Moderation of illegal content and social media scraping

Privacy and data protection constraints in the processing of publicly available data by law enforcement authorities

Abstract

Social media scraping can be used in connection to a wide range of law enforcement tasks, and to investigate various forms of crime. At the same time, these practices create peculiar fundamental rights concerns, linked to the rights to privacy, data protection and freedom of expression. To complicate the matter, the recently adopted EU legal instruments on the moderation of illegal content create new grounds for potential social media monitoring activities by law enforcement authorities, possibly leading to an ehanced use of social media scraping techniques. In light of these legislative novelties, the paper aims to present potential fundamental rights criticalities of the use of social media scraping technologies in this context, when aimed to collect and process publicly available data.