Nexgate Reveals Stats on Over 100 Million Pieces of Social Media Data

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — (Marketwired) — 11/12/13 — , an innovator in social media brand protection and compliance, today announced a select set of findings taken from the scanning and analysis of more than 100 million unique pieces of social media content. Available in Nexgate-s , the new findings come from the company-s expanded corpus and content classifiers designed to address security, compliance, and risk management in social media for enterprise brands.

Social media has rapidly become the communications platform for consumers and corporations along with the cyber criminals that want to exploit them. To help protect social media infrastructure while addressing the evolving regulatory requirements around social, Nexgate persistently scans and classifies social media communications across thousands of accounts. In total, Nexgate has now scanned and classified more than 100 million unique pieces of social media content, and in the process discovered some interesting pieces of data.

Here are some of Nexgate-s findings:

5% of all risky social media content contains security risks — spam, malware, and criminal and illegal activity, for example.

YouTube has 5 times more bad content as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and the other leading social networks.

5% of social spam contains personal information, such as emails and phone numbers.

Financial organizations have — on average — 3 Truth in Lending Act / Regulation Z violations per month on their social media accounts.

Social spam is growing at a faster rate that good comments and posts – nearly x% faster.

“Roughly 90% of the bad stuff on branded social media accounts is content that violates acceptable use policy — things like adult content, hate speech, pornography, as well as controversial topics like politics and religion,” said Harold Nguyen, Lead Data Scientist at Nexgate. “From behind the silicon curtain, good people often act irrationally, saying things they-d never repeat in a brand-s store to a clerk or employee. What-s more, we-ve started to see an uptick in the volume of security and compliance risks — nearly 400% — on brand-owned social accounts. This increase isn-t just from everyday consumers; increasingly it-s from automated bots and fake accounts, which the bad guys have created as an efficient source for getting revenue from unprotected organizations and their unsuspecting consumers.”

In addition to releasing its findings, Nexgate also announced new policies for FFIEC and Regulation FD. The policies are designed to automatically detect, stop, intelligently archive, and report when content that constitutes an FFIEC or SEC Regulation FD violation and risk is posted, tweeted, shared, or messaged using a social media account. For example, FFIEC requires that agents for the creditor disclose loan terms on a brand or affiliated social media account; however, as found in Nexgate-s research, agents often end up bypassing approved social communication workflows and fail to include the requisite disclosures, resulting in three FFIEC and Truth in Lending Act compliance violations per month, on average, per organization. At the same time, the SEC-s Regulation FD means a broader set of organizations have to detect when their earnings, company performance, and other financial disclosures are shared on their social media accounts and make sure that the news comes from an official, authorized disclosure account.

“Although financial services are facing the clearest and most rapid increase in social media regulations, any public company in any industry must start taking compliance for social media seriously,” said Devin Redmond, Co-founder and CEO of Nexgate. “Aside from FINRA and FFIEC requirements, the SEC and other regulatory bodies are quickly issuing guidelines and requirements to govern product, marketing, and support communications in social media beyond just financial services organizations. That-s why Nexgate has built new Regulation FD compliance policies as well as first of their kind FFIEC policies, among our many others, which can be enacted in just minutes across a brand-s entire social media presence to automatically catch and handle policy violations.”

For more information on Nexgate policies for regulatory compliance, or its statistics on social media security, visit .

Nexgate provides cloud-based brand protection and compliance for enterprise social media accounts. Its patent-pending technology seamlessly integrates with the leading social media platforms and applications to find and audit brand affiliated accounts, control connected applications, detect and remediate compliance risks, archive communications, and detect fraud and account hacking.

Nexgate is based in San Francisco, California, and is used by some of the world-s largest financial services, pharmaceutical, Internet security, manufacturing, media, and retail organizations to discover, audit and protect their social infrastructure.

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