Travelers t0 Chicago, be warned: City officials are watching you and your social media feeds. According to published reports, The City of Big Shoulders (and nervous immune systems) will be monitoring apps like Twitter and Instagram to track tourists who violate the Windy City’s mandatory Covid-19 14-day quarantine orders.
Chicago maintains a quarantine list of U.S. states from which tourists must quarantine for 14 days before heading out to watch the Cubs lose or to try six-inch-thick, half-baked pizza dough. Chicagoans returning from any of those states are also expected to quarantine at home. The order doesn’t make clear how these quarantines are to be conducted or how violators will be detected.
After Chicago officials imposed tourist quarantine requirements, they announced they'll use social ... [+]
That’s the problem with such quarantine edicts. How can they be actively enforced without the likes of roadblocks, ID checks and authoritarian harassment? Chicago announced last week it will turn to tracking social media posts to spot possible violators.
Chi-Town’s public health authorities say they “might” check the social media feeds of suspected violators to collect evidence for a possible citation. The Chicago PD evidently won’t be starting up a 24-hour Coronavirus Social Media Spy Squad. However, if an individual is somehow cited for not following the quarantine order, authorities could scan their social media posts for prosecutorial evidence.
On the surface, these efforts seem better aimed at intimidation than actual Coronavirus law enforcement. For the social media monitoring to work, police would have to find and identify either a tourist who didn’t quarantine for 14 days or a resident who didn’t sit tight for two weeks upon returning from a banned state or country. On the outside chance of spotting a violator, law enforcement would then have to analyze that person’s social media feeds looking for posts that proved their quarantine-defying whereabouts.
There’s no official word on how desperate other cities and states are to keep Chicagoans themselves outside their borders.
