Skip to main content

Pulse User Guide

Full user guide for Primer Pulse

Accessing Pulse

To access the Primer Pulse module, visit: https://analyze.primer.ai/

After logging in, you will arrive at the home page, where you can scroll down to the Pulse section and click on the "Go to Pulse" button, or you can select the Pulse icon on the navigation on the left-hand side of the screen.

How to Create a Pulse Social Media Monitor

From the Pulse landing page, click + Add a Monitor in the top right hand corner of your screen. You will then be brought to this page:

  1. First, create a name for your monitor.

  2. Choose whether you would like the monitoring to stop if you don’t open Pulse after seven days. The default is set to stop background collection after seven days of inactivity, but you can disable that feature if you'd like.

  3. Select your data sources

  4. Under the "Included Terms" section specify what terms or phrases you'd like to search for. These search terms will apply to both the news and the social media sites you've selected.

    1. Simply type a word that you’re interested in (it can be anything from keywords to hashtags to usernames of specific social media accounts) and then click enter.

    2. To search on an exact phrase, ex: "Joe Biden", please use quotation marks: "Joe Biden". If you do not utilize quotation marks, ex: Joe Biden , the monitor will search for any post or news article containing Joe AND Biden.

  5. In the "combined with all of these term" section, you can add terms that need to appear in conjunction with the initial term(s). Ex: If your initial included terms are president , election , adding "Joe Biden" as a combined term will return results that contain either president OR election , AND "Joe Biden"

    1. Please note: There is a 1,000 word maximum for computed terms in a monitor. For example, you can add 1,000 terms to the "any of these terms" bucket. If you use the "combined with any of these terms (optional) bucket, the combined terms will act as a multiplier. In the example below, there are 6 computed terms:

    2. Please note: The terms buckets do not utilize stemming, so please include all variations of the terms you would like to see in your monitor. In the example above, you may want to include indictments, indicted, etc.

    3. Please note: If you are using terms separated by a colon (:) please wrap the term in quotation marks, ex: "321:123"

  6. Select the "add group" button to include additional sets of terms.

  7. Adding "Excluded Terms"will exclude any results that contain those terms.

  8. You can apply a geofence to your search. This feature will restrict the social media & news results to only those either geotagged or mentioning a location within the geofenced area.This helps reduce noise and focus search results on a geographic area of interest.

    Results are first returned based on the query terms, then are further narrowed down based on mentioned or geotagged locations from these results - which fall within the geofence area.

    For example if a user searched on “flood AND (damage or destroyed)”, then set a geofence over a region across the Queensland and New South Wales border in Australia - results will only be surfaced if they mention a location somewhere in this region, or are geotagged to this area (and they mention the search terms).

    It is important to note that most social media posts on Twitter do NOT have a geolocation assigned, so the majority of tweets that appear will be because a location was mentioned. Here's how to create a geofence:

    1. Define Geofence

      1. You can either search for a known specific location - like a town, or landmark or drop a Custom Location on the map (Click Custom Location).

      2. Type the location name into the Find location box - the map will zoom to the location, and a marker will be dropped for a center point. You can also enter a lat/long in decimal degrees into this box (format example: 37.7687, -122.3875)

      3. Alternatively, you can zoom and scroll in on the map, and use “Custom Location” to drop a marker wherever they like

      4. A search radius will appear by default with each marker - the size of this radius will depend on the scale of the location searched (e.g. Arizona v Eiffel Tower), and/or the zoom level.

      5. The radius of the search area can easily be adjusted by hovering on the circle - a small marker will appear on the edge which can be dragged in and out to make the radius larger or smaller:

      6. Alternatively, you can click on the map marker - and a small text box will appear where a radius can be manually entered.

      7. The text box allows you to label the location with a name:

      8. Each location marker will create an entry in a table beneath the map - showing how many geofences your search includes. The user can click on a Location from the table and the map will zoom to that marker.

      9. To remove a geofence - click on the marker, and select “Remove Location”

      10. Geofence Pro-Tip: When the results for a monitor loads, the map populated with news and social posts will likely contain many locations highlighted outside of your geofenced area. This is because for each article or tweet - every location mentioned or tagged is assigned to that event or post. So if there is an article about Donetsk in Ukraine, attributed in the article text to an author in Cape Town, South Africa - you will get both of those locations marked on the map for that article. Note: Geotagged tweets will appear as blue markers.

