ACLU Exposes Geofeedia's Surveillance of Black Lives Matter Protests Through Social Media Platforms

The ACLU of Northern California released a report revealing that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram had provided special data access to Geofeedia, a surveillance technology company that marketed its location-based monitoring tools to law enforcement agencies for tracking Black Lives Matter protesters and other activists of color. The investigation, based on public records requests to 63 California law enforcement agencies, uncovered that police in Oakland, Baltimore, and Ferguson, Missouri used Geofeedia to monitor protests following the police killings of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, with one Geofeedia email boasting the system had “covered Ferguson/Mike Brown nationally with great success.”

The ACLU’s findings exposed disturbing marketing materials in which Geofeedia representatives described unions and activist groups as “overt threats” and promoted the platform’s capabilities for tracking protest movements. Documents revealed that approximately 500 police departments and law enforcement agencies nationwide were Geofeedia customers, with the company having secured a “confidential legally binding agreement” with Facebook for privileged access to user data. The surveillance product allowed police to monitor social media posts, photos, and locations of protesters in real-time, creating what civil liberties advocates described as a system designed to disproportionately target communities of color engaged in constitutionally protected political activism.

Following the ACLU’s public exposure, all three major social media platforms moved swiftly to cut off Geofeedia’s data access. Instagram and Facebook had already terminated Geofeedia’s access on September 19, 2016, after being contacted privately by the ACLU, while Twitter announced it would “immediately suspend Geofeedia’s commercial access to Twitter data” on October 11, 2016, the same day the report went public. The revelations sparked broader debates about social media companies’ responsibilities to protect users from government surveillance, the targeting of First Amendment-protected speech, and the emerging surveillance capitalism ecosystem that enabled mass monitoring of political dissent. The Geofeedia scandal became a watershed moment in understanding how technology companies’ data-sharing practices could enable discriminatory law enforcement surveillance of racial justice movements.