Philadelphia police arrested on Monday a 17-year-old teen who owned rats215, an anonymous account that posted pictures of cooperating witnesses to intimidate them and discourage aiding the police. The account has ID’s 30 witnesses since its creation in February; it has more than 150 photos with violent comments written on them.
The account has been suspended since the Philadelphia police began investigating the account on October 24. Courts have, of course, had a problem with witness intimidation even before social media sites existed. But their prevalence has prompted Philadelphia and many other cities to attempt to ban cellphones from the courtroom. A tweet from the courtroom with the photo of a witness and words they were saying spread intimidation faster than other methods did. The bans were unsuccessful for mainly logistical reasons, one being the need for locker room space to store the cellphones of court attendees.
The Philadelphia incident isn’t the first time a government has policed the use of social media. Just in June, France ordered Twitter to release the identity of an anonymous Twitter user who posted anti-Semitic Tweets. Twitter appealed, but in the end the French government won. In another case in the U.S., the Court of Appeals protected workers who had been fired for expressing their political views online with a “like”. The U.S. court ruled that a Facebook like was First-Amendment protected speech (in U.S. Circuit Judge William Traxler’s analogy the modern version of posting a political sign on one’s front yards).
In the rats215 case, Instagram took no action until the U.S. government started to investigate the user. Furthermore, the identity of the user was uncovered by the police, not by Instagram or its parent company Facebook. Increasingly, law enforcement is using social media as a criminal search tool. It looks governmental control of social media usage is becoming more common, and also as if that usage itself is entering more and more into of the public domain, which imposes limits on what social networks can do to protect their users’ identities. True, more authority involvement could (arguably) have security and quality-of-life benefits benefits. However, as activities on these sites become more traceable, Twitter, Facebook, and others can no longer claim to be the safe havens for revolutions and consequence-free political thought.