  9. Once you click ‘Save & Run Monitor’, your query will be running in the background

Separating news and social media terms

If you want an even more detailed search, you can click separate your news and social media terms by selecting the toggle under "Define Query Terms" on the monitor creation page:

This will split your search into a news query (i.e. the terms you want Pulse to search for in news articles) and a social query (i.e. this will only influence the search on social media posts, not the news):

Please note: When you separate the news and social terms, for the news terms, Primer uses an analyzer which can lemmatize and stem words to find common roots, so a search on: policy will return results of both “policy” and “policies”. News terms can also be utilized with any of our Boolean operators.

Primer Curated Monitors

You can also select one of the Primer curated monitors, to duplicate and modify those terms to fit your specific needs. From the Pulse landing page, find a Primer curated monitor, and select duplicate:

It will show up on your landing page, and you can edit the terms if you would like:

Pulse can be configured to alert you via email when activity of interest in the news or social media has met a set of conditions. This ensures responsiveness while allowing you to focus on other tasks outside of the Command application.

How to Create an Alert for Your Monitor

When looking at the list of your monitors, on the right click the 3 dots and click Edit:

Find the Alerts tab:

You will see “Alert me when” and a drop down menu option next to it with options for News, Social Media, or both:

Customize your frequency time frame and volume alert notice and make sure the “Email me when Alert is triggered” is toggled on if you'd like to receive an email notification

Pro Tip: If you want to see an idea of what the topic volume looks like before you set an alert you can explore that on the feed summary of the monitor:

Please note: Alerts are currently available when creating a new monitor (not on the Primer curated monitors). To create an alert on an existing Primer curated monitor you will need to recreate the monitor, then add the desired alerting criteria.

  1. Customize your frequency time frame and volume alert notice and make sure the “Email me when Alert is triggered” is toggled on if you'd like to receive an email notification

    Pro Tip: If you want to see an idea of what the topic volume looks like before you set an alert you can explore that on the feed summary of the monitor:

Please note: Alerts are currently available when creating a new monitor (not on the Primer curated monitors). To create an alert on an existing Primer curated monitor you will need to recreate the monitor, then add the desired alerting criteria.

Monitor Volume Limits

Each monitor has an initial quota of 500 Twitter/X posts per hour and 4,000 posts per hour combined from the other available social media sites. After the respective quotas are reached,, Primer will only ingest the 1% of the total volume stream for those monitor terms the rest of the day. For example, if the total volume stream is 1M, we would ingest an additional 10k posts for that day.

In addition to the daily quota restrictions, we also apply a limit of 150,000 social media posts and news articles per monitor. This means that for each monitor, we will ingest the 150k most recent posts and articles, up to the 30 day max monitor period.

Sharing Monitors

Easily share a monitor across all or select accounts within your organization by utilizing our "share" feature. Share and collaborate on monitors to gain a common operating picture across your team. A monitor can be shared in 2 ways:

Via Live Monitor

Once a Monitor is running, select the "share" icon in the search bar:

Pulse Landing Page

Select the 3 dots to the right of the monitor, and then select "share":

How To Share a Monitor

Once you select "share" from either a live monitor or the landing page, the "share monitor" prompt will open:

Chose to share with individual accounts within your organization, or across all accounts. When you share a monitor with either an individual or your organization, the monitor will populate in the respective user(s) Command landing page.

Individual Account

When sharing a monitor with an individual account, type in the username of the account you wish to share the monitor with:

Can View - means they can view the monitor and duplicate it (from the monitor landing page)

Can Edit - means they can view the monitor, duplicate, edit the monitor terms, and invite others as an editor

Across Accounts Within Your Organization

If the monitor is set to "restricted", only users that have been individually added can open the monitor. To enable the monitor for all accounts across your organization, under the "get link" section, change the access from "restricted", to "anyone at your org":

Then, the monitor will populate on the landing page of all accounts within your organization.

How to Interact with a Shared Monitor

Once a monitor is shared, it will appear on their monitor landing page on both the "ALL MONITORS" and "SHARED MONITORS" sections. Depending on the permissions granted, you can edit or view the monitor. Additionally, you can duplicate a shared monitor, which would allow editing capabilities. The duplicated monitor would only be visible within your Command account.

Overview Tab

After you've created a monitor, you'll land on the Overview tab:

Starting at the top, you will see the Overview summary, which is generated every 24 hours using a LLM and is based on the text of the top social narratives and key news events displayed below:

To the right of the overview summary you will find the Content Summary. This will show whether the news and social volume within your monitor is increasing or decreasing, as well as the sentiment of the social posts:

To the right of that is the Social Summary. Social Summary automatically aggregates key information using LLMs, and are generated every 10 minutes:

Social Highlights

Below that section, if you have access to social narratives, you will see the Social Highlights, which is a listing of the social narratives for your monitor over the last 24 hours, listed by narratives with the highest number of posts:

Clicking on a narrative will open up a narrative detail box:

From there, if you select 'view report' you will be taken to the main social narrative reports page.

