Thread by @tressiemcphd

This is an important story about tech, surveillance, and college campuses. interactives.dallasnews.com/2022/social-se…

Let's talk about it a bit.

(The UNC system figures prominently: UNC, A&T, NC State. Also note: "The company also changed the name of the service from Social Sentinel to Navigate360 Detect earlier this year.:)

The promise of social media monitoring is a gift from Facebook but also an extension of our culture's obsession with carceral solutions to social change. I've talked before about how campus police is more robust than the general public realizes.

radicalhistoryreview.org/abusablepast/m…

Private equity is the gift that keeps giving:

"In 2014, with support from a Boston-based private equity firm and a New York-based venture capital company, the duo rebranded the service as Social Sentinel, a social media threat alert service."

"The News reached out to every university known to use the service — none of the colleges that responded said they had rules specifically governing Social Sentinel." I say over and over again that universities rarely have a plan for managing the platforms they adopt.

A 1A professor in the piece says the monitoring is clearly at odds with students' rights. We see this over and over again. But there isn't a real mechanism for forcing universities to outline or defend these rights.

Look at these keywords. It doesn't take a gender studies student to spot the gendered impact of surveillance. "Documents obtained by The News show UNC-Chapel Hill’s police department asked the state bureau to surveil pro and anti-abortion protesters in October 2015.

The investigative agency quickly obliged. Emails between the agencies show SBI tracked keywords and hashtags including “Feminist Students United,” “Students for Reproductive Justice,” “#feminist,” “#studentsforlife” and even “#unc.”

The web of platforms, monitored only by administrators and with no faculty or student oversight, grows ever more complex:

"The Navigate360 CEO Guilbault said some colleges use the service to monitor emails. In emails to Gulf Coast and Palm Beach state colleges in 2019, the company touted its ability to monitor Google Docs, Google Hangouts chats and even Facebook Messages."

All of this is just a microcosm of tech in society. Looking at it in a total institution just helps us see the conflicts better. Platforms obscures by design, minimizing the power of the state and with it our claims to civil liberties.

We train our students to accept this every time we adopt an ungovernable platform.