Anime and Game Tweets Flagged Potential Danger by LAPD Software

Tweets related to anime and video games have been flagged as a potential danger by the Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) automated social media monitoring tool.

Their social media tool called ABTShield is an algorithm that grouped potentially harmful tweets under six subjects which included categories like “domestic extremism” and “American policing”.

The tool gathered over 70,000 tweets for the entirety of October and November of last year in 2020 as part of a trial for the program. The LAPD came back with some rather strange inclusions such as tweets that discuss anime and video games listed under the ‘potential danger’ tag.

The reason for this may apparently be simply because lots of anime and games involve violence and death and therefore tweets involving anime and video games have more violent language in them.

Two examples found by ANN were tweets about Persona 5 that stated “I DO LOVE THEM ALL BUT ALSO GORO AKECHI IS A MASS MURDER” and how “Kishimoto stepped in because they were bout to kill Naruto”. It seems that this isn’t a big deal overall and that the LAPD’s software may need some work.

This data was published as a spreadsheet by non-profit law and policy institute, the Brennan Centre for Justice on December 15th. The group has filed requests for police public records in Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, and Baltimore on January 30th, 2021, and filled a request for the DC Metropolitan Police Department on December 15th, 2021. The group states that they believe police departments should be transparent in their usage of mass social media monitoring.

They also say that LAPD specified several specific social media handles for ABCshield to track primarily in the ‘civil unrest’ and ‘American policing’ categories. These include at least two accounts related to anti-fascist groups and one that provides updates on protests through police scanners.

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