Jatheon captures posts, comments, edits, and deletions from the Facebook, X, Instagram, and YouTube accounts your firm and its advisors use for business.
It retains them under the schedule your compliance team sets and makes them searchable in the same archive that holds email, text messages, and WhatsApp.
An examination request naming a representative and a date range returns the posts, the comment threads underneath them, and the record of anything that was later edited or taken down.
Why Personal Accounts Still Create Firm Records
Most posts that need to be kept were never meant to be records. In practice, that usually means an advisor posting market commentary on X from a personal account and then answering prospects in the replies. It can be as ordinary as congratulating a client on Instagram from a personal phone.
Your policy may ban both, and you still have to keep them, because FINRA and the SEC decide what counts as a record by looking at what the message says rather than the phone or the account it came from.
Two retention periods apply, depending on how the firm is registered. Broker-dealers keep business communications for three years under SEC Rule 17a-4, and the first two years have to be easy to reach. RIAs keep them for five years under Rule 204-2 of the Investment Advisers Act, and a firm registered as both follows the longer period.
The enforcement pattern changed shape in 2025. The off-channel sweep that produced more than $3 billion in SEC and CFTC penalties across more than 100 firms ran from December 2021 to early 2025 and has since wound down. FINRA has kept bringing communications and off-channel cases out of routine cycle examinations, including actions against individual registered representatives. Its 2026 Annual Regulatory Oversight Report addresses social media directly, with findings focused on influencers who post on a firm’s behalf.
FINRA cited firms that did not approve the static content those influencers posted, did not supervise their interactive posts the way they supervise correspondence, and did not retain those communications at all.
The supervision side of that framework could change, depending on whether the SEC approves a pending FINRA proposal.
Regulatory Notice 26-14 proposes replacing blanket pre-use approval with risk-based written procedures and dropping the static and interactive distinction, as we covered in our guide to FINRA Rule 2210. The comment period closed on September 11, 2026, and the proposal still needs SEC approval before an implementation date is set
The retention duty is untouched by the proposal, and firms adopting risk-based procedures would have to keep evidence that those procedures were carried out.
Which Channels Jatheon Captures
Meeting those retention periods depends on what actually reaches the archive. Each connector authenticates against the account through the platform’s own API rather than scraping a public page, so what lands in the archive is the item plus its metadata, threading, and formatting.
When examiners review social media archiving for financial advisors, completeness is what they check first, because a record that arrives without its context is hard to defend.
Context also means following a conversation once it leaves the platform. An exchange that starts in the comments under a post often continues in a text thread or a WhatsApp chat, so the connectors that matter for social media archiving cover more than the social platforms themselves, and they fall into three groups.
- Social accounts: The Facebook, X, Instagram, and YouTube connectors capture posts, comments, replies, images, and video, together with the edited and deleted versions of each. Edits and deletions matter most in an examination, because removed content is often what a request asks for and is no longer available on the platform. The LinkedIn connector is coming soon.
- Mobile and messaging: iMessage, Android Messages, and WhatsApp are captured natively, with no wrapper app for the advisor to install and no separate business number to route conversations through. Deleted messages are retained. This is the gap off-channel enforcement was built around, and it explains why a firm with a written prohibition on texting can still be unable to produce what was sent. Our guide to text message archiving for financial advisors covers the mobile side in depth.
- Everything else on the same platform: Email, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, Bloomberg, and website capture run through Jatheon Data Connectors across 25+ channels in total, so supervision works from one index rather than from several vendor portals holding parts of the same conversation.
To learn more, check out our Social Media Archiving solution page.
What Supervision Looks Like Once the Records Are In
Capture covers the retention duty. Supervision is the second half of the obligation, and it runs on the same archive.
Narrow the volume you can actually review
No principal can read every post, comment, and message a producing branch generates in a quarter, and a review program that exists only on paper is a recurring FINRA examination finding.
Compliance teams can set keyword and pattern-based rules that tag matching posts, comments, and messages for review, covering language such as guarantees, performance claims, or complaints, and automatic alerts tell reviewers when a flagged item comes in.
The AI Dashboard then brings high-priority items to the top of the reviewer’s view, and every review action is recorded in a tamper-evident audit trail.
Surface the items worth reading first
AI Classification adds sentiment tags to each item, sorting it into one of five levels from very negative to very positive, so hostile comments and possible complaints reach a reviewer first. Reviewers can also ask Liya, Jatheon’s AI assistant, to summarize a long comment thread or answer questions about it in plain language.
Jatheon AI runs inside Jatheon’s own AWS environment, and customer data is never sent to outside AI providers or used to train models.
Retain by channel, and prove the disposition
Retention Tags apply separate policies per channel, so social content can sit on a three-year schedule while adviser records run to five, and Expunge deletes automatically at the end of the period with logging behind it.
Legal Hold overrides disposition when a matter opens.
Produce what an examiner asks for
Unified Search runs one query across every archived channel with more than 20 Boolean, proximity, wildcard, and fuzzy criteria, and social content exports to HTML or PDF.
Show the review happened
Audit Logs are WORM-compliant and tamper-evident, covering user actions and configuration changes, so supervision can be evidenced with timestamped records rather than with a description of the process.
How the Jatheon Social Media Archive Holds Up in an Examination
Capture and supervision both rest on how the records are stored, and storage is what an examination actually tests. Jatheon has served regulated organizations since 2004, works with more than 500 customers, holds over 21 billion archived messages, and rates 4.9 out of 5 on Gartner® Peer Insights. Records sit in WORM-compliant storage, with retention and legal hold applied at the record level, so a post that was edited or deleted on the platform is still on file in its original form.
The SEC’s 2022 amendments to SEC Rule 17a-4 took effect in January 2023, and compliance has been required since May 2023. Since then, broker-dealers can meet the storage requirement with either WORM or an audit-trail system that can recreate an original record after it has been modified or deleted. RIAs store records under Rule 204-2, which has never required WORM, although the records still have to be protected from loss or alteration and easy to retrieve.
