Big Data/Surveillance of Social Media

Running head: BIG DATA / SURVEILLANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA 1
Big data/surveillance of social media
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BIG DATA / SURVEILLANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
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Big data/surveillance of social media
Introduction
On a daily basis, people around the world share a large amount of information using various
social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, email, Instagram and mobile. The information
from the social media is used by government officials in law enforcement, for example in crime
investigation the police have been trained on how to use the social media to gather information
regarding to the given crime about the events, suspects or witnesses so that they can be able to
solve the cases of crimes and also to prevent the plan criminal activity which is almost to
happened. During the investigation police will not be able to gain the data from the private social
media and in case they want to get information from private social media then they will use the
search warrants. But in many cases, the police usually use the information which is posted by
people from the public forum where a search warrant is not required.
And as we evolved in the time of the big data, then the scale and the nature of the way the police
used social media is rapidly shifting. Supported by the offerings startup then data analytics have
personalized to the need for enforcing the law, now the police service has started testing with
resolving the surveillance by using the analytics which projecting and profiling. This all
activities will boost the new social media issue and will enhance privacy. In addition, the
activities will rise up some important issues of accountability, integrity, and transparency. If the
issues are well utilized then it will boost the growth between the privacy and other importance
disciples of the laws. In our discussion, we shall greatly focus on how social media data
analytics was greatly utilized in the United States by various police services. In addition, we
shall acknowledge other social justice issues and privacy raised by the given issues. Also, we

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shall extend our discussion by examining the transparency and accountability framework to
govern the use of various technologies.
Problem statement
As technology is evolving, many people around the world are now using social media as an
interacting and socializing platform. But at some points individual misuse the use of social media
by spreading the propaganda, some are using it for fraud activities and some used it to pass threat
to a group of individual and also to the government official. And as a result, this has posed a
great concern to the government as a way of increasing the security of a country. The police
now have the tasks of getting access to the social media so that they can identify and control any
sort of crime( Paul, Sarker, Brownstein, Nikfarjam, Scotch, Smith, and Gonzalez, 2016). And
in order to stop this case of crime using social media various rules and policies should be
established that govern the use of social media by the entire user. Fines and some penalties
should be subject to anyone who will be found to have used social media for any criminal
activity (Vayena, Salathé, Madoff, and Brownstein, 2015).
Literature review
In this section, we shall present the various concepts which are related to the study of our topic.
Various scholars have come out and talked about surveillance of social media in various
countries. Many authors have written various articles concerning the privacy that is raised by the
connection between modern technology and government surveillance (Santillana, Nguyen,
Dredze, Paul, Nsoesie, and Brownstein, 2015).in addition, some authors have accused and blame
the western democracies for overstating the threat of the crime to validate mass surveillance and
also overstating its role in the prevention of criminal activity (Ball, Di Domenico, and Nunan,
2016).