Current Events > Neighborhood watch app put 30k bounty on innocent man

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dpyw/inside-crime-app-citizen-vigilante

Andrew Frame was excited.

It was Saturday night two weeks ago, and Frame, the CEO of the crime and neighborhood watch app Citizen, was on Slack, whipping himself and his employees into what he'd later call at an all-hands meeting a "fury of passion" about a wildfire that had broken out earlier that afternoon in Los Angeles' Pacific Palisades neighborhood.

Citizen had gotten a tip that the wildfire was started by an arsonist, and Frame had decided earlier in the night that the fire was a huge opportunity. Citizen, using a new livestreaming service it had just launched called OnAir, would catch the suspect live on air, with thousands of people watching. Frame decided the Citizen user who provided information that led to the suspects arrest would get $10,000. Frame wanted him. Before midnight. As the night wore on, Citizen got more information about the supposed suspect. They obtained a photo of the man, which they kept up on the livestream for large portions of the night. More information trickled in through a tips line Citizen had set up.

"first name? What is it?! publish ALL info," Frame told employees working in a Citizen Slack room who were working on the case.

"FIND THIS FUCK," he told them. "LETS GET THIS GUY BEFORE MIDNIGHT HES GOING DOWN."

"BREAKING NEWS. this guy is the devil. get him," Frame said. "by midnight!@#! we hate this guy. GET HIM."

He was growing impatient. He increased the bounty to $20,000. Thousands of people were watching Citizen's livestream, but the man still hadn't been caught. Frame asked his staff to send out another notification, one that would hit all Citizen users in Los Angeles. The bounty had to go higher.

"Close in on him. 30k Let's get him. No escape. Let's increase. 30k," Frame said. "Notify all of la. Blast to all of la."

"Citizen is OnAir: Arsonist Pursuit Continues," the notification, which went out to 848,816 Citizen users in Los Angeles, said. "We are now offering a $30,000 reward for any information directly leading to his arrest tonight. Tap to join the live search."

Over the course of nearly seven hours, Citizen, under the increasingly frantic direction of Frame, conducted a citywide, app-fueled manhunt for a specific suspected arsonist. The employees went back and forth on how they should frame the manhunt they had started, who in Los Angeles they should notify via the app, and how often they should do it.

In the Slack room with Frame, one staffer brought up a "loophole," pointing out that Citizen was violating its own terms of service that prohibit "posting of specific information that could identify parties involved in an incident." The staffer who brought up the terms of service violation was ignored in that specific Slack room, and the broadcast continued to specifically name the person and share his photo for hours.

Earlier in the night, soon after news of a fire broke, Frame said he saw the fire as a chance to catch a suspected arsonist live on the internet, therefore proving Citizen's utility to users and helping the app grow.

"The more courage we have, the more signups we will have. go after bad guys, signups will skyrocket. period ... we should catch a new bad guy EVERY DAY," Frame said.

At one point, Frame said "these metrics will be great." And they were. At one point 40,000 people were watching the live feed, according to the Slack messages. Citizen saw a sharp spike in signups as the livestream spread. Frame said at a later all-hands meeting that 1.4 million people engaged with the content, according to other Slack messages.

Well after midnight, Los Angeles police made an arrest. In a separate Slack room, employees cautiously began to celebrate: "cop said its an ongoing investigation, this looks like our guy!!!" one employee wrote.

It wasn't Citizen's guy. Frame and the entirety of the Citizen apparatus had spent a whole night putting a bounty on the head of an innocent man.

(Motherboard is not publishing the name of the person Citizen falsely accused, though Citizen repeatedly used it both internally and externally.)

The article goes on with much more about this nightmare app, which used to be called "Vigilante."


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Please tell me the victim is suing both the police and app for this bullshit.

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Out of interest, what's the general "actual dude" vs "innnocent person" (and "found someone" vs "didn't catch anyone", for that matter) rate of this app?

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Everyone involved should get sued.

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Sounds like that guy got

Framed

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gunplagirl posted...

Please tell me the victim is suing both the police and app for this bullshit.

Why the police?

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gmanthebest posted...

Why the police?

Look at who posted.

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We did it, reddit!

I hope some vigilante who heard/saw the innocent guys name/face through the app and never learned he was innocent doesnt find the guy and cause an incident.

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gmanthebest posted...

Why the police?

Unlawful arrest

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gunplagirl posted...

Unlawful arrest

It reads more to me like the suspect the police arrested wasn't the same guy the app was gunning for. But that could just be me misunderstanding

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gmanthebest posted...

