By Jordan Vega · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, September 2011
In late September 2011, FishbowlLA picked up a PoliceOne.com story about the LAPD’s Internet Unit and Sheriff’s Department officers monitoring Twitter for flash-mob and large-gathering signals. The most concrete example: the multiple Carmageddon-related freeway-flashmob plans — including a “pretty amazing-sounding bicycle ride on the 405” — that had been thwarted via Twitter-monitoring earlier in the summer. The original FishbowlLA framing was wary-but-resigned, conceding the police monitoring was legitimate work while flagging concerns about scope and proportionality.
Then
The September 2011 piece captured an early documented case of LAPD’s online-monitoring infrastructure. The Internet Unit was, at the time, a relatively new institutional structure inside the department. The Carmageddon weekend — the July 2011 closure of the 405 Freeway for the Sepulveda Pass widening project — had been treated as a substantial public-safety challenge, with the broader LA media operating in heightened-coverage mode.
The flash-mob worry of the moment was tracking a broader 2011 cultural pattern. The Arab Spring uprisings earlier in the year had elevated the role of Twitter and Facebook in collective-action coordination; the August 2011 UK riots had produced explicit social-media-and-crowd-control debates in policing discussions worldwide. The LAPD’s Twitter-monitoring framing in late September 2011 was operating within that broader policing-and-social-media-monitoring cycle.
The original FishbowlLA framing — by then-FBLA editor Matthew Fleischer — flagged the proportionality concern. Conceding it would be “irresponsible for the police not to do this type of research,” the piece pushed back that “Screwing up a group bike ride seems like it should be pretty far down the pecking order.” The wry framing was characteristic of FBLA’s role in tracking the broader civil-liberties-and-policing conversation through the LA media lens.
Now
The LAPD Internet Unit’s social-media monitoring infrastructure has substantially expanded across the decade and a half since 2011. The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in particular produced extensive subsequent reporting on LAPD social-media monitoring practices — including the post-2020 disclosures about the department’s use of Geofeedia, Dataminr, and other platform-monitoring vendors. The 2011 LAPD Internet Unit framing reads now as an early-decade snapshot of what would become a substantially more developed monitoring infrastructure.
Twitter itself was acquired by Elon Musk in October 2022 and rebranded as X in mid-2023. The platform’s role in flash-mob and protest coordination has been substantially reduced relative to its 2011 cultural centrality; the broader social-media coordination function has dispersed across multiple platforms (Discord, Signal, Telegram, Instagram, TikTok), making the LAPD-Twitter-monitoring framing of 2011 effectively obsolete as a comprehensive monitoring approach.
The Carmageddon framing of LA-region traffic events has continued — the 2012 “Carmageddon II” sequel and various subsequent freeway-closure cycles have all been processed through the same press-event framework. The freeway bike rides that the 2011 piece flagged have continued to be a recurring LA-region cultural practice, though the LAPD’s relationship with them has continued to evolve.
The civil-liberties question the 2011 piece raised — about proportionality and the scope of social-media monitoring — has been substantially elevated rather than resolved across the post-2020 policing-reform cycle. The original FBLA framing reads now as one of the small documented moments of LA-media skepticism about the early-decade LAPD online-monitoring infrastructure that would later become a substantially larger political-and-policy question.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.