Geofeedia blocked from social media surveillance | Social You Should Know

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In a Nixonian twist, Geofeedia (which began as a way to gather social posts by location) was being marketed to police departments as a way to monitor activists and protests. Find out how Facebook and Twitter responded to the news, in this week’s Social You Should Know.

Twitter, Facebook Block Geofeedia Data Access over Civil Liberties Concerns

The ACLU last week released a report showing that location-based social tool Geofeedia was marketing their tool to police departments to monitor activists, saying “we covered Ferguson/Mike Brown nationally with great success.” Twitter responded by cutting off access to Geofeedia. Facebook cut access to both Instagram and Facebook on September 19, 2016. Apparently Geofeedia is not the only group marketing itself this way. Others include Media Sonar, Beware and Digital Stakeout, according to Mashable. This is an interesting battle between personal rights, the potential for government overreach and access to public data. We’ll see where this all lands, but for now Geofeedia as a business may be in trouble. The company currently has an open letter pop-up taking over their own homepage.

Did Twitter Trolls Kill Their Multi-Billion Dollar Sale?

Despite revenue of over $600m last quarter alone, Twitter has been looking for a buyer recently. That’s not going well with Disney, Google and finally Salesforce walking away from the deal. Multiple new reports are suggesting that Twitter trolls may have been a big reason buyers aren’t interested. Some report that nearly 90% of all abusive mentions on social media happen on Twitter. Whether Twitters value comes from community or from data, the presences of so much negative speech hurts either way. Twitter remains stuck in limbo for now, which might be ok as CEO Jack Dorsey reportedly never wanted to sell in the first place.

YouTube Remains a Force for Millennials

In the political season, it’s hard to imagine 93% of us agreeing on anything, but for millennials that’s the percentage that visit YouTube at least once a month. Before you roll your eyes at those wacky millennials, when you consider that about 85% of Gen X and about 72% of Baby Boomers visit once a month, it starts to become clear what a force YouTube has (somewhat quietly) become. Contrast this with Pinterest, which gets all the PR but just now reached a relatively modest 150 million active users.



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