The Surveillance Dimensions of the Use of Social Media by UK Police Forces

Abstract

This paper explores the various surveillance practices involved in the use of social media for communication and investigation purposes by UK police forces. In doing so, it analyses internal policy documents and official guidance obtained through freedom of information (FOI) requests sent to 46 police forces in the United Kingdom. This analysis finds that UK police forces advise their staff to simultaneously engage in both surveillance and counter-surveillance strategies in their use of social media as a policing tool.

Freedom of Information Research and Cultural Studies: A Subterranean Affinity

“…The focus here is on how government agencies—quite literally any government agency—enter the cultural sphere via the work of “public relations.” How do state organizations compose public communications, what practices of information collection and conveyance do they undertake in the process, and how do members of the public and other target audiences receive and interpret them? Police agencies, for example, are deeply invested in both social and traditional media communication platforms (Egawhary, 2019) and these could be productively analyzed using a cultural studies lens and FOI. The focus here would be using FOI to investigate how front stage rhetoric compares with backstage or off-stage decision making.…”