After Uvalde, social media monitoring apps struggle to justify surveillance

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

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. 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.

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. Systems like Social Sentinel promise to give genuine insight into the huge volume of information posted on...

Continue reading...