NY’s Social Media Stalking

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Friend,

If you live in New York, you might be bankrolling state-sanctioned social media stalking. That is because New York agencies are paying out millions of taxpayer dollars each year to surveillance firms spying on tens of thousands of New Yorkers’ social media accounts. Earlier this month, S.T.O.P. uncovered that the NYPD spent over $10 million on contracts with Voyager Labs, a firm selling software that rapidly analyzes large digital files obtained through social media providers. In June of this year, the Queens District Attorney renewed a contract with Cobwebs Technologies, an Israeli data surveillance company that provides location data, social media content, and other data for millions of people.

This is nothing new. With the take-off of social media platforms, law enforcement agencies saw an opportunity to sidestep the courts for their investigations, creating fake accounts to collect information on users. ICE regularly performs social media surveillance on immigrant communities and visa applicants. And the NYPD has long been suspected of practicing social media monitoring to spy on protestors and expand its controversial gang database, targeting Black and Latinx youth online for non-criminal reasons.

New Yorkers have a right to know when and how they are being monitored online. Social media should be a medium for individuals to express themselves freely with their communities, not a place for law enforcement to distort and criminalize our content. Enough is enough. S.T.O.P. continues our fight to outlaw warrantless social media surveillance, leading a campaign to pass the “Stop Online Police Fake Accounts and Keep Everyone Safe” (STOP FAKES) Act in New York State. The first-of-its-kind legislation would ban police from leveraging fake social media accounts to surveil New Yorkers.

In solidarity,
Sarah Roth
Advocacy & Communications Associate

Forward

Newslettercommunications staffSeptember 15, 2023