Social Media Police

According to Matthew Hudson, “Social Media is a series of websites and applications designed to allow people to share content quickly, efficiently, and in real-time.” Social Media is also a tool that help us stay connected to one another. Although all Social Media platforms have the same purpose but there are different types of social network such as: Instagram, Facebook, SnapChat, Tweeter, Tumblr, YouTube, and many more. Social Media plays an important role in today’s society, for instance it helps law enforcement catches and prosecutes criminals, and it spreads information faster than any other media. Social media also has a negative impact in the society, it allures people into wasting times and it also facilitates the spread of unreliable

Many police departments now use social media platforms to apprehend law-breakers and to find evidence about an unlawful act. According to Dan Alexander; the chief police of Boca Raton, “social media technologies and platforms can enhance community policing and can help reaching out to communities.” Police officers use social media to investigate crimes, by visiting the suspect’s page to find information which could hold him/her accountable for certain crimes, whether by looking at pictures or information that are relevant to the crimes that have been committed. Small clue can be a potential gold mine to any police department and Social media plays a big part when it comes to little details, because the audience is broader. For example, a live reality TV show called “live PD” was able to help a police department catch an important piece of evidence that even the officer on scene missed after a viewer tweeted a replay of the video in slow motion and the suspect was clearly seen spit something. Police departments also use social media platforms to help catch criminals by posting the suspect’s picture and ask citizen to report that individual if seen

Despite social media platforms reach their audience faster, they also have a lot of unreliable and false information. With the number of growing audience and user each year, social media finds its way into most people’s lives. According to US Adults, “32% people from the age 18 to 29 receive their news form social media sites, 23% from the age 30 to 49, 12% from the age 50-64, and 6% from the age 65+.” Sometimes those misleading social media news are full of hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and rumors. Based on an article tilled Fake News on Social Media, “64 percent of people who use social media platforms for news say they have encountered something they later discovered was not true and 16 percent of those people sometimes reposted this news but later on discovered it was