The Arlington police are using software that checks social media and sends out alerts when safety issues arise.
Social Sentinel, at a cost of $18,000, is in its second year of use, Chief Fred Ryan told YourArlington on May 14 following a report by Channel 25.
“This is a social media ‘alert’ system,” he wrote, “which is very different from a social media ‘monitoring.’ system.
He wrote police receive an alert — “like receiving a burglar alarm — whenever there are any harmful publicly facing social-media posts that threaten our schools/students.”
This system was not used in connection with the May 1-2 vandalism at the Arlington High School incident. The police report in that case, which remains under investigation, listed five people who reported it early May 2.
“In many of the tragic acts of school violence,” Ryan wrote May 14, “the perpetrator has left a social-media ‘bread trail’ that, if caught in advance, might have helped authorities to prevent acts of violence and death.
“In Arlington, while we have great systems in place to respond to acts of violence (ALICE [Active Shooter Response Training], etc.), we would rather prevent them from ever occurring. Today’s narrative occurs in the electronic world [and] we feel that we have a responsibility to be situationally aware of public conversations relating to the safety of our schools, our student body and our school faculty.”
Ryan made clear: “Again, this is an alert system of publicly facing social media posts. We do not monitor people’s social media.”
‘Big Brother’?
His comments addressed aspect of the Fox 25 report — that some say monitoring social media amounts to “Big Brother,” or a reference to Orwell’s novel 1984, in which the government in that dystopian society closely follows private behavior.
The technology scans public tweets, posts and conversations online for threats targeting the school district. Any time a keyword pops up that registers in Social Sentinel’s “library of harm,” local police get an alert and so do school administrators.
“In some instances, we have location-based information where you can see where the threat was communicated from,” Ryan told Boston 25 News.
Social Sentinel has hundreds of clients nationwide and dozens in New England.
Social Sentinel CEO Gary Margolis developed the software using linguists and mental-health specialists to build a library of nearly 500,000 words and phrases rigged to set the virtual alarm, Fox 25 reported.
“We get access to roughly a billion social media posts a day across nearly a dozen platforms, and with that information we scan it against our library,” Margolis told the TV station.
ACLU on guard
As the company’s library grows, the ACLU is watching.
Despite Ryan’s assurance, the Fox report quotes Kade Crockford, director of the technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, as saying: “We’ve seen all over the country that when law enforcement obtains technologies like this that allow them to monitor social media that yes, in fact, almost in every case there’s some type of inappropriate political surveillance that takes place.”
Boston 25 quoted two residents, one supporting the effort, another opposing.
The ACLU is pushing for local ordinances that would require law enforcement and schools to get approval for these kinds of technologies.
Social Sentinel says the company does not archive or store the data and their software does not monitor individuals.
This news summary was published on Monday, May 14, 2018.