Key News Events

Next is the Key News Events section, which is designed to display the most significant events (as determined by publication volume) for your Monitor:

Below Key News Events, you will find the Entity Extractions table, where you will see all People, Organizations, Locations, and Hashtags mentioned in your monitor. This will include both news and social media mentions:

Clicking into an Entity will show you all of the mentions of that entity, along with additional details:

Feeds Tab

The Overview tab is great if you want to get a high-level understanding of the ongoing events - but the Feed page is there if you want to dig deeper into the content.

Selecting a Time Period for a Monitor

For any monitor, you have the ability to select the time period for your feed, up to the last 30 days:

Please Note:

  • The content for the feed tab is limited to the most recent 150,000 social media posts and news articles. Depending on the terms used, certain monitors may not have a 7, 14, or 30 day look back option enabled, if the data those time periods exceeds the 150,000 volume cap.

  • For the longer time periods to display data, your monitor will need to have been created for that amount of time. For example, to view 7 days of social data, your monitor will have needed to be up and running for 7 days.

  • If you apply an entity filter while exploring a longer time horizon, we will limit the entity mentions for that time period to the most recent 5,000 mentions.

Content Summary

Just like on the Overview tab, you are told whether the volume of news and social media is increasing or decreasing; this gives you a good indication of whether the event is escalating or calming down.

Similarly, 'Social Sentiment' tells you what proportion of social media posts are positive, negative or neutral.

Top Links, Topics and Top X / Twitter Hashtags

Below the Content Summary section, Command highlights the top topics, hashtags, and links shared, all of which you can click into for further analysis.

Social Feed

On the social feed, the first thing you'll notice is the Social Summary feature. This is the same social summary from the Overview tab:

Selecting the References button at the bottom of the social media summary will provide additional analysis and citations for the summary:

Below the Social Summary, you’ll see a constant stream of social media posts - all of which are related to your search.

By clicking on a specific post, you will be taken to the post detail screen, which provides the posters social bio (when available), along with a link to view the post in it's native application:

To add a social media post to your saved items, select the bookmark icon on the top left of the post:


Adding User Accounts From A Pulse Monitor

You can now add user accounts you discover in a Pulse monitor feed directly to an existing social account. From the social feed, in the top right corner of a post, select the three dots and then "Add Author to Social Group":

From there, you can chose which existing social group you would like to add the user to. Please note, you can add a user to any social group that you've created, or any group that you've been given edit rights to:

You can also add a user to a group from the post detail page:

News Feed

The news feed shows you all the latest articles from over 50,000 news sources (which are taken from LexisNexis).

If several articles focus on the same topic, they’ll be grouped together. For instance, in the above image, below the fourth article it says ‘3 unique documents’ which means two articles all wrote about the same topic. Clicking into that news event will provide details such a a document lists, entities extracted, and a "how we got here timeline" in certain cases:

"Disputed Information Detected" is a warning that the information in that given article contains claims that are disputed.

The way this is done is through Primer’s models picking up on if two or more groups of people are disagreeing over a certain claim. Importantly, this does not necessarily indicate disinformation - instead, we just flag up where disinformation might be likely to appear given the disputed information so that human experts can investigate further.

Please note: The collection of news data begins the moment your monitor is created. For an immediate historical look-back on news data for your monitor, utilize the 'NEWS SEARCH' button:

Filters

On the top right of the monitor, you can find the 'Filters' button. This will open up a side panel with a variety of different options to slice and dice your data, leveraging Primer's NER and custom classification models:

There are 4 types of Filters: Keyword, General, Social, and News:

Keyword Filters

The "find keywords" box at the top of the Filters pop-out can be used by itself, or in conjunction with the other filters. the following criteria are supported for keyword filters:

  • term: threat

  • exact phrase: "serious threat"

  • boolean: ("serious threat" AND "nuclear") , ("serious threat" OR "nuclear") AND disaster

    • please note: the only Boolean operators available for keyword filters are AND and OR

  • prefix: crypto*

  • regex: between / /

    • e.g. find all the URLs: /.*http.*/

General Filters

In this section, you will be able to filter on entities (people, locations, and organizations), as well as specific sources (just 4chan posts, for example). You can also further refine the time period for your monitor, to only show results from the last 15, 30 or 60 minutes.

Social Filters

Scrolling further down the filters section, you'll find the social filters. Here, you will be able to select if you'd like to view only positive , negative or neutral posts from your monitor. Remember, a new social summary is created when you apply a filter, so this is a great way to get a sentiment analysis summarization for your monitor (for example: what are is the summary of the negative posts that mention Joe Biden).

