In order to deal with COVID, Pittsburgh's mayor bought a social media surveillance program, but he instead utilized it for side projects.

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Was Pittsburgh's mayor secretly keeping tabs on your tweets?

It was a tragic end to May in Pittsburgh, as it was in many other cities around the country, when angry demonstrators rushed to the streets in response to police deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

The city "erupted in violence" on Saturday. Thousands of people showed up. Two police cars were destroyed in the blaze. A curfew was imposed, and state troopers were dispatched to the scene to enforce it.

Pittsburgh's mayor, Bill Peduto, first straddled the line when it came to using social media. On Saturday night, he made a distinction between the "young Black Leadership" who planned the march and "anarchists hell-bent on disruption and devastation," claiming the latter "hijacked a peaceful march for justice for their own selfish purpose."

Afterwards, on June 1st, police in Pittsburgh's East Liberty neighborhood used tear gas, bean bags, and other "less deadly" weapons against over 100 nonviolent demonstrators before resorting to force.

After the incident, Peduto posted news stories claiming that protestors started throwing rocks first, despite video evidence to the contrary. Further tweeting by him claimed "conspiracy theories...being circulated tonight on Facebook and Twitter" as to why the cops had opened fire.

Peduto was briefed on this crucial problem by a long-sought source around 9:45 a.m. on June 3rd. However, it wasn't a close friend or family member. He received "insight" from a computer program from a Tel Aviv-based expert. Documents show he'd been screaming for it since 2017 because of its social media analysis capabilities.

Zencity develops software for municipalities that keeps tabs on how citizens feel about a wide range of topics. In Pittsburgh, local social media postings and interactions on Facebook and Twitter are the exclusive source of data for data-heavy reports and insights.

It was Peduto's use of social media, not the demonstrations or violence, that was the focus of Zencity's research.

An official report that covered May 28-June 2 shows "Negative sentiment grows as Mayor Peduto's remarks are viewed as supporting police over demonstrators and Pittsburgh people," according to the title of the two-page study.

Yesterday, Peduto declared his support for an independent inquiry of East Liberty police practices, citing his "deep examination of social media" as a major factor in his decision.

People urge politicians to alter their minds when confronted with fresh information, but Peduto's reversal of fortune has one flaw: Pittsburgh's emergency disaster declaration COVID-19 allowed the Mayor's Office to purchase the $30,000 Zencity software under unusual circumstances, and the office later justified the purchase to city council members by informing them it was "part of... continuing COVID-19 response."

Only five of the 24 Right to Know Request insights supplied to the Daily Dot by the mayor's office between June 2020 and May 2021 deal with COVID-19 limitations or reopenings. The majority of them are concerned with how the public feels about Peduto's favorite projects and other contentious political topics.

After reading the insights sought by the mayor's office, Pittsburgh City Councilmember Deb Gross stated, "It appears like they wanted Zencity to solely look at their own mirror."

For over a year, the mayor's administration kept Zencity a well guarded secret. At a standing committee session in May 2021, when it became obvious that the software would be up for renewal, Gross and the rest of the council heard about Zencity's use, first revealed by the Pittsburgh City Paper.

Mayor Peduto turned down an opportunity to speak with the media for this article. Peduto was defeated by State Rep. Ed Gainey in the Pittsburgh mayoral primary in May. Gainey was running for a third term. Some observers attribute Pedudo's defeat to his alleged backing for police officers against protestors during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations on the final weekend of May in 2020, which some say was the catalyst for his defeat.

It appears from right to know documents that the mayor's office requested additional information on June 17, 2020, in relation to a pair of Peduto police reform announcements: one, the endorsement of national 8cantwait police reform legislation, and the other, a "blueprint for a new Office of Community Health and Safety."

However, the mayor's office will not request an insight into any other COVID-related subjects until December 17, 2020 after obtaining an insight into community reaction to Allegheny County's decision to close bars and prohibit alcohol in restaurants on June 30. This is when the city's COVID cases went from a summer low of 12 to over 1,000 a day.

