How US police monitor social media to find crime and track suspects

Monitoring public posts on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is a common way police departments across the US collect information about individuals or specific types of activities. — Photo by Adem AY on Unsplash

Police are scrolling through social media to find crime and check up on potential suspects, raising concerns about surveillance in an increasingly online world.

Monitoring public posts on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is a common way police departments across the US collect information about individuals or specific types of activities. Representatives of the Michigan State Police and Detroit Police Department said officers manually search public posts and also feed social media photos to facial recognition algorithms that hunt for similarities between millions of faces collected in police databases.