Below Sentiment, you will find Humanitarian, Threat, and Cyber Attack Categories. These are machine learning models, or classifiers, that were trained by Primer to identify these topics and affiliated subtopics within social media posts.

The Humanitarian classifier identifies rescues, volunteering, donations, infrastructure and utility damage, sympathy and support, injuries or fatalities, caution and advice, displacement and evacuations, requests or urgent needs, other relevant information e.g. aftershocks or looting so residents can avoid certain areas, and not humanitarian, which are events that do not fit into any of the above-mentioned categories.

The Threat classifier identifies airstrikes, missiles, attacks, clashes, suicide bombs, IEDs, grenade or landmine attacks, military exercises, kidnappings, protests or riots, general strikes, worker strikes, refugee displacement, and other weapons.

The Cyber Attack classifier identifies six cyber attack indicators: Vulnerabilities, Denial of Service (DDoS), Ransomware, Data Leaks, Zero Day Exploits, and Botnets. This classifier also filters out irrelevant information or documents such as those related to cyber services or training.

You can also filter on specific languages, as well as on only verified Twitter users.

News Filters

Lastly, there is a set of News Filters, which includes filtering on specific Event Types. You can also filter to only show articles that match Primer's Disputed Information classifier.

Please Note: The filter logic is “OR between filter values of the same type” and “AND between different filter types”

Pro Tip: When applying a filter for your data, keep your eye out for a new Social Summary to be created on the new filtered content!

News Search Button

At the top of the screen on the search bar, you'll notice the 'NEWS SEARCH' button. This feature allows you to open any Pulse query within the News Search application for a more strategic analysis of the topic you are monitoring:

This will open a new window, and a News Search query will launch that is based upon the terms in your monitor. The default time period for the results in News Search is "last 7 days", but this can be adjusted to any time period from the "last 12 hours" to "last 2 years":

This is a great way to do a deeper analysis on the news data related to your query. To learn how to save items to create a custom briefing on data from News Search, view the help article here.

Reports Button

Both SITREPs and Social Narratives can be accessed via the 'REPORTS' button on the Pulse Title Box:

SITREPS

SITREPs provide a summary of both traditional news and Twitter/X activity for your monitor, and include insights such as key events with top numbers and quotes, mention counts of key individuals, and robust Twitter/X analysis.

Here's how to interact with the SITREP feature:

  1. Select your timeframe - e.g. 24hours, 7 days

  2. Click GENERATE REPORT - An "in progress" bar will appear. It may take a minute or two to generate your SITREP, you can go back to the monitor, and will receive a notification once the report is complete.

  3. The report can be viewed within Pulse, or it can be downloaded as a word document.

Social Narratives

Social narratives are a collection of similar social media posts from a range of social media platforms, highlighting a conversation occurring across the internet.

Social narratives reports have 3 scheduling frequencies (daily/weekly/monthly). Once you set up / access your monitor, toggling Auto-Generation will schedule a report for each frequency, and you get to choose which day of the week / month your Weekly and Monthly Social Narratives are triggered, as well as the time of day for your Daily Social Narrative. Once a report is scheduled, a status of Queued will remain on the card until the report run is triggered.

Daily - Enabling Auto-generation will schedule the report to run the following morning. The historical look-back window for this report is a 24hrs, ending at the time you set in the scheduling module.

Weekly - Enabling Auto-generation and choosing a day of the week will schedule the report to run the following morning. The historical look-back window for this report is a 7 days, ending at 9pm CT the previous day.

Monthly - Enabling Auto-generation and choosing a day of the month will schedule the report to run the following morning. The historical look-back window for this report is a 30 days, ending at 9pm CT the previous day.

Metrics within Social Narratives

For each social narrative, we will provide the Trajectory, Inauthenticity, Impact, and any participating Factions. Each of those metrics is described below

Trajectory

Trajectory helps you understand whether the narrative is speeding up or slowing down in volume of participation and repetition across accounts, and supplies a meaningful short-range prediction. It reflects the post volume of the narrative during the current report period, as well as trend direction from previous appearances of the narrative

Inauthenticity

We frame inauthenticity as "the percentage of posts from potentially inauthentic accounts" relative to "the typical inauthenticity level for the measured platform." We identify inauthentic actor/poster behavior across Discord, 8Kun, 4Chan, Gab, Looksmax, MeWe, Pastebin, Raddle, Reddit, Stormfront, and Telegram.

We assess potential inauthenticity based on posting behavior, follower networks, and the age of the account. Escalated levels of inauthenticity indicate a concerted effort to propel a narrative or agenda and is therefore useful for highlighting narrative manipulation.

