Posted on 06/01/2022 4:42:12 AM PDT by TigerClaws
Related story:
Uvalde CISD purchased social media monitoring service years before shooting
The service says it helps schools prevent shootings, but some question its worth.
A man holds a child as they wait outside of the SSGT Willie de Leon Civic Center where...
A man holds a child as they wait outside of the SSGT Willie de Leon Civic Center where families were reunited after fourteen children and one teacher were killed in the shooting at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday, May 24, 2022, in Uvalde, TX. (Juan Figueroa / Staff Photographer)
By Ari Sen
11:13 AM on May 25, 2022 — Updated at 8:20 PM on May 25, 2022
Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District purchased a technology service to monitor social media for threats of school shootings and suicides years before a gunman killed 19 children and two adults Tuesday.
The monitoring service, called Social Sentinel, says it uses sophisticated artificial intelligence to scan over a billion posts a day for threats of violence. The service is used widely across the state, but it’s unclear whether it would have been effective in alerting Uvalde to the shooter’s posts.
Before it was taken down Wednesday afternoon, an Instagram account purportedly belonging to the shooter showed several images of AR-15-style rifles. Social Sentinel says it monitors several social media platforms, including Instagram, and has advertised to clients in the past the ability to detect firearms in pictures. But according to Social Sentinel’s terms of use with the platform, the service monitors content posted to the client school’s social media accounts. None of the images had a caption or mention of the school or district.
It’s unclear whether the district still uses the service. Representatives from Uvalde CISD did not immediately respond to The Dallas Morning News’ questions about whether its Social Sentinel contract is active.
Uvalde is among at least 52 school districts and three colleges in Texas that have used the Social Sentinel service, according to records from GovSpend, an organization that tracks state and local government spending. It has also been used by dozens of colleges and hundreds of school districts nationwide.
Uvalde purchased Social Sentinel in August 2019, according to GovSpend. A document from the 2019-2020 school year lists the service as one of the district’s “preventative security measures.”
“UCISD utilizes Social Sentinel to monitor all social media with a connection to Uvalde as a measure to identify any possible threats that might be made against students and or staff within the school district,” the document reads.
The district made two payments to the company totaling more than $9,900, the data show.
Several Texas districts that have used Social Sentinel complained the service was mostly ineffective. The News reached out to every school district that used Social Sentinel, including Uvalde, for comment last year. Clear Creek ISD, a district outside of Houston, used the service in the 2018-19 school year but soon canceled.
“The Clear Creek Independent School District discontinued the use of Social Sentinel in its first year,” Elaina Polsen, Clear Creek’s chief communications officer, told The News last year. “The District determined the service just did not meet our needs, and we were receiving far stronger information through our anonymous tip line.”
Representatives from Keller, Lewisville, Mineral Wells and Schertz-Cibolo school districts also said the service provided them with few alerts or alerts that contained mostly irrelevant information.
Some schools contacted by The News said the service was helpful. Lamar Consolidated Independent School District said officials used it several times to intervene before students harmed themselves.
In an interview with The News in February, the CEO of Social Sentinel parent company Navigate360 defended the service.
“We’ve seen school staff and law enforcement liaison show up at a house and stop the kids from killing themselves,” JP Guilbault said. The service also has been used to identify bomb threats, “sexual aggression” and bullying, he said.
Navigate360 did not immediately respond to request for comment for this story.
Even if authorities had been alerted to the potential threat, they may not have been able to prevent the violence from taking place. NBC News reported last month that the FBI had interviewed a man who wrote online that he was “plotting [a] mass shooting” and looking for “weapons that are good for killing a lot of people within a budget” a year before he carried out a school shooting in Aztec, New Mexico. The FBI was also alerted to the Parkland shooter’s intent to kill others and “disturbing social media posts” more than a month before he killed 17 people and injured 17 others.
Some Texas politicians and legal experts have supported schools’ use of the technology but others have raised privacy concerns about the proliferation of monitoring services in schools.
“It’s been a reaction to absolutely just unfortunate and deadly school shootings and mass violence,” Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, a Republican from Southlake, told The News last year. “But what we have to ask ourselves is, ‘Do we have to create such a big dragnet that affects everyone’s civil liberties?’ ”
State police said that the 18-year-old gunman crashed his car and then entered Robb Elementary School.
Tuesday’s massacre was the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, behind Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 children and six adults died.
In Uvalde, two adults, the shooter and 19 children were killed.
fl
Related stories:
After Uvalde, social media monitoring apps struggle to justify surveillance
Flagler School Board Wants To Snoop on Students’ Social Media, And Maybe Yours. Wrong Move.
https://flaglerlive.com/120860/social-sentinel-pt/
And...
The school district paid just under $10,000 for Social Sentinel services in the 2019-2020 school year, per public records, and it has maintained its relationship with the service since. (During the same time period, the State of Texas paid over $2,000,000 in tax dollars to social monitoring surveillance services, with $188,855 specifically to Social Sentinel.) Overall, the company has secured contracts with school districts and colleges across 25 states, and it today claims coverage of “more than 7 million students, faculty and community members.”
Holy Cow
That makes it all the more tragic
I couldn’t find anything in my search
Thank you
Yes, they spent money to try to avoid this to no avail.
I don’t agree with the thread slider if there was an implication this attack did not occur.
Just seems to be these attacks occur within a month or so of training on the subject and they occur at conveniently political times.
At the very least the school districts around the country paid this A.I. group money and the results (or lack thereof) speak for themselves.
What does the video say?
What dad carries around a framed portrait also?
Phones not available?
Also...notice “step dad” isn’t in ANY of the pics they show of the deceased girl, like the other/bio dad is.
Bottom line: The AI didn’t help. Maybe it was ignored, maybe it was used to incubate the situation. Maybe it had no bearing.
Glad you posted this. The video is very interesting about the people on the advisory board.
I wonder if a FOIA request can be done to find out if the shooter was on their radar.
I don’t care what it says. You engaged in discussion by posting here. You posted the link for a reason. What point were you making? That the little girl isnt real?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.