It reads more to me like the suspect the police arrested wasn't the same guy the app was gunning for. But that could just be me misunderstanding

... Yeah that'd be even worse. You do see why that's worse, right?

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sounds like we found the actual bad guy.

edit, for extreme clarity:

Antifar posted... Andrew Frame

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They probably framed him for the lulz because of his name.

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TheGoldenEel posted...

Sounds like that guy got

Framed

Yeah, the name is rather ironic... unless he picked it himself.

Antifar posted...

The article goes on with much more about this nightmare app, which used to be called "Vigilante."

Oof.

Trumble posted...

Look at who posted.

Yeah, they troll nonsense like that non-stop.

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Trumble posted...

Out of interest, what's the general "actual dude" vs "innnocent person" (and "found someone" vs "didn't catch anyone", for that matter) rate of this app?

I have no idea. I didn't even know they did this vigilante stuff. I have the Citizen app, but I only have the notifications for local incidents on. Stuff like "Commercial building on Fire. Reports indicate that there is no one inside." And then users in the area can record and upload footage. It mostly ends up being fires and car accidents.

Like this Big Rig on fire last month



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gunplagirl posted...

... Yeah that'd be even worse. You do see why that's worse, right?

I'm not seeing it. How would it be worse that the police arrested a suspect who wasn't the one being dogged down by internet vigilantes?

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Some more details on the app, which again, nightmare

Motherboard spoke to eight sources in reporting this story: five former Citizen employees, two sources with knowledge of the company's operations, and one person close to the company's founders. Motherboard also obtained multiple caches of internal policy documents, Slack messages, and company notes. Our reporting spells out not only what happened in Pacific Palisades, but also how workers and Andrew Frame view the incident and Citizen's role in society. The app pitches itself as a public-safety tool, but aims to grow its user base and revenue just as much as any other startup. The Palisades incident was characterized by Frame as a risk, a test, an experiment, even though it potentially put the person they named in danger.
Motherboard has learned that:
Users are flooded with notifications in what multiple sources interpret as an attempt to make users feel anxious enough about their neighborhoods to buy "Protect," a $19.99 per month service that allows users to livestream their phone's camera and location to a Citizen "Protect agent" who monitors it and sends "Instant emergency response" in case of an emergency.
The return of a missing autistic teen to his family in the Bronx earlier this month was done by Citizen employees on a "Street Team" that films and interacts with people while pretending to be ordinary app users.
Employee performance is measured by how many seconds it takes workers to input an incident into the app and how many incidents they cover.
Citizen's grand vision has never been a secret: From its initial launch as an app called "Vigilante" in 2016, the company pictured a world in which people were alerted to crime as it happened, and then app users stepped in to stop it before the police needed to intervene. In the Vigilante launch advertisement, a criminal stalks and then attacks a woman in New York City. The app broadcasts the location of this active crime to Vigilante's users, and a horde of people descend on the criminal, stopping the crime in progress: "Can injustice survive transparency?" the ad asks.

Thus far, however, Citizen has essentially been a social network for reporting crime that operates in around 50 cities. Citizen workers listen to and summarize police scanner audio as "incidents," which are then pushed to the app. Users can also post their own incidents, upload photos and videos, and comment on or react to incidents with emojis. The app allows users to search "around you" for incidents, and also sends push alerts to users for nearby events.

"The whole idea behind Protect is that you could convince people to pay for the product once youve gotten them to the highest point of anxiety you can possibly get them to," one former employee said, referring to Citizen's subscription service. "Citizen cant make money unless it makes its users believe there are constant, urgent threats around them at all times," they added. A Citizen spokesperson denied this in a statement: "Its actually the opposite. With user feedback in mind, we have designed the Citizen home screen so users only see relevant, real-time information within their immediate surroundings," the spokesperson said.

The disastrous Palisades fire bounty hunt and the discovery of a Citizen-branded "private patrol" vehicle driving around Los Angeles (part of a pilot program in which Citizen envisions offering a physical private security force to respond to the problems of its users) hint that Citizen's goals essentially remain the same as Vigilante's.

Frame seems to imagine Citizen as an all-encompassing crime-fighting machine that he believes will make the world safer. In Slack messages viewed by Motherboard, Frame calls ProtectOS, the system Citizen uses to create incidents and push them out to users, "the most powerful operating system ever created."

"Our vision is a global safety network of people protecting each othera world in which a kidnapping is impossible, because everyone is looking out for each other, and neighbors are alerted as soon as a kidnapping attempt is made," a Citizen spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement.