More specifically, Inauthenticity is a calculation that determines if the actors (posters) involved in a narrative typically exhibit "spam-like" behavior. An actors behavior is considered "spam-like" if 90% of their posts are copy/paste posts, they post at least 10 "spam-like" posts over 7 days, and they don't post or engage with original content.

The inauthenticity calculation is # of posts from actors labeled "spam-like" / total number of posts in the narrative.

"Typical" inauthenticity is determined by calculating a general baseline of inauthenticity we expect across all platforms, categorized by post volume.

Impact

You can use the Impact rating to prioritize and triage your narratives. "Low impact" indicates it is worth maintaining awareness only. "Moderate impact" indicates the narrative should be tracked carefully, and "High Impact" should likely be escalated and actioned. These broad guidelines should calibrate to your brand sensitivity level. The metric is calculated using a weighted combination of several metrics, including influence, faction coordination, post volume, and authenticity, primarily used to understand the potential risk of a narrative and to support day-to-day triaging of team priorities.

Factions

For certain Narratives, you'll notice Faction composition. Factions are groups of social media accounts or online communities that share a common articulated ideology, passion, purpose, and/or idiomatic language and who through that similarity spread narratives and disproportionately shape public opinion.

The Faction Participation metric represents the % by which a faction has engaged with (posted, replied, retweeted) this narrative, and how much of the overall engagement they represent.

You can click on each faction (from which "Faction Detail" will pop up) and learn more about their influence, reach, political alignment, "Faction VIPs", social platforms used, and aligned factions:

Narrative Detail

The following video explains how to engage with the narrative detail feature. Please note: narrative details will only show up in narratives that have faction engagement.

Tips and Tricks for Social Narratives

You can hide irrelevant narratives from your report by selecting the eye icon in the left-hand side bar:

You can download the social narrative report as a word doc, by selecting the download button on the top right of the screen:

You can also view past reports that have been generated from the "Past Reports" tab in the Reports page:

Media Tab

On the Media tab, Command provides you with an overview of all the relevant pictures and videos that are being posted on social media.

All

This page contains both pictures and videos.

Importantly, Primer’s models pick up on another type of content that is becoming an increasingly important part of shaping the narrative of ongoing events: memes. Primer enables you to click onto these and see how Twitter users are responding to them too.

Images

Only images are shown on this page.

Videos

Same as above, but for videos. You can click into any of these and see the post the video is attached to:

Collections

On the Collections page, all images and videos that are visually similar are grouped together.

This saves you having to pass through hundreds or thousands of pictures and videos of the same thing. For example, instead of seeing 100 images and videos of Trump’s speech, Primer puts them together in a collection and tells you how much content of the event is out there.

Collections also allow you to identify patterns, compare narratives for memes, and view unfolding situations from different angles.

Entities Tab

On the Entities tab, all the key people and organizations are extracted from social media and the news:

On the far left column, you are told the name of the entity - and the symbol indicates whether it is an organization or person. Often, the models also pick up on the affiliation of the entity - e.g. in the above image you are told that Vladimir Putin is the Russian President

Under ‘Context’, Primer generates a summary of how the entity is involved in your query.

The next four columns show how often the entity is mentioned across different sources. Note that the default is that the search results come in order of how often they are mentioned across all sources - but you can change this to rank results in terms of how often they appear on news or social media by clicking on ‘News’, or ‘Social’.

The final column is a bar which shows whether the entity is mostly spoken about in news articles (orange) or social media (blue).

Clicking into an Entity will show you all of the mentions of that entity, along with additional details:

Locations Tab

Next up is the locations tab:

Primer’s models scour through all the data from news and social media to pick up on any locations that are mentioned - these are then plotted on the map. Please note: This is not done by identifying the geotags of Tweets because only 1-2% of Tweets have these.

Using the + and - sign in the bottom right hand corner (or using your mouse/trackpad), you can zoom in to see a street-view level.

Pro Tip: For a satellite image of your map, select the icon in the top right corner of the map, and select "Satellite Imagery":

In the column to the right of the map, the key locations are laid out - you can click into any of these and will be provided with a summary and the key entities that are related to it:

Customizing Your Dashboards

You can change the design of what is shown on your dashboards. Each module in Command (Feeds, Entities, Map, etc.), or widget, has input for how and if it appears. You can now:

  • Remove widgets you don't use.

  • Add additional widgets.

  • Re-arrange where the widgets appear on screen, and how much screen space they take up.

