Proposed Plan Would Track Disability Benefits Via Facebook
A recently proposed plan would utilize Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites to search for posts and updates that might bring into question the validity of a user’s disability claims. According to Robert A. Crowe, at St. Louis lawyer who has worked with Social Security applicants previously, there is a chance that the administration may be “snooping on your Facebook and Twitter account.”
User should be wary about the types of photos and updates they post. He quipped, “You don’t want anything on there that shows you out playing Frisbee.”
Over 10 million people in America collect Social Security disability benefits. The goal here is to find people who may not have a rightful claim to this money. As of the last budget proposal, social media is rarely used in cases, only when a particular case has been flagged for further investigation.
Monitoring social media is not unprecedented, and other agencies have used it to track the movement of immigrants and non-residents before. The Department of Homeland Security plans to screen visa applicants through their Facebook accounts, looking for anything irregular they could use to deny entrance into the country. In 2018, a Freedom of Information request was filed on behalf of the ACLU who was trying to figure out how Customs Enforcement and the DHS were using these sites to collect and disseminate user data.
Of course, people abuse the Social Security benefits system occasionally, but even then, on the whole, there are fewer people relying on disability insurance than there has in prior years, with (according to the New York Times) applications for new claimants down a whopping 29 percent from the year before.
Previously, any person denied benefits due to fraud would be afforded an in-person case in court. It’s been reported that the Social Security Administration is looking to change that, a move that could be said to violate the right to due process of the claimant.
Widely considered one of the best-run government agencies, the Social Security system’s cost of operation is barely a blip on the federal budget, as more money is often being paid into it than is being paid out. Still, many sitting Republicans are still eager to trim the fat where they can.
Traditionally, the role of Congress in Social Security is to determine how much of the surplus is used to run the program itself. Congress does not determine how the actual Social Security payouts are allocated. Beginning in 2010, when Republicans took control of the House, the budget for operating costs of the department has shrunk, as have the allowances within the program.
The slope could be slippery. And if social media monitoring becomes a part of tracking disability benefits, then that means they could use Facebook and the like to track the rest of us too for all sorts of reasons. And private companies could soon follow suit, which would create greater disparities in power.
One of the main problems with all this is that social media isn’t always the greatest indicator of the actual reality of a person’s life. People tend to curate their content, painting a picture of who they want to be instead of who they, in fact, might be, and are filled with misinformation.
In the end, the only surefire way to track abusers to the system would be through better-trained investigators.
