The Sept. 7 editorial touched on a relatively new area the federal government is tapping in to — social media monitoring. Unfortunately, they may have missed the point that this is not some kind of futuristic Orwellian monitoring; rather, it is already occurring as you read these words.
Companies like Radian6 and HootSuite already offer social media monitoring (aka “listening”) services to businesses. They scan Facebook, Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and virtually every other corner of the Internet for words pertinent to their clients.
For example, Coca-Cola Co. could hire Radian6 to monitor its brand name so they can measure the effectiveness of a new YouTube advertisement. The applications are endless.
While the U.S. Department of Defense’s adopting this technology raises some new rights-based questions in regard to what the government should and should not be allowed to do to monitor its citizens (nearly all defenses against which, by the way, have been eliminated by the so-called “Patriot Act”), the poll question that was posed by The Daily — “Does having your social media use watched concern you?” — is not hypothetical.
Keep this in mind the next time you watch a cat video on YouTube, complain about your electric bill on Facebook or spread the good news about a new product via Twitter: Big Brother may not be listening in yet, but Big Business certainly is.
Jerod Coker is an economics junior.
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