Which Platforms Still Leave Traces? An OSINT Comparison of Modern Social Sites

One thing is sure, not all platforms are built to be remembered.

If you’re trying to verify a claim, unmask a fake persona, or reconstruct someone’s online trail, the social web today is very different from what it was a decade ago. Many platforms have tightened their privacy defaults. Others have redesigned themselves to prevent visibility, indexing, or long-term discovery. And a few - intentionally or not - still leave behind surprisingly rich and traceable footprints.

So the question becomes: which platforms are actually useful for open-source intelligence in 2025? Which networks let you see what a person has done, said, or shared? And which ones bury it the moment it happens?

Let’s walk through this terrain not as a feature chart, but as a lived landscape - one shaped by friction, affordance, and the architecture of visibility.

LinkedIn: The Most Consistent Professional Timeline (Still)

Among all platforms, LinkedIn remains the most structured and externally legible. That hasn’t changed. In fact, its commitment to profile stability - even in the face of job shifts, deletions, and privacy trends - makes it incredibly useful when you’re reconstructing a work history or verifying the existence of a claimed role.

But the power isn’t just in the profile. It’s in the patterns across profiles. As we explored when reconstructing hiring timelines, if five people list a company around the same time, you can see when a department was born. If two profiles use the same phrasing in their summaries, you might be looking at copy-paste branding - or a coordinated effort to inflate presence.

Even small details like mutual connections, skills endorsements, and years of graduation can help triangulate the truth. LinkedIn isn’t just a resume. It’s a story told over time, through format, omission, and habit.

Facebook: Still Useful, But Getting Slim

Once upon a time, Facebook was the largest open record of casual digital life. Photo albums, tagged events, public wall posts, workplace details - everything was there, waiting to be indexed. That era is mostly over.

Today, most Facebook profiles are either tightly locked down or sparsely updated. Privacy defaults, “Review Tag” settings, and post expiration have closed many of the once-open windows. But even now, if you encounter a profile with open friend lists, legacy photo albums, or old public comments, it can reveal more than you expect.

Sometimes it's not the user’s profile, but a group they posted in. Or a comment they left under a brand page in 2013. Or a like on a public meme from a decade ago that links them to another identity. But Facebook’s value is increasingly time-sensitive - if you see something, save it. It might be gone the next time you check.

YouTube: Content Strategy Hides in Plain Sight

YouTube comments have become harder to search, and user-to-user trails are more fragmented than they used to be. But a creator’s channel layout, playlist structure, upload cadence, and sidebar recommendations still offer a rich view of intent.

When you want to understand how a creator positions themselves, don’t just look at what they post - look at how they frame it. A curated playlist titled “What They’re Not Telling You” pinned to the top of a channel tells you more than a single video ever could. Sidebar channels, upload frequency, pinned comments, even the absence of comment moderation - these are structural choices, and they reveal more about the agenda than the talking points do.

If multiple channels use the same banner design or post on the same schedule, you might be looking at a network - or a playbook.

TikTok: A Pulse, Not a Record

TikTok isn’t about history. It’s about now. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless.

In fact, for real-time sentiment tracking, TikTok is one of the sharpest tools available. As we examined in our piece on sound trends and comment patterns, what matters on TikTok is often how a sound is used, not just which sound it is. Watching a comedic clip evolve into an ironic anthem, then back into sincere use, reveals mood swings in the collective user base that few platforms surface as clearly.

You won’t find long comment histories. But you will see how people respond to each other through audio reuse, duets, visual mimicry, and timing. TikTok is hard to archive, but great for reading the cultural temperature.

Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky: The Promise of Openness, Fragmented in Practice

At first glance, these new-wave social platforms appear more transparent. They’re small, public, and less algorithmic. But they come with their own limitations.

Threads is still finding its shape. Some content is web-accessible, but comments often disappear after a short window, and the lack of robust search makes timeline reconstructions tricky. Bluesky, while technically open and federated, is limited by size and a fragmented user base. Mastodon is the most complex of the three - wide open technically, but hard to monitor at scale because of its decentralized nature.

The real OSINT value here lies in username repetition, self-referential bios, and cross-links between accounts. When someone repeats the same intro post across multiple federated timelines, or when an account consistently links to the same website, you can still begin to build a behavioral map.

But expect more friction. These aren’t mass-marketed profiles. They’re sandboxes - valuable only if the person you’re watching happens to use them.

Tumblr and Flickr: Legacy Footprints Still Standing

Tumblr and Flickr have largely faded from mainstream use, but they remain quietly valuable. In both cases, users often forgot to clean up their presence. A person might now present a polished professional identity - but still have a 2012 Tumblr full of unfiltered thoughts and old fandom posts, complete with usernames and tags they no longer use.

Flickr, though rarely talked about, is a powerful source of archival content. Photos may include original EXIF data, geographic tags, comment threads, and visible upload timelines. These become especially useful when trying to disprove false claims or reconstruct older identities - a strategy we leaned on in our investigation of archiving micro-moments.

In both platforms, the trail is more durable than you’d expect. Forgotten, yes. But not erased.

WordPress: Posts, Pages, and the Stuff That Lingers

WordPress - especially self-hosted instances - often acts as the long tail of identity. When other platforms are locked down, deleted, or restricted, old blog content often lingers quietly on custom domains or forgotten subpages.

The trick here is to follow links. If someone once linked to their blog from a profile, that breadcrumb might still lead to old About pages, CVs, mailing lists, or comment threads that were never removed. Even when the blog itself is gone, the archived version often lives on - and can be dissected for language, structure, or changes over time.

WordPress won’t tell you what someone did last week. But it might tell you who they were before they learned to clean up.

Just To Sum It Up

What all of this points to is simple: platforms differ not just in what they show, but in what they forget. Some erase quickly. Others preserve more than users realize. If you’re doing social OSINT, the goal is to understand which spaces leave usable traces, and how those traces connect. In the end, you’re not just following content. You’re following behavior, shaped by design, exposure, and time. And those trails, even when partial, still tell stories worth reading.