Facebook and the Surveillance Assemblage: Policing Black Lives Matter Activists & Suppressing Dissent

Abstract

This article outlines the "social media surveillance assemblage"' (Trottier 2011: 63) on Facebook, including its deployment against social activists. In particular, it traces intersecting, dynamic, and opaque data flows among Facebook, third parties, and law enforcement that undermine Black Lives Matter activists and suppress social dissent in the United States. Sources of data include interviews with academics, lawyers, and researchers as well as an in-depth examination of platform policies, Freedom of Information Act requests/lawsuits, and news articles. Theories of the surveillance assemblage (Trottier 2011), the surveillance-industrial complex (Hayes 2012), and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2015, 2019) frame the interviews and documents, demonstrating the multi-faceted nature of social media surveillance. Providing an interdisciplinary focus, this article engages with the fields of private policing, surveillance studies, and social movements literature. The article's empirical data contribute to the existing literature bystressing the role of third parties and providing insights into the nontransparent system of surveillance on social media.

Headnote

Abstract

This article outlines the "social media surveillance assemblage"' (Trottier 2011: 63) on Facebook, including its deployment against social activists. In particular, it traces intersecting, dynamic, and opaque data flows among Facebook, third parties, and law enforcement that undermine Black Lives Matter activists and suppress social dissent in the United States. Sources of data include interviews with academics, lawyers, and researchers as well as an in-depth examination of platform policies, Freedom of Information Act requests/lawsuits, and news articles. Theories of the surveillance assemblage (Trottier 2011), the surveillance-industrial complex (Hayes 2012), and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2015, 2019) frame the interviews and documents, demonstrating the multi-faceted nature of social media surveillance. Providing an interdisciplinary focus, this article engages with the fields of private policing, surveillance studies, and social movements literature. The article's empirical data contribute to the existing literature bystressing the role of third parties and providing insights into the nontransparent system of surveillance on social media.

Introduction

The tools of the information revolution hare been flipped... cell phones and Web surfing have been turned into powerful tools of mass state surveillance... with the full cooperation ofprivatized phone companies and search engines. (Klein 200S: 12).

Boldly promising connectivity, communication, and openness, social media platforms have held great appeal for activists, protesters, and organizers. For a period of time, these sites were even synonymous with social protest when the Arab Spring was referred to as the "Twitter Uprising" and the "Facebook Revolution" (Shearlaw 2016: para. 4). However, the very features that make platforms conducive to protest (including personal disclosure and networking) also render activists vulnerable to surveillance, policing, and intelligence-gathering by a number of actors. In recent years, a "social media surveillance assemblage" (Trottier 2011: 63) has developed, facilitating data flows and the integration of multiple surveillance systems across porous boundaries that previously separated private, public, state, and corporate actors. This assemblage is particularly powerful in the United States (US), which grants decentralized law enforcement broad discretion (Cheatham and Maizland 2020) and establishes weak regulations for social media platforms (Gasser and Schulz 2015). The interconnection of corporate and governmental surveillance along with the self-regulation of social media sites and commercial intelligence-gathering companies compromise activists' privacy and civil rights.

The surveillance of activists on social media is vital to study because of the indispensable role of platforms for contemporary protests. Facebook in particular, which commands a user base of over 2.91 billion individuals (Statista 2021), has become a central hub of communication, mobilization, and organization for activists (e.g., Warren, Sulaiman, and Jaafar 2014; Tsatsou 2018). However, activism leaves a digital trace on Facebook, and the sheer scale of the platform's operations increases the risks of digital protest, exacerbating the detrimental effects of online surveillance. Such surveillance can chill speech (Penney 2016) and suppress civil liberties in a discriminatory manner (Citron and Pasquale 2010; O'Neill and Loftus 2013; Fuchs and Trottier 2015; Walsh and O'Connor 2019). Given the importance of assembly, protest, and public speech to promoting democratic culture and calling attention to societal injustices, it is critical to examine the workings and profound impacts of surveillance on Facebook.

This article traces the intersecting, dynamic, and opaque data flows among Facebook, third parties, and law enforcement that undermine Black Lives Matter (BLM) and subvert social dissent. Sources of data include interviews with academics, lawyers, and researchers as well as an in-depth examination of platform policies, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests/lawsuits,1 and news articles. Theories of the surveillance assemblage (Trottier 2011), the surveillance-industrial complex (Hayes 2012), and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2015, 2019) frame the interviews and documents, demonstrating the multi-faceted nature of social media surveillance. This article's empirical data extend the theoretical frameworks and contribute to the existing literature intersecting surveillance, social movements, and private policing. By providing insights into a masked surveillance assemblage, this article stresses the urgency of structural and regulatory reforms to create greater transparency, install oversight measures, and combat racialized surveillance.

Contextualizing Racialized Surveillance

Racialized surveillance as well as surveillance of protesters, dissidents, and radicals are long-standing features of American society (Theoharis 1983; Boykoff 2007). The US has consistently engaged in racialized surveillance wherein certain bodies are rendered hyper-visible and other bodies are positioned as invisible and are thus normalized (Canella 2018; Ross 2020). From eighteenth century lantern laws in New York City (which forced unaccompanied slaves to carry a lantern at night) to contemporary Transportation Security Administration practices, race has been reified and politicized to justify the use of surveillance on certain populations (Browne 2015). In the words of Simone Browne (2015: 9), "racism and antiblackness undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillances of our present order." Additionally, government surveillance has concentrated on organizations and causes (such as socialism, environmental conservation, and racial justice) that fundamentally challenge the socio-political status quo. A powerful example of this tendency is the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which targeted Black activists and allies during the Civil Rights Movement (Canella 2018). COINTELPRO's legacy remains ever-present as "policies aimed at surveilling and harassing social movements among Black people in the United States have never really ended" and are used against contemporary movements such as BLM (Navaroli qtd. in Joseph and Hussain 2018: para. 18).

