{"id":111076,"date":"2025-07-01T07:37:52","date_gmt":"2025-07-01T12:37:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=111076"},"modified":"2025-07-01T07:37:52","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T12:37:52","slug":"111076","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=111076","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Why Are Authorities STILL Hiding Social Media Profiles After High-Profile Crimes?<\/a><\/p>\n

It happens every time there’s a high-profile crime. Law enforcement officials, in collusion with social media companies, surreptitiously disable the social media profiles of suspects, leaving Americans in the dark about their motives and political leanings.<\/p>\n

The question is why. And who benefits?<\/p>\n

The most recent example is Wess Roley, 20, who is accused of starting a fire in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, on Sunday so he could ambush first responders. Two firefighters died in the attack, and a third was critically wounded. Roley was later found dead on Canfield Mountain. It’s not clear whether his gunshot wound was self-inflicted or the result of a firefight with police. The Kootenai Sheriff’s office, as per usual when these things happen, has not released a motive in the shooting.<\/p>\n

Also, as per usual, his social media profiles have been scrubbed. The gatekeepers have decided that the public will not see his posts unless and until they decide to release them. Most likely, that won’t happen until they are forced to release the files as the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. That could take months, or even years.<\/p>\n

The standard arguments for removing content created by suspects in major crimes are that leaving the accounts intact would encourage copycat crimes or incite violence. I asked Grok, X’s AI, about this and learned that the platform has a “general practice of not publicly detailing individual content moderation actions unless legally compelled or highly publicized.” I asked the same questions of Meta AI and was given the runaround rather than a straight answer. (My previous requests<\/a>\u00a0for information on how these policies work went unanswered by Facebook and X representatives.)<\/p>\n

Instead of transparency, what now happens in the wake of a major crime is that, after social media profiles are scrubbed, the internet immediately goes to work creating fake profiles that circulate and are viewed by thousands or sometimes millions of users,\u00a0as happened<\/a>\u00a0after Matthew Crooks tried to murder Donald Trump. There are also multiple fake profiles for Roley floating around social media today.<\/p>\n

How does that help anything?<\/p>\n

Investigative journalist and self-described “FOIA Queen” Sarah Fields described what she discovered about Roley in an X post:<\/p>\n