  • Update layout and name of any existing dashboards (Overview, Feeds, Media, Entities, Locations)

  • Add New Dashboards

  • Remove Dashboards (note there has to be a minimum of 1 dashboard)

Creating New Dashboards

Under the monitor name, you’ll see tabs, each for a separate pre-set dashboard. On the far right of this menu select “New Dashboard”.

You’ll now see a new screen, with options to customize how this will appear.

  • Add title: In the top left, you’ll see a text box where you can enter what you’d like the dashboard to be called. In this image it’s New Dashboard.

  • Next you have two options, either select the widgets you want to appear OR use a preset template Primer has curated (additional presets and widgets coming soon!)

    • Select Preset: select the block for the preset you’d like to use, there are currently three options:

      • Essentials: template that includes Timeline, Feed, Top Entities and Map. This is what the Overview dashboard comes with by default.

      • Primer Feeds: template that includes Feed Summary, Social Feed, News Feed, Top Links, and Top Twitter Hashtags. This is what the Feeds dashboard comes with by default.

      • Primer Entities: this template only includes the Entity Table, and is what the Entities dashboard comes with by default.

    • Start with a specific widget: select the widgets you want to include in the dashboard. Once these are added you’ll be able to arrange and resize (see below).

  • After selecting either a preset or widget(s) then click save in the top right.

Editing Existing Dashboards

Once you’re on a particular dashboard you’d like to edit, select “Edit Dashboard” in the top right.

Now you can update the title to reflect what or who this dashboard is for. If all you’re doing is changing the name of the dashboard, select save in the top right. To add a widget, select “Add Widget” next to the title and move to the Editing Widgets section below.

Deleting and Duplicating Existing Dashboards

To delete a dashboard, select the tab of interest and select the three vertical dots to the far right, next then select delete. You’ll be prompted to confirm, note that deleting a dashboard can’t be reverted. You can also select those three vertical dots and click “duplicate” to create a new dashboard with the same layout.

Adding Widgets

To add a widget, select “Edit Dashboard” then select “Add Widget” in the top left of the monitor. A side bar will pop up and display a scrollable list of the widgets available. Simply select the widget you want to add. This will add the widget to the bottom left of the dashboard, where you can then resize and rearrange.

For each widget, you can also edit the widget’s settings. You can do this by clicking the settings icon in the top right of the widget. In most cases this gives you two options: change the name of the widget, and whether or not to show the title. In some cases, you’ll have additional options, e.g. only showing particular entity types–see the full list of widgets below for more information.

Removing Widgets

To remove a widget from your dashboard, simply click the trashcan item within the widget in the top right:

Rearranging & Resizing Widgets

To rearrange widgets, click the top left three horizontal lines icon and drag to where you want the widget to appear on the dashboard.

To resize the widget, click the bottom right resize handle (see below) and drag in any direction (right to widen, down to lengthen, left to narrow, up to shorten.)

List of All Available Dashboard Widgets

Timeline

Timeline chart displays news and social content count volume for a certain date range. The timeline is interactive as a date range filter.

Entity Table

Entity list can be broken down into three requests, one for each entity type: person, organization and location.

Affiliations should be a list that provides name and context to display on the Entities Discovered table.

Custom Settings: The widget has settings to customize which entity shows up in the tabs above the table. The options for you to select from are “Show all”, “Show People” and “Show organizations”. Selecting any of these checkboxes will add to that widget:

Extractions

This will show the top entities for your monitor across both news and social media. Entities include People, Organizations, and Locations. This widget also appears on the Overview tab.

Group Feeds

A combination of News and Social feeds.

Content Summary

Aggregated news and social content volume summary for a specific time range.

Key News Events

Adds the top 3 news events to your monitor, as determined by the number of documents that comprise the event. Clicking into an event will provide you with a full summary, and details such as top numbers and quotes.

Map

Cluster map displaying the entity locations with social and news count

Map with lists

Uses the Map widget but also visualized the locations that are within the bounds of the map.

Media Grid

The media that appears in all the social posts organized into time buckets of 15min, 30min, 45min, multiple hours

News Feed

Composite list of documents and events, marked correspondingly by a type key. Events are made up of a list of documents

Overview Summary

An LLM-generated summary designed to highlight key topics related to your monitor.

Social Feed

List of social posts (twitter, reddit, 4chan, etc.).

Social Summary

An LLM-generated summary of the social media data from your feed. Social Summary automatically aggregates and cites key information to generate easy to digest summaries.

News Themes

An aggregation of the top news themes over the last 7 days.

Top Entities

List of people, organization and location entities with aggregated data and meta information.

Custom Settings: this widget allows you to select which entity types to show (people, organizations, and locations.)

Top Links

A list with a count of all the links that have appeared in Twitter posts.

