A client presentation from the company shared by the EFF lists a range of social media sources for monitoring, including Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Tumblr, WordPress, and even Meetup.ĭata obtained by BuzzFeed News confirmed this through data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, which showed the company skewed heavily towards Twitter monitoring. Of all US states, Texas has been the most enthusiastic about the use of digital surveillance for school childrenīut while Social Sentinel advertises an ability to monitor a broad range of platforms, there’s some suggestion that its surveillance capabilities are dictated more by the accessibility of data sources than by their importance. But of the Texas districts that did take out these contracts, results were apparently mixed: a number of school districts that had paid for Social Sentinel told the Morning News that they had declined to renew contracts, describing a service that provided few actionable alerts or flagged mostly irrelevant information. A 2021 investigation by The Dallas Morning News found that no state has more school districts contracting with digital surveillance companies than Texas. Of all US states, Texas has been the most enthusiastic about the use of digital surveillance for school children.
(Alerts were reportedly triggered by tweets about the Mark Wahlberg movie, Shooter and from a student pleased their credit score was “shooting up,” among other things.) In the same year, reporting by Education Week also covered the dramatic expansion of digital surveillance in schools, highlighting the large number of false positives generated by Social Sentinel’s technology. In 2019, the Brennan Center for Justice outlined a range of civil and human rights concerns stemming from expanded social media monitoring in K-12 schools, among them the questionable effectiveness of the technology in combination with a tendency to disproportionately impact students from minority communities. But Social Sentinel is only able to monitor public posts and would not have had access to any content shared in private messages.Īt the same time, there are significant privacy concerns with the software. There are now numerous reports of concerning activity surrounding the shooter’s online activity: he allegedly made frequent threats to young women and girls via chat apps, sent images of guns to acquaintances, and reportedly discussed carrying out the school shooting in an Instagram chat. However, even if it had been, the technology would have been unlikely to flag any of the shooter’s posts. The Uvalde school district was confirmed to have purchased monitoring capability from Social Sentinel in 2019–2020, though it is unclear whether the subscription was still active at the time of the shooting. “Could you imagine schools using toxic materials to build classrooms, even if it hadn’t met any safety standards? No.” Multiple requests for comment sent to Navigate360 - which acquired Social Sentinel in 2020 - did not receive a response. “Similarly, to use unproven, untested surveillance technologies on children, without first checking whether they are safe to use, exposes children to an unacceptable risk of harm.” “Could you imagine schools using toxic materials to build classrooms, even if it hadn’t met any safety standards? No,” said Han.
Hye Jung Han, a researcher at Human Rights Watch specializing in child rights, told The Verge that using surveillance technology on children could cause unwarranted harm: For these firms, it can be a lucrative business - but often, they’re mining shallow insights from available data, providing few benefits to outweigh the privacy harms.įor privacy advocates, the lack of evidence for the technology’s effectiveness means that there are no sufficient grounds for the potential violations of privacy that come with its use. Systems like Social Sentinel promise to give genuine insight into the huge volume of information posted on social media every day, parsing out the signal from the noise so that educators can be informed of threats before harm takes place.
It’s an increasingly common service as schools grapple with the chaos of social media, often raising serious privacy and speech concerns along the way. Digital monitoring technology has come under particular scrutiny after reporting revealed that the Uvalde school district had experimented with a service called Social Sentinel, which claims to identify and alert schools to threats based on social media conversations. With the country still reeling from the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, officials are scrambling for more ways to stop mass shootings - and facing hard truths about how ineffective many of our existing tools really are.
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