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THE INDEPENDENT PRESS OF VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY 2019, 2020, 2021 Newspaper Pacemaker Winner
VOL. 64, NO. 4 OCTOBER 5, 2022
SARAH HAGEN Contributing Writer ANDREW KERLEY Contributing Writer JACK GLAGOLA Contributing Writer A journalist listed VCU as one of 37 colleges to purchase and use Social Sentinel, a service he said was used for monitoring student protests. VCU Police admitted to using the tool, according to university spokesperson Corey Byers. University police entered into a contract with Social Sentinel in November 2015 and ended it in August 2017. It paid $9,999 its first year and $15,000 its second year, but did not use it again once VCU Police discontinued their service in 2017. “VCU Police only used Social Sentinel to find publicly accessible information related to potential threats to security, public safety, harm, self-harm or acts of violence that were posted on publicly accessible accounts, which were on Internet-based, social media platforms,” Byers stated in an email. VCU Police did not use Social Sentinel to monitor student protests, only to monitor “public social media feeds for threats in and around VCU,” Byers stated. The university did not use any information that wasn’t readily and publicly accessible to anybody on the internet, so it is within student privacy laws for VCU Police to use this tech, according to Byers. Social Sentinel, which had its name changed to Direct earlier this year, is a service that Navigate360 offers, a technology company that provides various safety services. Its original purpose is to allow its users to scan information on the internet, using artificial intelligence to seek out harmful content or possible violence before it has the chance to escalate, according to their website. Arijit Sen, a computational journalist for the Dallas Morning News, was the first to expose the practice of universities using the
It led me down this rabbit hole of, ‘if UNC is using Social Sentinel to surveil protests, I bet a bunch of other colleges are as well.’” Arijit Sen, journalist technology to surveil student protests in an article published on Sept. 20. He mentioned VCU in a twitter thread about the article the next day. Sen said he first discovered the service while attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus. Protests had broken out over a statue on campus depicting the confederate soldier Silent Sam. “There were a lot of protests over the statue going on in 2017 and 2018,” Sen said. “There was a very large police response, so I wanted to know what was going on behind the scenes, what the police and administrators were saying.” Sen filed a public records request with UNC Police but was denied, he said. There were a lot of record requests by others, be-
Journalist names VCU as one of 37 colleges
to virtually monitor students
VCU Police entered into a contract with Social Sentinel, a social scanning tool, in November 2015. Photo by Kaitlyn Fulmore cause of the topic, Sen said. Using UNC’s open portal, he requested the information previously requested by others. He received thousands of pages of legal documents months later, and within them, records of UNC using Social Sentinel. “It led me down this rabbit hole of, ‘if UNC is using Social Sentinel to surveil protests, I bet a bunch of other colleges are as well,’” Sen said. Sen said he continued to accumulate data via public record requests until 2022. “Navigate360 is very opaque about how the service works,” Sen said. “They have machine learning models that scan social media, websites and potentially emails for a language of harm, which I think is just a list of keywords like, ‘shoot,’ ‘bomb’ or ‘kill.’ They find tweets that have those words and send them to college police departments. This is the general theory behind it.” Navigate360 states Social Sentinel is only used to cover violent riots “upon their client’s request” but is not used to monitor peaceful protests, according to its website. Only one school investigated by Sen directly stated to him that they were using it for such purposes. A marketer working with Navigate360 touted the service to a UNC administrator as a way of mitigating the impacts of “disruptive demonstrations & protests,” according to the Dallas Morning News. There was no informed consent with students at these universities to use this Social Sentinel, Sen said. “When you sign up for Facebook, for example, there’s a terms of service, though most people don’t read it. Right? The students are not signing a terms of service with Navigate360, the school is,” Sen said. “When schools bought the service, they either did not say anything at all, or, in a
couple of cases, journalists heard about it.” Many college police departments have been using taxpayer dollars to pay for Social Sentinel’s services to monitor what students say, according to the Dallas Morning News. “The Fourth Amendment has considered things like spying. That is clearly an invasion of privacy,” Sen said. “Looking at one person’s tweet is not an invasion of privacy, but when you start to aggregate millions of people’s tweets that might be a potential concern. You can track superhuman levels of tweets and use them for purposes like tracking activist networks.”
The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution protects people’s right to privacy and protects them from unreasonable intrusions by the government. “It is chilling to think that universities might have a power imbalance between them and their students,” Sen said. “Even though a lot of schools have canceled their usage of the service, if they were willing to do this once, I would not be surprised if they were willing to do it again.” See SOCIAL SENTINEL on page 2
List of colleges that have used Social Sentinel - Arizona State University - California State Polytechnic University, Pomona - Shasta College - University of California, Los Angeles - University of Connecticut - Gulf Coast State College - Florida State University - Florida Atlantic University - Palm Beach State College - Indian River State College - Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University - Miami Dade College - Broward College - Kennesaw State University - Anne Arundel Community College - Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Jackson College - Oakland University - Grand Rapids Community College - Michigan State University
- Wake Forest University - North Carolina State University - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Duke University - North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University - University of North Carolina at Asheville - East Carolina University - Oregon State University - University of Oregon - University of North Texas - North Central Texas College Texas State University - Collin College - University of Texas at Dallas - University of Virginia - Virginia Commonwealth University - Virginia State University