, engagement metrics, and content type.
Instagram & Facebook OSINT
Instagram tools include Inflact Viewer, Imginn, and Dumpor. Meta reports Instagram has over 2 billion monthly active users. Facebook tools include StalkFace, Who Posted What (date-specific searching), and Facebook ID Finder for numeric IDs enabling direct API queries.
Reddit, TikTok & Other Platforms
Reddit tools: Reddit Metis (profiling), Pullpush (archives), Reveddit (removed content). TikTok now has over 1.5 billion monthly active users. LinkedIn, Telegram, Discord, and Mastodon each have dedicated tools.
Pivoting from Social Media
Use the username search for cross-platform presence, email lookup for emails in bios, person search for real names, and domain OSINT for linked websites.
The best free social media OSINT tools in 2026 are Social-Analyzer for broad profile discovery, Maigret and Sherlock for finding accounts by username, Social Searcher for monitoring public posts, and platform specialists like Instaloader (Instagram) and Telepathy (Telegram). The ranked list below covers genuinely free tools and notes what each is best for. Always work within each platform's terms of service and applicable data-protection law, and expect scrapers to break as platforms change.
- Social-Analyzer — searches and analyses profiles across 900+ social platforms and rates each match with a confidence score to cut false positives. The best free all-rounder for social account discovery. Cost: Free, open-source.
- Maigret — checks a username across 3,000+ sites, including every major social network, and extracts bios and linked accounts into a dossier. See our username tool comparison. Cost: Free, open-source.
- Sherlock — a fast command-line sweep for a username across 400+ platforms; ideal for a quick first pass before going deeper. Pair with our username search. Cost: Free, open-source.
- WhatsMyName — checks 732 community-vetted platforms from the browser with no install and a low false-positive rate. The easiest no-setup starting point. Cost: Free.
- Social Searcher — searches and monitors public posts and mentions across networks in real time. Best for tracking a name, brand, or keyword rather than a single profile. Cost: Freemium (free searches; saved monitoring paid).
- Instaloader — downloads public Instagram posts, stories, reels, captions, comments, timestamps, and geotags for analysis or archiving. The standard free tool for Instagram. Cost: Free, open-source.
- Toutatis — extracts data from an Instagram account by username or ID, including profile metadata and any publicly exposed email or phone number. Cost: Free, open-source.
- Telepathy — a Telegram OSINT toolkit for archiving channel and group history, mapping membership, and analysing activity; tgstat is a useful web companion for channel statistics. Cost: Free (tgstat freemium).
- snscrape — scrapes posts and profiles from X/Twitter, Mastodon, Reddit, and Telegram without an API, where platform access allows. Best for pulling post history at scale. Cost: Free, open-source.
- IDCrawl — aggregates a person's social profiles from a name or username in the browser, linking handles back to a real identity. Cost: Free.
For most investigations, start by mapping accounts with a username tool (Social-Analyzer, Maigret, or WhatsMyName), then pull content with a platform specialist (Instaloader, Telepathy) and verify identity by cross-referencing profile photos, bios, and timestamps. Continue with our social media OSINT links below, the username OSINT guide, and our people search.
How to Protect Yourself From Doxxing
To protect yourself from doxxing, reduce what publicly ties your real identity to your online presence: opt out of data brokers, keep your real name separate from your handles, lock down social privacy, and strip location data from anything you post. Creators and streamers are the most targeted, so the bar is higher if you are public-facing.
- Audit what is already exposed. Run the digital-footprint self-check to see what a doxxer would find.
- Opt out of data brokers. The fastest single win — follow the removal guide, since brokers are where most doxxes start.
- Separate identities. Use different usernames, and a dedicated email and phone number, for public accounts versus anything tied to your legal name.
- Strip metadata and mind your backgrounds. Remove EXIF and location data from photos, and on streams avoid reflections, visible mail, and recognisable landmarks near home.
- Harden accounts. Turn on two-factor authentication everywhere and set social profiles private to limit what strangers can scrape.
If you are doxxed: document everything with screenshots, report it to the platforms (most ban doxxing), and contact law enforcement if there are threats. Acting fast limits how far the information spreads.