US police departments are using tools to monitor your social media posts

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Didi Rankovic

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was using a software tool to extract information from as many as 70,000 tweets every day for two months in 2020, a records request has revealed.

ABTShield was the tool the LAPD used as they conducted a social media monitoring pilot program in October and November 2020, and the total number of tweets posted across the US affected by this operation came close to two million being sent to the LAPD by a third party company producing the tool; the total number of monitored tweets was about 200 million.

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