Twitter says monitoring service does not violate surveillance ban

Twitter said Tuesday a service that monitors tweets for police, alerting them to brewing social justice protests and more, does not break the platform’s ban on being used for surveillance.

Twitter defended letting the service, Dataminr, tap into the flow of public tweets to send alerts to police or other government agencies about plans for protests or civil disobedience, such as those involved in the Black Lives Matter movement.

“Twitter prohibits the use of our developer services for surveillance purposes. Period,” a spokesman for the San Francisco-based company said in reply to an AFP inquiry.

“We see a societal benefit in public Twitter data being used for news alerting, first responder support, and disaster relief.”