Top Hashtags (Twitter)

A list with a count of all the links that have appeared in Twitter posts

Save Social Media Posts and News

Within Primer, you can save social media posts from the social feed on the Feeds tab. You can also save posts and articles from their respective news and social feeds. To save a specific post or article, click on the bookmark icon next to the respective post.

From the Social Feed

From the News Feed

Accessing Saved Items

Once you have saved items to the Saved Items tab, navigate to the page via the icon on the left hand side of the screen:

Here, you will see navigation options to view all saved items, or view certain categories, including News, Social Media, Themes, Maps, and Timelines, as well as any labels/folders you've created:

You can chose to select individual outputs, or chose Select All to download all data from a particular section. Downloads are currently available in .docx and .pdf formats.

Data Sources in Command

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) data sources are continually being added to Primer Pulse. Below is a breakdown of all the data sources currently available.

Social Media

Available sites include: X/Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, Discord, 4Chan, 8kun, Gab, and MeWe, Pastebin, Raddle, Looksmax, Stormfront, Mastodon, Toutiao, Weibo, Xueqiu and Vk. Here's a brief description of each:

X/Twitter: Twitter is a microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as "tweets".

Reddit: A social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called "communities" or "subreddits".

Please Note: Primer currently collects only a subset of subreddits. To have additional subreddits added, please reach out to [email protected].

Telegram: A free cloud-based chat application that offers built-in end-to-end encrypted video calling, file sharing, and other advanced features.

Please Note: Primer currently collects 11,000+ Telegram channels. To have additional channels added, please reach out to [email protected].

Discord: a VoIP and instant messaging social platform. Users have the ability to communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media and files in private chats or as part of communities called "servers". A server is a collection of persistent chat rooms and voice channels which can be accessed via invite links.

Please Note: Primer currently collects only a subset of Discord servers. To have additional servers added, please reach out to [email protected].

4chan: A notorious imageboard. It was created in 2003 as an English-language counterpart to similar Japanese forums dedicated to anime discussion. Over time, 4chan grew to become a central hub of internet culture, with associations to Anonymous and alt-right politics. Over the years, users of the site have been implicated in murders, distribution of child sexual abuse imagery, and cyberattacks.

Please Note: Primer currently collects a subset of 4chan content. To have additional content added, please reach out to [email protected].

8kun: Known previously as 8chan, 8kun is most famous for being the origin of QAnon. In addition, users of the site have engaged in several mass murders, distribution of child sexual abuse imagery, and swatting.

Please Note: Primer currently collects a subset of 8kun content. To have additional content added, please reach out to [email protected].

Gab: An alt-tech platform that frames itself as a bastion of free speech and individual liberty. However, its lack of moderation has allowed extremist communities to become established on the site. As such, Gab is rife with antisemitism, racism, and white nationalist rhetoric. The format is similar to Twitter, with individuals posting on their own timeline, or in groups.

Please Note: Primer currently collects a subset of Gab content. To have additional content added, please reach out to [email protected].

MeWe: A social media network often compared to Facebook that focuses on data privacy and engages only in limited moderation of provocative content.

Please Note: Primer currently collects a subset of MeWe content. To have additional content added, please reach out to [email protected].

Pastebin: A historically popular website used by software developers to store text and easily share across different communities. Despite these innocuous uses, Pastebin is also used by bad actors to store malware scripts, stolen information, and at times used for propagating mis- and dis- information.

Please Note: Primer currently collects a subset of Pastebin content. To have additional content added, please reach out to [email protected].

Looksmax: A popular incels stomping ground to discuss "lookism" and to bash each other on how they look. Far right Nazi content can be found here as well.

Please Note: Primer currently collects a subset of Looksmax content. To have additional content added, please reach out to [email protected].

Stormfront: A neo-nazi internet forum.

Please Note: Primer currently collects a subset of Stormfront content. To have additional content added, please reach out to [email protected].

Mastodon: A "federated" microblogging platform much like Twitter. Individuals have the power to host their own Mastodon instance and center that instance around a community of similar interests. These instances can then be connected to other instances in a federated network.

Please Note: Primer currently collects a subset of Mastodon content. To have additional content added, please reach out to [email protected].

Toutiao: A Chinese news aggregation platform owned by China's ByteDance.

Please Note: Primer currently collects a subset of Toutiao content. To have additional content added, please reach out to [email protected].

Weibo: China's microblogging platform like Twitter. Given that Twitter is blocked in China, Weibo is the dominant microblogging platform inside China and also used by Chinese diaspora.

Please Note: Primer currently collects a subset of Weibo content. To have additional content added, please reach out to [email protected].

