Alfred Ng reports:
Mere hours after supporters of former president Donald Trump forced their way into the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, sleuths, both amateur and professional, took up the task of combing through the voluminous videos and photos on social media to identify rioters. Facial recognition technology—long reviled by police reform advocates as inaccurate and racially biased—was suddenly everywhere.
A college student in Washington, D.C., used facial recognition to extract faces from videos on social media. The Washington Post used facial recognition to count the number of individual faces at the Capitol Building attack, and a researcher from Citizen Lab used it to identify people involved in the riots. And when the FBI posted photos of rioters, looking for help with identification, the Miami Police Department assigned two detectives to scan faces into the department’s Clearview facial recognition app.
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