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Facebook Is Suspending Prison Inmates' Accounts

The company might be helping the South Carolina prison system violate the Constitution.
​Image: Flickr/​Nicola Jones

​Imprisonment means being cut off from the world, unless you have someone on the outside to manage your social media accounts for you while you're locked up. But in South Carolina, authorities are cracking down on inmates using Facebook, and the company is helping them.

According to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the South Carolina Department of Corrections, the agency that oversees the state's prison system, uses fake Facebook accounts and obtains inmates' passwords to catch them using the site—a violation of Facebook's Terms of Service. The SCDC then asks the company to suspend the prisoners' accounts. Facebook has processed more than 500 requests since 2012, according to the report.

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The reason? Giving another person access to your account and letting them use it on your behalf is also a violation of the Facebook's Terms of Service, even if you're an inmate trying to communicate with the outside world. "Accessing Facebook from prison does not violate our terms, but allowing another person to access your account on your behalf does," a Facebook representative told me. "We will restrict access to accounts when we believe they have been compromised for any reason, including in the case of people who are incarcerated and don't have Internet access."

The SCDC has also put more than 400 inmates in solitary confinement for using social media, sometimes for stretches of up to 37 years. South Carolina's jails don't even have the space to carry out all the punishments, the report states, leading to many sentences being shortened or suspended. Infamous hacker and internet troll Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer was rumored to have been placed in solitary confinement for tweeting during his prison stint in 2013, and he was unreachable for weeks.

"We should ask why Facebook is helping the government carry out its censorship agenda"

Inmates use social media for a variety of reasons, including staying sane in a soul-crushing environment. It's perfectly legal for an inmate to send a letter to their grandma to let her know how they're doing, but if grandma posts that message to the inmate's Facebook page on their behalf, that prisoner could have their account suspended and face years alone in a cell in South Carolina.

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"The South Carolina Department of Corrections does not distinguish between [inmates and non-inmates using social media]," said David Maass, the EFF researcher who obtained the documents. "Sometimes they don't even have evidence one way or the other."

The key issue here—beyond the violation of basic human rights via the use of a punishment understood to be cruel and unnecessary by numerous human rights organizations and the UN—is that the SCDC and Facebook are working to stop average, non-incarcerated people, from helping inmates communicate with the outside. Even though inmates letting family and friends post for them is in violation of the site's Terms of Service, suspending accounts could be seen as an act of censorship in this case.​

According to David Fathi, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project, disabling accounts and punishing inmates constitutes a violation of the First Amendment rights of inmates and the people who help them post.

"This is a clear First Amendment violation for a couple reasons," said Fathi. "You have to realize that many of the web pages it targets are maintained by non-prisoners—their friends, or relatives, or supporters. South Carolina is trying to tell free people in other states, and even other countries, what they can and cannot post on the web. The First Amendment does not permit that. There's also the rights of the prisoners that are being violated—prisoners have First Amendment Rights."

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There is a legal precedent for allowing inmates access to the internet. In 2003, the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, in partnership with the ACLU, successfully challenged a law in Arizona that prevented prisoners from accessing the internet with the help of a third party. The CCADP was posting the letters inmates on death row sent to them, providing them with a channel to the outside world.

According to Fathi, this is the only legal precedent on record when it comes to laws that prevent inmates from communicating with the outside world using the internet. "We believe these laws are unconstitutional," he said, "and the one case in which their unconstitutionality was tested, that's what the federal court found."

Prisoners do have the right to communicate with the outside world

The First Amendment only binds government organizations, Fathi said, and Facebook is free to do what they like when it comes to suspending accounts unless it violates other legislation like anti-discrimination laws. "Even if it's not breaking the law, we should ask why Facebook is helping the government carry out its censorship agenda," said Fathi.

Of course, there are myriad reasons why prisoners should not be allowed to communicate with anyone, anywhere, at their own discretion. Gangs use cell phones and Facebook to confirm details on new inmates in order to initiate them, according to a report from The Atlantic, for example. Prisoners also give up some of their rights when they enter the prison system.

This appears to be the reasoning of the SCDC, which sent me a pre-written comment from Bryan Stirling, Director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, who said, "We have to look no further than our own SC corrections officer, Captain Johnson, who was shot six times in his home due to an attempted contract killing via a contraband cellphone. We take the use of contraband cell phones and social media by inmates very seriously and the punishment for using them are severe."

But having cell phones on the inside is already prohibited in many places, and prisoners do have the right to communicate with the outside world. It appears that Facebook is being caught in the middle of prisoners' attempts to do just this, and in response the company is suspending accounts that may be critical to inmates' ability to share their stories online. The reason? A technicality, and because law enforcement asked them to.