What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - Can an Algorithm Spot a Shooter?
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2022
⏱️ 22 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Schools have spent millions to detect threats online. It mostly doesn’t work.
Guest: Arijit Sen
Host: Lizzie O'Leary
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | After the massacre in Evalde, Texas, reporter Ari Sen got a look at the Instagram account |
| 0:09.5 | belonging to the gunman before Meta took it down. |
| 0:13.0 | What we saw on the Instagram was lots of photos of the shooter, very dramatic, sort of moody |
| 0:19.3 | photos. |
| 0:20.4 | Ari is a computational journalist for the Dallas Morning News. |
| 0:23.9 | And lots of photos of like AR-15 style rifles and weapons. |
| 0:29.3 | Do you know if anyone at the school saw them? |
| 0:33.1 | I don't know that. And that's a big outstanding question for us, whether these posts were |
| 0:39.2 | identified to the school in any way. |
| 0:42.1 | It's the kind of question that comes up with grim hindsight after a shooting like this. |
| 0:46.7 | Were there signs? Did we miss them? And could we have caught this? |
| 0:52.2 | Since the 2018 shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in |
| 0:55.7 | Parkland, Florida, an entire industry has sprung up claiming that it has the answer, software |
| 1:01.6 | that scans social media for threats. From your reporting, I learned that the Evalde |
| 1:07.7 | Consolidated Independent School District purchased a social media monitoring service |
| 1:12.9 | designed to flag threats a few years ago. Are you able to know if it flagged anything in this case? |
| 1:21.9 | We aren't able to know that until we get records back from the school district, which I've asked for. |
| 1:27.5 | And even then, they may not be able to tell us whether this particular post was flagged. |
| 1:34.3 | But I think in this particular instance, it's very unlikely. |
| 1:39.0 | Right now, Ari says, it's hard to know if the software, called Social Sentinel, |
| 1:43.4 | was active in Yuvaldi at the time of the shooting. |
| 1:46.0 | The school hasn't answered that question yet. But Ari, who has reported extensively on social media |
... |
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