Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are cutting ties with a social media surveillance company after a report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) claimed it was being used by the police to target protesters.
Digital Trends reported in April that Geofeedia — a social media mapping tool that analyzes geotagged messages on the aforementioned platforms — was receiving funds through the CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, in light of a report by The Intercept.
Now, the ACLU claims it has uncovered documents in which Geofeedia touts the “special access” it has to user data thanks to its “arrangements” with the leading social networks. This despite the fact that all three social media companies have policies in place that prohibit developers from selling user data for the purposes of surveillance.
As a result of Geofeedia’s marketing efforts, law enforcement in Oakland and Baltimore have used its tool to monitor protests, and target activist groups considered “overt threats,” according to the ACLU.
In the case of Facebook — and its photo-sharing platform, Instagram — Geofeedia was allowed to access public posts that included location-based user data in the case of the latter. Facebook also agreed to let it obtain a ranked feed relating to specific posts (broken down by hashtags, events, or specific places). Both Facebook and Instagram terminated this access on September 19.
Twitter had also allegedly been providing Geeofedia searchable access to its database of public tweets as recently as July. On Tuesday, the official Twitter Policy account tweeted that it is “immediately suspending Geofeedia’s commercial access to Twitter data” as a result of ACLU’s findings.
Based on information in the @ACLU’s report, we are immediately suspending @Geofeedia’s commercial access to Twitter data.
— Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) October 11, 2016
“[Geofeedia] only had access to data that people chose to make public,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “Its access was subject to the limitations in our Platform Policy, which outlines what we expect from developers that receive data using the Facebook Platform.”
“If a developer uses our APIs in a way that has not been authorized … we will take swift action to stop them and we will end our relationship altogether if necessary,” the spokesperson added.
“Social media companies and their executives have expressed support for activists, movements, and free speech. Mark Zuckerberg endorsed Black Lives Matter and Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey went to Ferguson,” writes the ACLU in its blog post. “Yet there is a severe disconnect between these positions and the data access they have provided.”
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?