BLM is an activist organization that protests structural racism and violence (especially by law enforcement) against Black Americans (Clark, Dantzler, and Nickels 2018). The organization originated in the US as the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in 2013 after neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman was acquitted for killing Black teenager Trayvon Martin (Clark, Dantzler, and Nickels 2018). BLM led protests in 2014 following the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and in 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd (McLaughlin 2020). This article uses BLM as a framing because the organization was born on social media, strongly relies on social media as a mobilization and consciousness raising tool, and has been the subject of intense scrutiny and surveillance by local and national law enforcement in the US (Canella 2018; Mundt, Ross, and Burnett 2018). In fact, "Black Lives Matter has been the subject of surveillance for almost as long as the movement has existed" (Funk 2020: para. 4). After civil rights organizations filed FOIA requests, information has been released about the extent of police surveillance.

For years, social media sites such as Facebook gave Geofeedia (an intelligence-gathering firm) access to user data, which was then shared with police who tracked BLM protests (Timberg and Dwoskin 2016). Although Facebook subsequently cut off Geofeedia's data access (Seetharaman 2017), police continue to monitor BLM protesters through covert and overt means on Facebook, making it essential to examine the network of surveillance entangling Facebook, third parties, and law enforcement.

Literature Review: The Entanglement of Corporate & Government Surveillance

Since the surveillance of activists on Facebook is multi-faceted and conducted by numerous actors, this article draws on several strands of scholarship, including studies of corporate surveillance, private policing, and social movements.

Scholars of corporate surveillance have demonstrated how social media provides a brave new world for commercial data collection as platforms harvest torrents of user information, selling advertisers the ability to reach consumers with pinpoint precision (e.g., Cohen 2017). Zuboffs (2015, 2019) articulation of surveillance capitalism has become critical to this field of study. Fler theoretical work describes a new logic of accumulation in which social media and technology companies gather unprecedented information about users who have become enticed by and dependent on the convenience and connectivity that platforms offer. Researchers have also noted that surveillance capitalism deepens societal inequities and asymmetries as it grants the public diminished protections but bestows corporations with ever-expanding rights and privileges (Zuboff 2015), threatening social justice (Cinnamon 2017) and personal privacy (Silverman 2017).

Researchers have also analyzed the way platforms' business models and self-regulatory governance facilitate corporate surveillance (Cohen 2008). Fuchs (2012) explains that platforms have been emboldened by a self-regulatory privacy regime to create an extractive infrastructure that primes users to disclose information, make connections, and sync all aspects of their lives. Noting the commercial imperatives of surveillance, Fuchs (2012: 17) aptly asserts: "Data surveillance is the means for Facebook's economic ends." Park (2014) similarly argues that the self-regulation of social media sites has led to privacy policies that are stacked against users, offering few protective safeguards. Extending this point, Draper and Turow (2019: 1830) describe how self-regulation empowers companies to devise "obfuscatory strategies and tactics" to promote resignation and cultivate "a sense of normalcy around consumer surveillance." While these scholars highlight the commercial and regulatory underpinnings of social media surveillance, they do not stress how self-regulation fuels the connections between government and corporate surveillance or outline the impacts of surveillance capitalism on specific people, groups, and social movements.

Legal and surveillance scholars have focused on the interconnections between corporate and governmental surveillance in regimes of "private policing" (Button 2020: 40). While corporate surveillance provides the infrastructure for tracking people, these data can be sold to, obtained by, or demanded from government agencies since "police consider social media to be part of their jurisdiction" (Trottier 2011: 62). Researchers have described how social media data are now indispensable for governments due to fewer face-to-face interactions in policing (Goldsmith 2015), the rise of predictive policing (Ferguson 2018; Wilson 2019), greater reliance on big data (Selbst 2017), and the neoliberalization of law enforcement (Linder 2019), which includes numerous public/private partnerships (Canella 2018). As a result, law enforcement has shifted from reactive investigation to proactive monitoring, combing through social media accounts, creating databases, and heavily tracking particular individuals, groups, and communities. Several studies have examined the ways in which law enforcement utilize an "assemblage of top-down and bottom-up efforts" (Trottier 2012: 153) on social media to gather evidence and build cases. For example, Levinson-Waldman (2018) explains that police surveil users online by viewing publicly available profiles, creating fake accounts, and accessing data from third parties. These methods have raised concerns about the lack of legal protections for users under private policing since social media data are obtained by private companies and third parties rather than the state (Balkin 2008; Semitsu 2011; Bennett and Parsons 2013; Levinson-Waldman 2018). This situation is especially problematic in the US, which has limited surveillance guidelines and regulatory measures for law enforcement (Levinson-Waldman and Diaz 2020; Wong 2020) as compared to more robust oversight provisions, reporting requirements, and cultural constraints on police in countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom (Crump 2011; Parsons and Molnar 2018; Egawhary 2019).