Xueqiu: A Chinese financial platform similar to Seeking Alpha.

Please Note: Primer currently collects a subset of Xueqiu content. To have additional content added, please reach out to [email protected].

VK: A Russian social networking service. VK users can message publicly or privately, and create groups, public pages and events.

News Data

Primer Pulse ingests the LexisNexis news data set, a collection of 50,000+ sources from all over the world. The knowledge base of events, entities, and relationships is continually updating and has been backfilled with English-language data going back 2 years to present day.

Translated Languages

Primer automatically translates social media data from over 125 different languages to English. You can add search terms to your monitor in your desired language, or utilize the translation functionality to translate the social media posts that appear in your feed.

Primer automatically translates social media data from over 125 different languages to English. You can add search terms to your monitor in your desired language, or utilize the translation functionality to translate the social media posts that appear in your feed.

Please Note: When using English language terms in your monitor, we will provide all English and foreign language posts that match those English language terms, and provide the translation of those foreign language posts to English. If you add foreign language terms to your monitor, we will provide posts in that same language of the terms used. For example, using Chinese characters as search terms will only return posts that contain Chinese characters.

To translate the posts in your feed, first we detect the language of origin. To do this, we use language detection annotation along with a language identification model. If both models agree that the language can be identified, we will translate the post. Once a post is translated, it shows up in the form of a “Show/Hide Translation” button. f you would like to have all foreign language posts automatically translated to english, visit your Settings and User Profile page to adjust your preferences. The tweet below shows the translation from Japanese:

picture of a tweet in japanese with the associate english translation

The languages we support for translation are:

Afrikaans

Albanian

Amharic

Arabic

Armenian

Assamese

Azerbaijani (Latin)

Bangla

Bashkir

Basque

Bhojpuri

Bodo

Bosnian (Latin)

Bulgarian

Cantonese (Traditional)

Catalan

Chinese (Literary)

Chinese Simplified

Chinese Traditional

chiShona

Croatian

Czech

Danish

Dari

Divehi

Dogri

Dutch

English

Estonian

Faroese

Fijian

Filipino

Finnish

French

French (Canada)

Galician

Georgian

German

Greek

Gujarati

Haitian Creole

Hausa

Hebrew

Hindi

Hmong Daw (Latin)

Hungarian

Icelandic

Igbo

Indonesian

Inuinnaqtun

Inuktitut

Inuktitut (Latin)

Irish

Italian

Japanese

Kannada

Kashmiri

Kazakh

Khmer

Kinyarwanda

Klingon

Klingon (plqaD)

Konkani

Korean

Kurdish (Central)

Kurdish (Northern)

Kyrgyz (Cyrillic)

Lao

Latvian

Lithuanian

Lingala

Lower Sorbian

Luganda

Macedonian

Maithili

Malagasy

Malay (Latin)

Malayalam

Maltese

Maori

Marathi

Mongolian (Cyrillic)

Mongolian (Traditional)

Myanmar

Nepali

Norwegian

Nyanja

Odia

Pashto

Persian

Polish

Portuguese (Brazil)

Portuguese (Portugal)

Punjabi

Queretaro Otomi

Romanian

Rundi

Russian

Samoan (Latin)

Serbian (Cyrillic)

Serbian (Latin)

Sesotho

Sesotho sa Leboa

Setswana

Sindhi

Sinhala

Slovak

Slovenian

Somali (Arabic)

Spanish

Swahili (Latin)

Swedish

Tahitian

Tamil

Tatar (Latin)

Telugu

Thai

Tibetan

Tigrinya

Tongan

Turkish

Turkmen (Latin)

Ukrainian

Upper Sorbian

Urdu

Uyghur (Arabic)

Uzbek (Latin)

Vietnamese

Welsh

Xhosa

Yoruba

Yucatec Maya

Zulu

Settings and User Profile Page

To access your settings and user profile page, click on the icon on the bottom left of the screen:

On this main profile page, you can add your name (if not already populated), and adjust your timezone to ensure any digests you've subscribed to are being delivered at the correct time.

Preferences Tab

There are 3 main components to the Preferences tab, explained in detail below.

Command Feed Translation

Primer Command translates foreign language posts from over 125 languages. If you would like all foreign language posts to be automatically translated into english, select the 'Show translation text in Command feeds by default' box:

External Site Warning

Whenever possible, Primer Analyze and Command will link back to the original source material, whether that is a news article or social media post. If you would like to disable the pop-up warning about navigating to an external site (and thus leaving the Primer application), select this box.

Explicit Image Filter for Social Media

By default, Primer Command blurs images we identify as being explicit. If you would like to change the image filter settings, select your desired experience:

Did this answer your question?