Investigation shows campus police across the country used surveillance program to monitor student protests

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Campus police departments for at least 37 colleges used a social media monitoring service to track and prevent student protests, an investigation by The Dallas Morning News revealed.  

Key Players

Social Sentinel, which was acquired by Navigate360, monitors the well-being of students by scanning social media posts and flagging keywords or trends that might suggest they are planning to harm themselves or others. Founded by Steven Healy and Gary Margolis, the service calls itself “the leader in holistic safety and wellness solutions” and uses “threat detection and prevention” software. Margolis said one in four American K-12 schools use the service, as well as “hundreds of colleges and universities in 36 states.”

Arijit Douglas Sen and Derêka Bennett of The Dallas Morning News worked on the investigation with University of California, Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program. 

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), a public university, has nearly 20,000 undergraduate students. In August 2018, after a year of protests, a Confederate statue named Silent Sam was pulled down by student protesters.

North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (North Carolina A&T), a historically Black college in Greensboro, North Carolina, has some 13,000 undergraduates. In 2019, many participated in demonstrations after a first-year student said she had been raped by a fellow student the previous semester, and that her cheerleading coaches failed to report the incident. At the time, the school reportedly had a contract with Social Sentinel.

Further Details

In 2017, Margolis said that Social Sentinel shared concerns around invasive surveillance technology. 

“Monitoring is icky,” he said in a webinar, addressing an American Civil Liberties Union report about a similar service that law enforcement used to monitor 2014 Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown, a Black man. 

But on Sept. 20, 2022, The Dallas Morning News published “Tracked: How Colleges Use AI To Monitor Student Protests,” detailing how campus police departments used Social Sentinel to track student protest movements. 

While Social Sentinel publicly stated its service was not a surveillance tool, emphasizing its goal of preventing mass shootings and suicides, it promoted privately its ability to mitigate and forestall student protests. 

The newspaper’s investigation revealed that in 2017 and 2018, as UNC’s student body was demonstrating against the confederate statue, campus police used Social Sentinel to monitor posts related to the protests. Documents suggested the service was never used for any other purpose, despite its stated intention of preventing self-harm and violence. 

“The former campus police chief, David Perry, and Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said in 2020 that they were not aware of any instances when the service had helped to prevent violence on the campus,” The Dallas Morning News reported. 

In 2019, North Carolina A&T administrators approved a long list of keywords to be added to the phrases that Social Sentinel would track, flagging any posts that contained them and sending them to administrators and campus police. Such phrases included “NC A&T sexual violence” and “A&T acted slowly I don’t pay $ to be raped.”

Additionally, since 2019, the service has become potentially more invasive by allowing schools to monitor student emails on university accounts. 

Outcome 

Critics cite mixed results of stated safety function

The effectiveness of Social Sentinel has been heavily scrutinized. 

“This story is absurd,” tweeted North Carolina state Rep. Graig Meyer (D), a member of both the information technology and education committees of the state house. “At least seven universities in NC may have used tech for surveillance of their own students – from tracking protests to delving into student emails. This deserves a legislative investigation.” Meyer’s district lies between Greensboro and Durham. 

Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, condemned the option for colleges to track student emails. “The idea of adding surveillance software to the campus infrastructure where students are supposed to learn is just shocking,” Maass said, calling it “an abomination to the idea of scholastic freedom.”

Sen expressed concern to WRAL, asking whether it was worth it for Social Sentinel “to invade students’ privacy, and potentially chill their speech rights.”

The investigation also noted that after the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting in May 2022 that killed 19 children and two teachers, it came to light that the Uvalde School District had paid for Social Sentinel in an effort to reduce the risk of violence. While the shooter had not posted publicly about his plans, a significant amount of violent online rhetoric had been posted on private channels, including a discussion of his plan in an Instagram group chat.

Additionally, Social Sentinel tended to turn up a large number of false positives, as terms such as “shooter” or “shoot up” could be used by students in a non-threatening manner, leading many school districts to decide that the service was not worth its cost. 

UNC-Chapel Hill ends contract with Social Sentinel

UNC-Chapel Hill administrators said they would not renew their contract with Social Sentinel. “We re-evaluated our relationship with the product and decided not to renew the contract,” the university told The Daily Tar Heel on Sept. 28.