In addition to private policing scholarship, this article draws from a large body of literature detailing how information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been deployed for social activism (e.g., Castells 2012; Tüfekçi 2017). Scholars have outlined the ways in which ICTs both facilitate older forms of protests and foster newer, emerging types of protests (Cammaerts 2015; Agur and Frisch 2019) in a "dialectical relationship between online and offline" activism (Misián and Dache-Gerbino 2018: 677). Numerous studies have demonstrated that ICTs help protesters transcend formal organizational structures, recruit new members, transmit text and images, build coalitions, promote events, disseminate information, apply pressure on governments, internationalize their causes, produce resistance narratives, strengthen ties among activists, and "bear[] witness" to events (Cammaerts 2015; Jackson and Foucault Welles 2016; Mundt, Ross, and Burnett 2018; Tsatsou 2018; Agur and Frisch 2019; Anderson 2019; McGarry et al. 2019: 285).

Conversely, there is a growing body of scholarship revealing the negative effects of ICTs on protest, including censorship, surveillance, propaganda, hate speech/trolling, and misinformation (Leistert 2012; Cammaerts 2015; Mundt, Ross, and Burnett 2018; Anderson 2019). Researchers (e.g., Feistert 2012; De Souza 2014; Tufekci 2017; Canella 2018) have specifically analyzed the digital surveillance of activists who are caught "between vulnerability and empowerment" (Fotopoulou 2017: 1) in the digital age. For example, Demirhan (2014) explores how the use of social media in Turkey's Gezi Park protests mobilized activists and resources (such as medical supplies and Wi-Fi passwords) but led to the surveillance and arrests of protesters by government officials. Similarly, Treré (2016) conducted an extended ethnography of Yo Soy activists in Mexico, detailing how protesters used the web portal YoSoyl32.mx only later to find out that the portal was created by an agent of the Mexican Secret Sendee to surveil and steal the data of over 70,000 activists. Treré (2016) argues that the government's "dataveillance" (133) and "digital trap" (134) undermined the Yo Soy movement and prevented it from becoming a "Mexican spring" (133). In contrast to the aforementioned works that emphasize government repression, Youmans and York's (2012) case study of Egyptian and Syrian activists foregrounds the role of platforms themselves in subverting movements. Their study highlights how a platform's commercial imperative may align with a governmental agenda to police and surveil protesters and dissidents. Collectively, these sources highlight the dynamic and asymmetric relationships among activists, corporations, and law enforcement that render protesters vulnerable to multi-pronged, sustained, and pervasive surveillance on social media sites.

Building upon previous scholarship, this article makes several unique contributions. First, answering calls for more empirical studies (e.g., Walby 2005; Walsh and O'Connor 2019) and greater focus on private surveillers (e.g., Rubbers 2015; Uldam 2018), this article gathers expert-activist knowledge about opaque platform surveillance and policing of social movements. Second, this article traces the "social media surveillance assemblage" (Trottier 2011: 63) consisting of private and public actors on Facebook and highlights the underexamined role of third parties in furthering data flows. In doing so, this article deepens and extends the theories of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2015, 2019) and the surveillance-industrial complex (Hayes 2012), demonstrating their convergence on social media. Fastly, this article contributes to literature examining the intersection of surveillance and social movements by outlining the sustained efforts to surveil BFM activists and undermine the movement's democratic potential.

Method & Theory

Methodological Approaches & Challenges

Investigating surveillance of activists on social media is methodologically challenging given the sensitive nature of this topic and the opacity of online surveillance (Rubbers 2015). Activists may not wish to discuss the ways in which they are surveilled out of fear of helping police develop better surveillance strategies or inadvertently exposing their strategies for resisting surveillance. Additionally, platforms, law enforcement, and third parties are reluctant to share information about surveillance practices to avoid public censure and unintended revelation of trade secrets. Previous researchers have similarly noted the difficulties involved with interviewing surveillers, surveilled groups, or activists generally, including the refusal to participate and inability to provide a holistic picture of the topic under investigation (e.g., Blee and Taylor 2002; Galdón Clavell, Lojo, and Romero 2012). Consequently, researching the surveillance of activists on social media requires the use of multiple methods and sources (e.g., Lubbers 2015).

The primary source of data for this article was a series of semi-structured interviews, which provide grounded insights into a masked system. Two sampling methods were used to recruit participants: purposive sampling and chain referral sampling. This article originated with key informant surveys (a type of purposive sampling), which "targetQ individuals who are particularly knowledgeable about the issues under investigation" (Schutt 2014: 171). Key informants included academics, privacy advocates, and lawyers who are cognizant of social media surveillance and have perspectives that are useful for thinking through needed policy and regulatory reforms. Given the aforementioned challenges of conducting sensitive research (e.g., Dickson-Swift et al. 2007; Li 2008), experts (who in some cases were also activists) were chosen as the primary interviewee group rather than protesters who were more concerned about issues of disclosure. Chain referral sampling (a method for sensitive topics and groups) was also used to recruit interviewees. In this method, "multiple networks are strategically accessed to expand the scope of investigation beyond one social network" (Penrod. Cain, and Starks 2003: 102).

Fifteen semi-structured interviews took place from February to March 2019 over the phone or through Skype. Interviews were audio-recorded, uncompensated, conducted in English, and lasted an average of forty-one minutes. The Table 1 below lists the pseudonym, profession, and location of interviewees as well as the interview format and date.

Interviewees were asked about their perspectives on social media surveillance, their understanding of its technical features, their awareness of law enforcement and government involvement, their interpretation of company motives, their analysis of regulatory gaps, and their beliefs about the impacts of surveillance on activists. After transcribing the interviews, I used open coding to analyze the transcripts (Corbin and Strauss 2008). Coding topics related to the actors involved in the surveillance assemblage online, including platforms, third parties, and law enforcement.

