Social Media Police

Law enforcers have a stalking problem and the victim is you.  There has been a recent advent of police work that is really starting to take shape and it is centered around policing social media profiles.  After a series of interviews with social media specialists, conversations with law enforcers, and discussions with constitutional law experts, there was a consensus gathered that purports to these policing services not being well-regulated, operating on many false allegations of just causes, and violating many laws on a state and federal level.  When speaking to law enforcers about the social media policing that they participate in, not one agency could provide details about what types of processes are undergone, who these individuals are that are trolling people’s accounts, and what are the reasons for it. 

Due to this, there were numerous responses from the other interviewed persons that suggested that the police departments that are doing this do not have much scope of this suggested law enforcement.  In other words, it was inferred that the police departments that are doing this are simply looking for possible criminal activities on a general level and using these services to harass citizens as well as to arrest them.  This is a twenty-four hour ordeal, and many experts are stating that police departments have officers who make fake profiles to attempt to solicit criminal activities and simply capture profile information to pass it along with no legal reason attached.  This is where the constitutional experts come into effect.  That is, these experts are claiming that police departments are engaging in an enormous entrapment scheme and simply abusing their authority.  However, because this unusual form of police work is not well-regulated or spoken about by law enforcers or other members of society many of the illegal acts by these so-called police officers carry on with little intervention or oversight.  A unique problem develops because of this stalking work by police departments who perform these tactics.

The problem is that police officers are identifying people who they think they can generate a case on.  Specifically, police officers will find a profile that they believe has identifiers of criminal activity and will eventually contact them through a fake profile or even find them in society and stalk them.  Police officers are, essentially, using the advent of social media to easily target a citizen and hopefully catch them doing something illegal.  In an interviewee's words: “This is laziest form of police work I have ever seen and it says a lot about what our police agencies are really doing these days.  I think that it is a troubling issue in our society when police officers have to troll accounts because of their laziness about more pressing issues.”  Of this, it is necessary to mention that most of the trolling and identifiers that are being used are questionable criminal acts or not even an illegal posting, picture, thread, or other social media practice.  Explaining more, police departments that are doing these perverted tactics are looking at commonalities and suggesting that they are a reason to investigate or stalk a person.  Some of these identifiers are individuals who like music and movies that are related to drug use or gang activities, anti-government or anti-police media, memes and self-taken pictures or videos that demean law enforcers, personal postings that slander law enforcers, and group likings that may relate to any of the aforementioned content.  Essentially, the social media police are taking common likings of media and communication and turning them into a reason to go try to arrest or annoy someone.  In other words, these identifiers are not uncommon social media activities and do not include threats, postings that entail actual images or statements about illegal activity, or other alarming behaviors that would cause a legitimate concern for the safety and well-being of an individual or others.

The secrecy of these social media stalkers is entering the courts and causing people to plead guilty to charges that may have never even come up if it was not for these police trolls.  To wit, social media police are not telling accused defendants, prosecutors, or courts that they were targeted because of a disliked social media situation.  More specifically, the social media Gestapo is simply targeting a person and arresting or harassing them for something that they are doing while in society and not connecting it to a social media experience that they came across.  For example, these police officers will locate a target and wait till they do something that is arrestable without letting the individual know that they were selected because of something they did on social media.  That is, a person can say something like “I think marijuana should be legal” on their Facebook page and then the police will stalk them and arrest them for smoking weed somewhere.  Or, a person who posts a video about police misconduct and then finds themselves being pulled over and searched.  Other examples can be used by simply substituting the phrases, posts, likes, and other social media endeavors that millions of people do on a daily basis. 

Overall, technology can be used by police officers to investigate and arrest people when something legitimately illegal is going on, but this does not appear to be the majority of tactics used in this new branch of police work.  Police officers are simply feeding other officers information about a person without confirmation that they were the ones behind the social media accounts and arresting people by following them around and waiting for something to arise, or making up reasons to subject an individual to police contact.  The constitutionality of this is enormous.  The question is how many people have been targeted by law enforcers and arrested for something because the social media police did not like their taste or lifestyle choices?  The bad side of technology tends to come about when law enforcers apply it to their profession.  Fucked-up, America.  Fucked-up!                   

               Source:  Public Domain