In recent weeks, social media executives have jumped in to pledge their support for the protest movement that emerged in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. In a June 1 Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg wrote about the need to fight for racial justice and noted, “One of the areas Priscilla and I have personally worked on and where racism and racial disparities are most profound is in the criminal justice system.” On the same day, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey tweeted “Police policy reform now”; he later pledged $3 million to Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri recently promised to take steps to improve black users’ experience on the platform, and Google’s Sundar Pichai published a blog post this week affirming the company’s support for “organizations working to advance criminal justice reform.”
When it comes to the role these companies actually play in the criminal justice system, however, a different story emerges, according to defense attorneys. As things stand, law enforcement routinely gets access to private social media records, including direct messages, that it can use to investigate and prosecute suspects. But criminal defendants—a group in which poor people of color, particularly black people, are
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