To contextualize and triangulate these interviews, the researcher examined an extensive corpus of documents, including social media surveillance policies, news articles from both mainstream media and independent presses about the surveillance of activists, court documents, and information produced from FOIA requests. Scholars have considered documents and FOIA requests as a means of triangulation for interviews (e.g., Walby and Larsen 2012; Beyers et al. 2014), and this article provides outside references to corroborate interviewees' quotes. News articles from 2012-2020 (the time period in which surveillance of activists gained increasing press coverage) were retrieved from the LexisNexis database and the Alt-Press Watch database. Search terms included "surveillance," "social media," "Facebook," "activist," "protest," "BLM," "privacy," "government," and "NSA." Resulting articles were selected based on their relevance to the topic.

Theoretical Frameworks: The Surveillance Assemblage, The Surveillance-Industrial Complex, & Surveillance Capitalism

This article draws from three related conceptual frameworks: the surveillance assemblage (Trottier 2011), the surveillance-industrial complex (Hayes 2012), and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2015, 2019). Trottier's (2011) conceptualization of the surveillance assemblage is informed by Haggerty and Ericson's (2000: 619) earlier theorization of "the surveillant assemblage." According to Haggerty and Ericson (2000), surveillance is not simply a top-down process but instead comprises/constitutes an assemblage made up of disparate data flows from discrete sources that bleed into each other and produce abstracted and datafied information streams about individuals. Trottier (2011) further develops this idea by arguing that social media represents an expanded frontier of the surveillance assemblage wherein information from peers, law enforcement, and government agencies is integrated and made accessible to surveillers. This assemblage is supported by the surveillance-industrial complex and the financial directives of surveillance capitalism.

The surveillance-industrial complex, articulated by Hayes (2012), describes the increasing number of public/private partnerships, which extend the state's reach and the sophistication of its surveillance methods. Hayes (2012: 169) outlines the symbiotic relationship of these two entities: "By definition, the securityindustrial complex recognizes that the state-while retaining its monopoly over the 'legitimate' use of violence-has entered into a partnership with the private sector in order to exercise that power." The notion of the surveillance-industrial complex is useful for thinking through the interconnected, enmeshed layers of surveillance that are deployed by both public and private actors in the growing "social media surveillance assemblage" (Trottier 2011: 63).

Hayes' (2012) theory of the surveillance industrial complex can be coupled with Zuboff s (2015, 2019) concept of surveillance capitalism to explain the motives and practices of social media platforms that foster surveillance. Zuboff (2015,2019) explains that through industry consolidation, technological sophistication, and a self-regulatory regime, companies have produced and profited from a wealth of information about individuals. Such data are coveted by law enforcement, motivating the formation of mutually beneficial public/private partnerships. Thus, the theory of surveillance capitalism deepens the concept of the surveillance-industrial complex by attending to the commercial logic underpinning the extraction and commodification of social media data.

Uncovering the Surveillance Assemblage on Facebook

The "state-corporate nexus" (Hayes 2012: 167) includes a web of interconnected actors linked through problematic practices, self-serving arrangements, and lax policies that violate protesters' privacy and civil rights. Facebook in particular, with its vast reservoir of personal data, has been instrumental in expanding the state's arsenal of surveillance tools to monitor and repress social activists (Timberg and Dwoskin 2016). Interviewees outlined the surveillance assemblage supporting this process, revealing how the seamless flow of information across platforms, third parties, and government agencies has been used to curtail social dissent, uphold commercial interests, and bolster the status quo.

Facebook: Commercial Motives and Surveillance Capitalism

Interviewees stressed that social activists rely on Facebook to promote events, build solidarity, and document abuses, features that are especially important for groups without extensive funding or ties to powerful gatekeepers. As stated by Easton Fay (personal interview, March 7, 2019), a campaign director for a racial justice non-profit organization: "Social media just opens so many doors to spreading our message, to connecting with others like us, and to strategizing and collaborating at much greater scales." Among the many benefits that social media provide to activists, interviewees emphasized the critical importance of visibility. Flynn Virto (personal interview, February 19, 2019), an advocacy officer for a privacy non-profit organization, stated that activists primarily "want to use social media to be seen." However, this visibility comes at a cost as Facebook serves as a "honey trap" (Tessa Rand, personal interview, February 27, 2019) that lures activists in and opens the door to surveillance, harassment, and criminalization.

Interviewees explained that Facebook's main danger to activists (including those involved in the BLM movement) lies in its adherence to surveillance capitalism, which structures its business model and informs its data gathering and sharing practices. Facebook does not charge users to access the site but instead profits from advertising revenue, meaning the platform is incentivized to collect a wealth of user data to deliver targeted advertisements (Lingei 2019). A recurrent theme that emerged from interviews was the platform's inherent commodification of users: "If you're not paying for a sendee then you are the product, right?" (Neal Slade, personal interview, February 25, 2019). Facebook follows a self-regulatory privacy regime (Fuchs 2012), and the US does not have a law equivalent to Europe's General Data Protection Regulation. Consequently, in the US, there are few (if any) real limits on the information Facebook can obtain and the means by which it can procure such data (Park 2014). Compounding this problem, several interviewees stressed that the platform's default settings (which rely on an opt-out mechanism) offer users little privacy since disclosure benefits the site financially. Neal Slade (personal interview, February 25, 2019), an organizer for a digital rights non-profit organization, explained that options providing a greater degree of privacy are obscured on the platform while those promoting unfettered sharing and openness are prominently displayed. To support his view that users are intentionally redirected from privacy protections, Slade (personal interview, February 25, 2019) added: "There's also a lot of energy that goes into design using dark pattern principles that basically coerce the user into making choices that are not in their best interest" (see also Wagner et al. 2020). For example, Facebook previously attempted to manipulate users into relinquishing their privacy by warning that opting out of the facial recognition feature would place them at greater risk for being impersonated (Pardes 2020).

