Social Sentinel scans online activity for shooting threats

One day after the mass shooting in Florida, a Seattle teen was arrested for allegedly threatening his classmates. The boy was known for his concerning behavior, but what ultimately prompted the arrest was his social media activity.

The boy posted a photo of a gun on Snapchat. That gun had a student’s face coming out of the barrel. It is reminiscent of an unrelated 2015 incident that shut down Western Washington University. Social media threats surfaced amid a tense campus debate, including a post showing a gun being loaded.

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As a national debate stews over gun control options, some are seeking other methods to prevent mass shootings. Monitoring social media, for example. Social Sentinel hunts for such threatening online posts.

“We scan a billion social media posts, every day, looking for indicators of harm and violence,” CEO Gary Margolis told KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross. “When we find something, and we connect it to our clients, we send them an alert. We actually go way beyond the geo-fence by looking worldwide for indications of harm and violence.”

The service is part of Toppenish School District’s solution to school shooting threats. The district in Eastern Washington has also made headlines because of its policy to allow administrators to carry handguns in school.

Social Sentinel

Social Sentinel is not a surveillance tool, nor is it a system for monitoring and investigating.

“We are akin to a home alarm system,” Margolis said.

A client — such as a school district — hires Social Sentinel. The company scans social media for threats. It considers hundreds of thousands of “behavioral threat indicators.” Then it determines if those threats target a client and eliminates false alarms. They then notify the client who takes action.

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“We’ve built what we call our Sentinel Search Library, it’s euphemistically a library of harm,” Margolis said. “… the geophysical location to the school is just one of dozens of methods we use to associate a post with a client. You could be posting about a particular school, about doing particular harm to a school, and be nowhere near the school physically and that wouldn’t negate our ability to identify that and connect it to the client.”

Margolis said that after the recent Florida school shooting, administrators at Social Sentinel pointed their software at the shooter’s online activity. He says that the service would have sniffed him out prior to the incident. Elsewhere, Margolis said the service consistently gets good feedback from clients who report they deterred a tragic incident.

“Our mission is to help schools ensure the safety of their classrooms,” Margolis said. “When we hear from our clients that tell us they’ve been able to act on something, that we’ve been able to help them identify, it means a lot to us.”

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