Vigilante was instantly controversial for a variety of reasons. Unsurprisingly, police said the app encouraged vigilantism. Critics worried that the app's users would racially profile Black people as suspicious, as happened on other safety-focused apps. Apple took the app out of the App Store because it violated terms of service that ban apps that risk "physical harm to people." The app relaunched as "Citizen" in 2017, with Frame saying that the original name "distracted from our mission" and that people should not take the law into their own hands. They should use Citizen to avoid crime rather than fight it.

In practice, Citizen is an app that experts say fuels paranoia and a fear of one's neighbors and surroundings by reporting "suspicious" people. Many of the incidents reported on the app are about people experiencing homelessness, for example. Citizen says it "does not report on suspicious people, nor does it report on people experiencing homelessness. Citizen reports on safety incidents such as car crashes, fires, and searches for missing people." However, many of the incidents do indeed relate to incidents involving people experiencing homelessness and many of the comments are overtly about homelessness.

"It plays into peoples anxieties and fears and magnifies peoples fears of the other and who and what they think should not exist in their neighborhood or their area," Chris Gilliard, a research fellow with the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard Kennedy Schools Shorenstein Center, said. "As weve seen, that often means people who dont look like them."

One former Citizen employee told Motherboard that a portion of the app's user base is "insanely racist, which comes out in comment sections that are especially vile even by the standards of internet comment sections." Citizen does moderate comments, but "two people having an argument about whether or not someones comment is racist drives engagement," the source added. A hacker recently scraped a wealth of information from Citizen, including user comments that repeatedly use the N-word, according to a screenshot provided by the hacker. Some of these were deleted by Citizen, but racist comments are regularly posted on incidents.

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The other scary thing is that, if their suspect had been the guy, their shady as fuck system would have received a huge boost.

Antifar posted...

Citizen's grand vision has never been a secret: From its initial launch as an app called "Vigilante" in 2016, the company pictured a world in which people were alerted to crime as it happened, and then app users stepped in to stop it before the police needed to intervene. In the Vigilante launch advertisement, a criminal stalks and then attacks a woman in New York City. The app broadcasts the location of this active crime to Vigilante's users, and a horde of people descend on the criminal, stopping the crime in progress: "Can injustice survive transparency?" the ad asks.

Other than the invasion of privacy, that scenario doesn't sound too terrible, although there's an inherent danger to concerned citizens trying to foil a criminal.

Antifar posted...

The disastrous Palisades fire bounty hunt and the discovery of a Citizen-branded "private patrol" vehicle driving around Los Angeles (part of a pilot program in which Citizen envisions offering a physical private security force to respond to the problems of its users) hint that Citizen's goals essentially remain the same as Vigilante's.

That's some dystopian shit.

Antifar posted...

Vigilante was instantly controversial for a variety of reasons. Unsurprisingly, police said the app encouraged vigilantism.

>_>


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You've gotta worry about vigilante justice.

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gunplagirl posted...

... Yeah that'd be even worse. You do see why that's worse, right?

Why would arresting the actual arsonist be worse than arresting the one the vigilantes went after?

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This some Black Mirror type shit

This is going to be one big pay day for the innocent person.

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I have been cleared by accusations by a secret security camera like 3 times.

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Wow that CEO is a lunatic.

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"For me, this is a cultural milestone," he said, adding that the team had devised a new strategy: "The next 50-100 OnAir stories will be heartwarming ones because we will do this responsibly." When asked questions about the meeting, a Citizen spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement that "We dont comment on anecdotes from internal meetings that are taken out of context."

Frame said at the all-hands that he is still performing a manhunt for the person Citizen falsely accused, but this time in order to apologize

"We need to find this person and we are actively looking to find him. We are not done when it comes to this person," notes from the all-hands say. "Andrew [Frame] said they are working on that and this has the chance to turn into a very happy moment




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Gatchaman Crowds tried to warn us about this.

That CEO should be in a mental institution.

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DarkRoast posted...

"For me, this is a cultural milestone," he said, adding that the team had devised a new strategy: "The next 50-100 OnAir stories will be heartwarming ones because we will do this responsibly." When asked questions about the meeting, a Citizen spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement that "We dont comment on anecdotes from internal meetings that are taken out of context."

Frame said at the all-hands that he is still performing a manhunt for the person Citizen falsely accused, but this time in order to apologize

"We need to find this person and we are actively looking to find him. We are not done when it comes to this person," notes from the all-hands say. "Andrew [Frame] said they are working on that and this has the chance to turn into a very happy moment

It's a bit like Trump trying to force the parents of the kid that was killed to meet the US ambassadors who claimed diplomatic immunity..

Rapid99 posted...

Gatchaman Crowds tried to warn us about this.

That CEO should be in a mental institution.

Based show.