Between now and then, Peduto would like information on Pittsburgh's involvement in the Mayors for Guaranteed Income initiative, his Marshall Plan for Middle America Roadmap, and the ongoing dispute over a Christopher Columbus statue in Schenley Park, the city's majestic greenspace.

to be more precise...

Your actions will be assigned an emotion by Zencity software the next time you click "like" or "comment" on a local news story, so that local politicians may see them.

Data-heavy reports generated automatically based on trending themes in the region are also available from Zencity in addition to those requested in advance. To find out how people really feel, Zencity looks into how they respond to and interact with social media posts. A Zencity account manager emailed the city of Pittsburgh in May 2020, requesting a connection with the city's Instagram accounts.

More importantly, academics are concerned about how people are using social media and if those views are representative of society as a whole.

The Internet connection must be dependable for you to succeed. A computer is an absolute need. According to Matthew Guariglia, policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "you need a smartphone to frequently share your thoughts on social media." Therefore, if governments gauge public opinion by using the internet, the opinions of some of the most disadvantaged individuals affected by policy may go unheard.

This is particularly valid if your mayor is a heavy user of social media. Former Councilman Peduto was profiled in 2013 and was described as having "a gushing firehose of jokes, facts, policy stances," and "Pittsburgh promotion, as well as YouTube parodies" on his Twitter account.

Only 9% of social media users frequently post or discuss about political or social problems, according to Pew Research, while 40% never do. In addition, almost 3 out of 10 Americans do not utilize any social media platforms at all.

Angel Diaz, a lecturer at UCLA School of Law who specializes in the confluence of emerging technologies and civil rights, says there's really little way to verify that what you're seeing on social media is truly representative of public sentiment.

According to Zencity, it also doesn't screen posts to see if they originate in the city they claim to be monitoring. Tweets from Pittsburgh-related Twitter users might impact the study in the same way that long-term citizen concerns have. According to Eyal Feder, CEO and co-founder of Zencity, "Location — it's easy. We have no idea where the poster is located.

It's not just a possibility that marginalized people won't be heard, but machine learning can only offer insights as excellent as the data it crunches. Rubbish in, garbage out is a well-known maxim in the computer science world.

In Pittsburgh, Zencity analyzed the sentiment of Facebook and Twitter users who interacted with hundreds of accounts, including local news stations and politicians, various public figures, museums, community groups, farmers markets, and a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Fox News AM radio station (as well as one in Atlanta).

Tweets geo-tagged near Pittsburgh and Twitter inquiries about Pittsburgh are also included in the list.

When the city of Pittsburgh received a Right to Kow request, they sent over two spreadsheets, each containing data from about 418 different public social media outlets in Pittsburgh.

In June of 2020, the first was dated, and in May of the next year, the second. They're nearly identical, with the exception of the addition of a half-dozen Pittsburgh-based social activist and community groups in the most current iteration.

It was revealed in an email from the mayor's spokesman Molly Onufer that the program depended only on these data points and that she would have to check with Zencity to find out. A follow-up email from the Daily Dot seeking explanation from Zencity went unanswered.

According to Zencity's website, its program examines data from "open, public, social media channels and web sources, such public Facebook groups, Twitter hashtags, and keywords" in addition to city-generated information.

According to the company's website, Zencity was founded by a former intelligence officer from the Israeli equivalent of the NSA. It is currently being used in over 250 towns and municipalities of various sizes across the country.

The software is rarely brought up in public.

According to policy analyst Guariglia at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, most people have no idea what technologies their governments are using until it is exposed in some way after contracts have been signed and money exchanged.

Councilman Gross tried unsuccessfully to stop the city of Pittsburgh from using it during a hearing in Pittsburgh. Social media surveillance was brought up at the hearing by resident Sara Pearman, a Ph.D. security researcher from Carnegie Mellon University.

There must be measures and safeguards in place if the city intends to employ this."