Social media and the police

Abstract

With this paper we take a first step to understand the appropriation of social media by the police. For this purpose we analyzed the Twitter communication by the London Metropolitan Police (MET) and the Greater Manchester Police (GMP) during the riots in August 2011. The systematic comparison of tweets demonstrates that the two forces developed very different practices for using Twitter. While MET followed an instrumental approach in their communication, in which the police aimed to remain in a controlled position and keep a distance to the general public, GMP developed an expressive approach, in which the police actively decreased the distance to the citizens. In workshops and interviews, we asked the police officers about their perspectives, which confirmed the identified practices. Our study discusses benefits and risks of the two approaches and the potential impact of social media on the evolution of the role of police in society.

“Putting Everything up There”: Framing How We Navigate the Intricacies of Privacy and Security on Social Media

“…The State, of course, has the authority to seek this information, and smartphone logs, GPS locations, text messages, Internet search history, or social media posts are all part of this remit. Moreover, a growing body of work has considered how police forces and police officers use social media (Davis, Alves, and Sklansky 2014; Denef, Bayerl and Kaptein 2013; Trottier and Fuchs 2014). Alternatively, government have sought to target and decrypt WhatsApp conversations in order to prevent terror attacks (Guardian 2017).…”

Sentiment analysis during Hurricane Sandy in emergency response

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Toward Reproducibility in Online Social Network Research

“…Unsurprisingly, this is closely associated with the data-sharing policies of different venues. Multidisciplinary journals such as Nature and Science mandate authors to include data such that reviewers and other researchers can replicate results 8 and accordingly are a notable exception to this trend, with 40% of papers sharing their data. We are not aware of any conferences in our survey which mandate data necessary for replication must be shared, although conferences such as SOUPS do allow authors to include appendices which support replication.…”

“…These providers assert control over how the data that they host are used, and actively disallow large datasets of their content to be published. 12 This may impede one of the tenets of reproducible research, particularly when work concerns a specific corpus of content, such as Denef et al's examination of tweets during the 2011 London riots [8], rather than a random sample of content generated by a certain population. If OSN data cannot be directly shared, then it might be possible to instead repeat the experiment, but only if the sampling strategy of the original experiment can be replicated.…”