To advance its capitalist agenda, Facebook deliberately encourages users to post information about themselves and their social networks (Hintz and Dencik 2016), an orientation that interviewees found to be problematic and self-serving. Privacy activist Saul Rodney (personal interview, February 17,2019) asserted: "Facebook is absolutely vicious. It's designed in many ways to squeeze more data out of people and manipulate them into using it more and giving more of their own data and more data about other people." Facebook collects users' locations (Feiner 2019) and employs facial recognition software (Devich-Cyril 2020) to gather more information about users. However, police have used these insights (among others) to surveil and arrest BLM activists (Mundt, Ross, and Burnett 2018; Farivar and Solon 2020; Rihl 2020; Samaha, Adams, and Leopold 2020). Thus, while Facebook's vast data collection is used to increase the efficiency of targeted advertising, these inferences also lay the groundwork for surveillance by third parties, state actors, and law enforcement agencies.

Interviewees cited inadequate security on the platform as a barrier for activists. Communication on Facebook is not currently encrypted, and the site controversially requires users to create accounts using authentic names, which forecloses a certain degree of anonymity that activists may require. This policy, along with Facebook's voracious collection of personal data, highlights the extractive nature of surveillance capitalism and platforms' "formal indifference" (Zuboff 2015: 79) toward users. Benson Jordan (personal interview, March 6, 2019), an archivist who works with activists, commented on this indifference: "No matter what marketing says, platforms are around to make money. So, their concern is not necessarily how to keep activists safe." Facebook's lack of protection for vulnerable communities is further revealed through the site's strategic partnerships. Since 2017, Facebook provides financial support to one of "the nation's only privately-funded public police forces" as it funds the "Facebook Unit" of the Menlo Park Police Department (Emerson 2019: para. 9). This partnership has occurred "despite strong opposition from communities of color" (Emerson 2020: para. 4), and BLM protesters have called on Facebook to cease supporting local police. Thus, despite its professed commitment to supporting activists (Zuckerberg 2020), Facebook has an alliance with local police and operates according to a business model predicated upon monetizing users and their information, making surveillance an ever-present feature of the site (Tufekci 2018).

Facebook & Law Enforcement: Opening the Door to Surveillance

Police can monitor activists directly on Facebook by viewing individuals' public profiles (Trottier 2011), engendering efficient and extensive surveillance. The vast amount of information available on the site further expands the reach of law enforcement into the private lives of individuals, threatening free speech. Civil rights lawyer George Gallen (personal interview, March 15, 2019) expressed this concern as follows: "It's not feasible for police to be out there listening to everything people say out on the street... but it is technically possible for them to do that very thing with speech that's occurring online... because all that speech is aggregated on these few platforms. That makes the speech very vulnerable to surveillance."

Interviewees described the various applications of social media data for police. Axel Fowler (personal interview, February 25, 2019), a criminal law professor, explained how ongoing monitoring by law enforcement occurs as local police access user profiles, map connections between parties of interest, and establish "associations of guilt" (see also Ferguson 2018). Fie further explained that there have been reports of police officers infiltrating secret Facebook groups (including BLM groups) by adopting fake identities and acting as "virtual undercover agents" (Axel Fowler, personal interview, February 25, 2019; see also Maass 2018). Police have also used Facebook to identify BLM protesters from photos and events (Shere and Nurse 2020) and to ask the public for help in identifying activists (Wong 2020). Additionally, police have tracked individuals who planned BLM rallies on Facebook and, in some instances, continued to surveil organizers offline, visiting their homes or workplaces (Funk 2020). Through these means, officers can obtain incriminating material about individuals, increasing the vulnerability of activists online.

Interviewees identified other routes through which activists can be tracked on the site. User data may be obtained through legal measures, limiting Facebook's ability to protect users. An examination of the platform's terms of sendee reveal its perceived obligation to comply with legal requests for data: "We access, presence and share your information with regulators, law enforcement or others [i]n response to a legal request (like a search warrant, court order or subpoena) if we have a good faith belief that the law requires us to do so" (Facebook, n.d.). Facebook's "good faith belief' is subject to interpretation, giving the company's Law Enforcement Response Team great latitude to determine which requests it will honor. Additionally, prosecutors can request information from the site, which is turned over about 88% of the time (Fassler 2020).

Complicating matters further, interviewees noted that courts usually grant law enforcement broad warrants that enable police to obtain material unrelated to the narrow area of investigation (Fassler 2020). Criminal defense lawyer Josh Gaeta (personal interview, March 7, 2019) had grave concerns about this pattern: "Oftentimes [police will] get information that may reveal another crime, that has nothing to do with what they're investigating. I think they view that as a score or win too." Thus, the liberality of courts in providing search warrants and Facebook's compliance with law enforcement offer a wealth of user data to police that can be used to the detriment of activists (Fassler 2020). Police can also obtain Facebook data by making emergency requests wherein the platform "will voluntarily hand over data outside the legal process when police claim a case involves death or 'potential bodily harm'" (Fassler 2020: para. 10). The US government has increasingly made such emergency requests in recent years (Fassler 2020). Interviewee Cora Carney (personal interview, March 4, 2019), a criminal defense lawyer, further revealed that the government has "backdoor access" to Facebook's data. In particular, Saul Rodney (personal interview, February 17, 2019; Hintz 2016) discussed PRISM, the anti-terrorism surveillance program exposed by Edward Snowden that enables the National Security Agency (NSA) to collect information from internet companies such as Facebook in the US. Through such practices, Facebook has extended the reach of law enforcement while claiming it is powerless to shield users.

