Social Media in Policing
Social media in policing refers to the use of various online platforms by law enforcement agencies to monitor criminal activities, gather intelligence, and engage with the community. In the 2000s and 2010s, police began leveraging social media to track suspects, with individuals often posting incriminating evidence of their criminal behavior. Law enforcement agencies have utilized platforms like Facebook and Twitter to collect information, sometimes employing tactics such as creating fake profiles to befriend suspects and gather intelligence. While this has enhanced police capabilities in some scenarios, it has sparked significant privacy concerns among citizens and civil rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Critics argue that such practices can infringe on personal privacy rights and expect social media companies to protect user data from invasive surveillance. Additionally, incidents of high-profile crimes have intensified the debate about balancing effective policing with the protection of civil liberties. Overall, the intersection of social media and policing remains a complex and evolving topic, reflecting broader societal discussions about privacy, ethics, and public safety.
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Social Media in Policing
In the twenty-first century, local police departments and some law enforcement agencies of the US federal government began using various social media sites to monitor the activities of criminals and criminal suspects. Police may see posts on Facebook, for instance, showing multiple people engaging in some form of illicit activity at a designated location. The police can then travel to that location and arrest the suspects.
Social media sites have made policing easier for law enforcement agencies in some instances, but some American citizens and civil rights groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have asserted that police monitoring of social media amounts to the invasion of people's privacy. Law enforcement's use of fake social media profiles to befriend criminal suspects was noted as especially controversial. Privacy advocates have called for social media and data collection companies not to share their user data with law enforcement so police cannot conduct invasive surveillance on American citizens through social media.
Background
American law enforcement agencies, specifically local police departments, began using social media to aid in their work in the 2000s and 2010s. Many police departments started this practice only informally, with on-duty police officers simply checking their own social media profiles occasionally during working hours. Social media swelled in popularity into the 2010s, with hundreds of millions of people using sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Police across the United States eventually realized that criminals were among the people using social media sites to communicate with one another, by boasting about crimes they committed, setting up drug exchanges, and posting videos of themselves engaged in various illegal activities. The police saw that they could turn these communications to their advantage. In 2008, for instance, police in Texas arrested a man for a gang murder after he posted incriminating information, including photos, about the act on his Myspace page.
Police modernized their social media presence in the 2010s, as new social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram started appearing. Some of their activities on these and other sites were meant to monitor the movements of criminals or publicize police action against criminals. In 2014, police in Prince George's County, Maryland, announced that they would be live-tweeting a sting operation that would eliminate a local prostitution ring. Live-tweeting involves posting updates of an event in progress, in real time, using the social media site Twitter. Days later, however, the police department canceled the live-tweet, saying it would have compromised the identities of undercover officers involved in the sting.
In other cases, police departments used social media to promote themselves or help the public. In 2014, the New York City Police Department requested that Twitter users post photos of themselves with New York police officers to aid the department's public image. Around the same time, the police department in Gloucester Township, New Jersey, began using the social media site Pinterest, which encourages user interaction through photo sharing, to post a lost-and-found page for public access. County residents could search through the page's photos and claim any lost items that had been turned in to police. In many cases, law enforcement departments appreciate the opportunity to post real-time updates regarding safety concerns, such as an active shooting or missing suspect, to provide the most authoritative information to the community.
Impact
Police continued to use social media to monitor criminals' online posts into the mid-2010s. By this time, however, their increasingly modern and technologically savvy methods of doing so had drawn the attention of advocates of social media privacy. These people claimed that the tools being used by law enforcement for the surveillance of criminals on social media sites were unethical because they invaded the right of privacy of social media users, who expected these sites to protect their personal data from such intrusions.
One method some police departments use to glean information from criminals online is to create fake Facebook profiles. Undercover police officers use these profiles to befriend suspects and gain access to their personal information, which might otherwise be hidden with Facebook's privacy settings. The officers use false names and profile pictures to deceive suspects into believing they are people who can be trusted. The officers may then obtain information about suspects' upcoming crimes or lure suspects into committing crimes so police can arrest them.
This practice has generated criticism of police, particularly by Facebook administrators. Facebook's terms of service forbid users, including law enforcement officers, from creating fake profiles. This rule is meant to protect the safety and security of users. However, evidence collected against suspects on social media sites can be legally presented in court. Police officers can use search warrants to request social media sites turn over the data of specific users. Social media sites often grant these requests, depending on the urgency of the particular situation, and some sites may inform users that their information has been requested.
Other law enforcement agencies have turned to more technologically advanced methods of rooting out criminals on social media. The mid-2010s saw the founding of the social media data-mining tool Geofeedia, which allowed users to search for public social media posts by geographic location, rather than by key words. Geofeedia marketed itself to law enforcement, claiming police could use its data collection to find the locations from which criminal suspects were posting information. Police used Geofeedia in April 2015 to respond to protests that had erupted in Baltimore, Maryland, finding suspects by their posts of the events on social media.
Geofeedia quickly became controversial among civil rights activist groups such as the ACLU. Lawyers from the organization claimed that social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter should be more conscious of how data-mining sites collect and use information from their users. Facebook and the photo-sharing social media site Instagram barred Geofeedia from accessing their user data in September 2016; Twitter did the same the next month.
The social media companies claimed Geofeedia had used their users' data in violation of their privacy policies. The ACLU, meanwhile, asserted that police departments that used Geofeedia to search for individuals' locations were invading users' personal privacy. Earlier in 2016, Twitter had also restricted the data-collection company Dataminr from accessing its users' information because the company had been allowing American federal intelligence agencies to sift through users' Twitter feeds. The ACLU continued advocating for increased personal privacy on social media sites, even as police departments and law enforcement agencies across the United States still accessed social media users' data to pinpoint the locations of crimes. At the same time, particularly heinous and high-profile events such as mass shootings continued to fuel the debate, particularly from the law enforcement side, as evidence discovered in subsequent investigations have often involved suspects' social media presence. In the case of the shooting that left eleven people dead at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in October 2018, police searching for a motive found that the suspect, Robert Bowers, had been actively engaged in hate speech and had posted pictures of his gun collection on the social networking site Gab.
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