Justice
How Police Are Watching You on Social Media
Documents from Chicago's Cook County Sheriff’s Office reveal the undercover techniques law enforcement uses to monitor—and manipulate—social media users.
In October, the ACLU released emails showing that a social media monitoring company called Geofeedia had tracked the accounts of Black Lives Matter protesters for law enforcement clients. The revelations of social media spying made headlines and led Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to cut off Geofeedia’s access to bulk user data (which in turn prompted the company to slash half its staff). Since then, two more social media monitoring companies, Snap Trends and Media Sonar, lost Twitter data access for similar surveillance activities.
Civil liberties advocates have celebrated these decisions, but new documents suggest police still have plenty of other tools to spy on social media users.