The Entanglement of Facebook & Third Parties: Foiling to Protect User data

Interviewees emphasized the role of private companies in enabling police to surveil users on Facebook, blurring the boundary between corporate surveillance and government surveillance. An understanding of Facebook's policies, practices, and corporate values regarding third parties helps to contextualize interviewees' frustration over this aspect of the surveillance assemblage.

Listed within Facebook's terms of senice is an open-ended policy regarding third-party "partners" (Facebook, n.d.), giving the site freedom to share data with advertisers, measurement partners, content creators and sellers, vendors and senice providers, researchers, academics, law enforcement, and those using the site's analytics services. Although the site lists these parties to appear transparent, it does not explain when and under what circumstances user data are shared. Further, the site has recently tried to stop a request for information (in a class-action lawsuit) about its agreements with third parties to share user data (Pasternack 2018). Thus, Facebook produces a dramatic information asymmetry whereby users' data are laid bare to a number of unspecified actors, but even the most basic details about these transactions are hidden from public oversight and scrutiny (Uldam 2018), a disparity critiqued by every interviewee. This fundamental imbalance reflects broader power dynamics as articulated by Zuboff (2015: 83): "Surveillance capitalists have extensive privacy rights.... [that] are increasingly used to deprive populations of choice in the matter of what about their lives remains secret." Without the awareness of users, Facebook enables third parties to repurpose personal data for commercial or political ends (Lewis 2018).

Interviewees discussed the aforementioned case of Geofeedia, an intelligence-gathering firm that famously sold law enforcement agencies across the country the ability to track BLM protesters and their locations from Facebook data (Timberg and Dwoskin 2016). Geofeedia enabled police to monitor the use of keywords such as protest, #blacklivesmatter, and Ferguson (Eledroos and Crockford 2018). Litz Medina (personal interview, March 6, 2019), the director of a digital rights organization, noted that Geofeedia touted its capacity to surveil protesters in Ferguson and Baltimore in its marketing material (see also BBC 2016). Other companies such as MediaSonar and Dataminr were also used by law enforcement to surveil protestors (Pearson 2017; Biddle 2020), underscoring the pernicious private/public partnerships that have been used to surveil and criminalize BLM activists.

After Facebook's data-sharing practices were exposed, there has been increasing public pressure on the platform to provide greater transparency. In 2017, Facebook (along with other platforms) updated its policies to explicitly prohibit third parties from using data for surveillance, a term that was left undefined (Seetharaman 2017). However, interviewees were skeptical about Facebook's commitment to change given its track record of negligent data practices. Easton Lay (personal interview, March 7, 2019), who worked with Facebook on its 2017 policy update, explained that the platform does not have a history of checking with developers to see how data are being used (see also Lewis 2018). Other interviewees noted that Geofeedia's contracts with law enforcement were first exposed by the ACLU and not by Facebook, reflecting the site's lack of initiative in safeguarding the privacy of users (Timberg and Dwoskin 2016). As Josh Gaeta (personal interview, March 7, 2019), a criminal defense lawyer, explained: "It shouldn't be on the ACLU or anyone else, outside of Facebook, to try to figure out whether or not these third parties are actually abiding by these rules." Interviewees also pointed out that the 2017 policy change did not include a plan to audit third parties, which has left the door open for continued problems. To this point, Easton Fay (personal interview, March 7, 2019) reported that commercial entities continue to employ user data for surveillance. Additionally, in 2018 Facebook reinstated Crimson Flexagon (a third party with connections to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the State Department), which was previously suspended for using data for surveillance purposes, threatening activists (including those involved in the BLM movement), and undermining digital privacy (Pasternack 2018).

Many interviewees linked Facebook's lack of accountability to its self-regulatory governance and reliance on surveillance capitalism. Josh Gaeta (personal interview, March 7, 2019) declared: "I'm reluctant to trust them to self-regulate, because again, as a corporation, their purpose is to create profit." To this point, Facebook may be disincentivized from enforcing its surveillance policies since its relationships with application programming interface developers have been important historically (Lewis 2018; Pierson 2018; Plantin et al. 2018). Facebook relies on developers to create interactive features that draw users to the site, encouraging them to spend ample time on the platform (Bodle 2011; Plantin et al. 2018). Further, Facebook receives money from third parties and receives user data that third parties generate (Lewis 2018; Plantin et al. 2018). In the past, Facebook has also granted data access to companies (such as Amazon) that advertise heavily on the platform, revealing Facebook's self-interested data sharing practices (Solon and Farivar 2019). These partnerships likely contribute to Facebook's unwillingness to spend considerable resources tracking down third parties that violate surveillance policies. Reacting to this pattern of intentional nonintervention, civil rights lawyer George Gallen (personal interview, March 15, 2019) asserted: "The platforms are being willfully blind to that kind of circumvention because it works for them to stay willfully blind to it" (see also Lewis 2018). Since both Facebook and third parties are not subject to meaningful oversight, they are empowered to conduct business in an opaque manner when cashing in on user data, revealing the deep inequities built into surveillance capitalism.

In addition to Facebook's limited incentive to track the way third parties use data (Lewis 2018), there are numerous obstacles that prevent the platform from effectively monitoring such companies. George Gallen (personal interview, March 15, 2019) noted that the site's enormous size and numerous contracts with third parties make it difficult to keep a close eye on what third parties do with data or even what their surveillance capacities are. Aware of the platform's limitations, interviewees expressed a sense of pessimism about controlling the activities of third parties. Tessa Rand (personal interview, February 27, 2019), the executive director of a privacy non-profit organization, described the persistence of third parties: "We took down Geofeedia, but there's four more companies that are doing the same thing with a different name... [it's] like putting a stab in at just one of the Hydra's heads." To this point, even when Facebook tries to seek legal remedies against rogue third parties, it does not pursue structural changes that would prevent such breaches from repeatedly occurring (Ghaffary and Morrison 2020). Given the complexity of tracking third parties, social media surveillance companies continue to extract data from Facebook and sell it to other actors (including law enforcement). In the fluid, high-stakes, and lucrative exchange of data between Facebook and third parties, both actors operate with a certain degree of impunity while exploiting users for profit. The commercial underpinnings of this surveillance assemblage are especially problematic when data are sold to law enforcement and used to suppress dissent (Timberg and Dwoskin 2016).

Covert Partnerships: Third Parties & Law Enforcement

Interviewees were most concerned about the way law enforcement is able to access user data through third parties, thereby expanding the surveillance-industrial complex (Citron and Pasquale 2010). In recent years, the state has turned to social media to increase its intelligence capabilities by tracking specific groups of people and monitoring potential threats in advance (Ferguson 2018). While large-scale data mining has not proven to be an effective tool to protect public safety (Schneier 2015), a 2014 survey estimated that 80% of law enforcement agencies utilize some form of social media surveillance for intelligence gathering LexisNexis 2014), underscoring the importance of this tool for contemporary policing. As noted previously, police heavily monitor BLM activists on social media. Information gleaned from interviews along with a review of FOIA requests/lawsuits indicates that, since 2014, police in Missouri, Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, California, Maryland, Oregon, and Ohio as well as the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the DEIS have engaged in an elaborate, networked project to surveil BLM activists (see the legal complaints in Color of Change and Center for Constitutional Rights v. Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation 2016 and ACLU v. US Department of Justice 2019). The scope of this surveillance project has been hidden for years because of the mutually beneficial relationships between police and third parties.

Third parties enable law enforcement to access a wealth of social media data while bypassing constitutional restrictions (Balkin 2008; Bennett and Parsons 2013). Interviewees noted that a surveillance company can act as a "private mercenary" (Clark Ingo, personal interview, February 22, 2019) or a "private para-military organization" (Neal Slade, personal interview, February 25, 2019), providing information that law enforcement cannot constitutionally obtain due to the Fourth Amendment, which outlaws unreasonable searches and seizures by the US government. Neal Slade (personal interview, February 25, 2019) explained that once law enforcement agencies obtain personal data, they can engage in a practice called parallel construction, whereby they "use their creative writing ability to find other ways that they could have possibly gotten that information had they not been using these tools." (see also Grayson 2015). Police and federal agencies utilize this practice to hide the source of their information, protecting private companies and avoiding public scrutiny for below board investigatory procedures.

Interviewees who were involved in litigation against law enforcement agencies felt that police have gone to great lengths to shield third parties from regulatory oversight. Roni Miner (personal interview, March 6, 2019), a civil rights lawyer, provided the example of the Chicago Police Department, which has consistently denied requests to release the name of its third-party data supplier (see also ACLU 2018). In the aftermath of Geofeedia's exposure and ban from Facebook, the Chicago Police Department maintained a hard line about protecting the identity of its partner out of fears that the third party would receive negative publicity and then cease to provide data (Axel Fowler, personal interview, February 25, 2019; Geigner 2019). This protective stance reveals the fundamentally interconnected nature of private and public entities as the Chicago police considered the unveiling of a third party to foreclose routine investigatory efforts.

FOIA lawsuits initiated by interviewees highlight the obstructionist stance of law enforcement agencies in providing information about third parties and social media surveillance of BLM protests. In one case, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Illinois sued the Chicago Police Department after their FOIA request for documents relating to the city's usage of social media monitoring software was delayed eleven times (see the legal complaint in ACLU of Illinois v. Chicago Police Department, City of Chicago 2018). Similarly, interviewees reported that the ACLU (headquarters) and the ACLU of Northern California had been forced to sue a number of government agencies (including the Department of Justice, FBI, DHS, Customs and Border Protection, Citizenship and Immigration Sendees, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Department of State) after they had not produced records pertaining to their social media surveillance or explained their failure to respond for over seven months (see the legal complaint in ACLU v. US Department of Justice 2019). These lawsuits demonstrate the efforts of law enforcement to keep individuals from learning about the reach of the public/private surveillance assemblage and its deployment against BLM activists.

To interviewees, FOIA is falling short of its promise to increase transparency given the expense of filing requests, the time-consuming nature of lawsuits, and the purposeful actions of agencies and departments to thwart public investigation (Kreimer 2007; Pozen 2016). Cora Carney (personal interview, March 4, 2019), a criminal defense lawyer, noted that FOIA requests are only accessible to a select set of the population: "You have to stay on top of [agencies] pretty aggressively and people with those resources are usually lawyers, and people who don't have lawyers who are orchestrating or managing their FOIA requests are usually not able to get what they need." The obstructionist approach of the government thereby exacerbates societal inequalities and makes it nearly impossible for any single individual to hold surveillers accountable. To this point, Easton Fay (personal interview, March 7, 2019) cautioned that "FOIA is not really built to benefit the public when it comes to issues of surveillance." Thus, government agencies may use FOIA requests to conceal as much as to disclose (similar to how Facebook lists the range of parties it shares data with but does not provide details about these exchanges), strategically preserving the secrecy of surveillance practices weaponized against activists.

This concealment and the intense surveillance of BFM activists reinforces prevailing power dynamics. Speaking to this point, one interviewee noted: "The status quo defends itself... the intent is to prohibit social change" (Clark Ingo, personal interview, February 22, 2019). In this manner, racialized surveillance is employed to chill speech and preserve societal inequities. Easton Fay (personal interview, March 7, 2019) declared: "Police don't want to give up power. The system works to benefit law enforcement, and they don't want protesters to be able to call out the ways that they bring violence and harm to those communities." By silencing voices that threaten to expose discriminatory policing, law enforcement not only safeguards its authority but also extends its command and control. Interviewees collectively stressed that the surveillanceindustrial complex has largely been brought to bear against groups who are already over-policed (Citron and Pasquale 2010; O'Neill and Loftus 2013; Fuchs and Trottier 2015; Walsh and O'Connor 2019). When used in this manner, the surveillance assemblage on Facebook becomes an instrument of suppression rather than protection. Condemning discriminatory surveillance practices, Easton Fay (personal interview, March 7, 2019) asserted: "It's very clear that [social media monitoring] is not a tool about public safety; it's a tool for tracking and opposing dissent, particularly from black and marginalized communities." Thus, police have partnered with commercial third parties to monitor and criminalize activists, perpetuating racialized surveillance and blocking free expression through a system cloaked in secrecy (Patton et al. 2017).

Conclusion: Reforming the Social Media Surveillance Assemblage

In the current moment, BLM activists are subject to the sophisticated surveillance assemblage on Facebook, an intersecting web of private and public surveillers bound together by self-interest, political power, and surveillance capitalism. The disparate actors in this assemblage intentionally mask their collection, commodification, and exchange of user data, disempowering users and preventing substantive reform. To shed light onto these opaque surveillance practices and their antidemocratic effects, this article draws upon interviews with expert-activists and an extensive collection of documents. Interviewees described the ties that bind Facebook, third parties, and law enforcement as well as the commercial enterprises, hidden interactions, and weak regulations that protect these actors from public censure or legal accountability. According to interviewees, Facebook (motivated by the logic of surveillance capitalism) harvests a vast swath of user data through its extractive and exploitative infrastructure. Facebook allows third parties to access user information through unregulated data flows, enables police to view public profiles, and hands over data when law enforcement obtain warrants (and even in some cases when they do not). Faw enforcement also partners with third parties, paying for data mining while bypassing constitutional restrictions.

These actors take part in the larger surveillance-industrial complex (Hayes 2012), which is not wielded indiscriminately, equally, or universally (Eubanks 2014) but rather is concentrated on surveilling those on the margins, especially racial justice activists (Patton et al. 2017; Canella 2018). Therefore, while BFM has frequently been "cited as an exemplar of social media's empowering, democratic potential" (Walsh and O'Connor 2019: 8), it also reflects the precarious fate of digital activists who use social media to protest repression but then experience repression through networked surveillance online. BLM is similar to other movements globally as scholars have demonstrated that activists in Germany, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Brazil, Hong Kong, Mexico, and Spain have been both empowered and disenfranchised by digital protest on platforms (Leistert 2012; Youmans and York 2012; Demirhan 2014; De Souza 2014; Treré 2016; Anderson 2019). Thus, far from being open, liberatory, egalitarian spaces, social media serve as the "Janus head of visibility" (Uldam 2018: 43) for activists, amplifying their causes while simultaneously exposing them to surveillance, criminalization, and prosecution. Consequently, activists are left with the difficult choice between using social media sites that offer visibility but exacerbate vulnerability or turning to alternative media that offer protection but risk invisibility.

However, it is of great political import to recognize the contingency (rather than inevitability) of social media surveillance. As Lingei (2019: 25) declares: "Diagnosing problems of platform surveillance is only a first step towards building a more equitable internet." On a transnational level, there is a need for more robust policies and accountability measures to mandate transparency for all actors in the surveillance assemblage. Third parties especially, which are often overlooked and underregulated, need to be exposed and brought to account through scholarship and regulation. These transparency provisions would allow activists (and users more generally) to disentangle the various sources of surveillance on social media and to better understand the tradeoffs involved with digital protest. In addition to transparency reforms, meaningful structural change must be achieved to actualize the democratizing potential of social media. However, if the surveillance-industrial complex and surveillance capitalism are not tamed, the intersection of corporate and governmental surveillance on social media will continue to threaten those who need their voices to be amplified and their messages to be heard, perpetuating social inequalities and limiting societal progress.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Jessa Lingei for her feedback, support, and guidance. Thank you also to Professor Matt Duncan for assistance with the legal analysis. Additionally, I am appreciative of the reviewers who offered insightful comments and suggestions as well as the journal's staff and editors who were incredibly kind and patient. Lastly, thank you to the interviewees who generously shared their time and knowledge.

Sidebar

Nurik, Chloé Lynn. 2022. Facebook and the Surveillance Assemblage: Policing Black Lives Matter Activists & Suppressing Dissent. Surveillance & Society 20(1): 30-46.

Footnote

1 Under the FOIA, individuals can request information from US federal agencies. However, as this aniele will explore, there are several issues with FOIA requests, including the fact that agencies can refuse to provide requested information (Jaeger and Bertot 2010).

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