Imagining Digital Data: Policing and Social Media Intelligence

Our assumptions, beliefs and expectations about digital data shape how we use them to govern organizations and societal affairs. In this article, we conceptualise the role of digital data through the concept of digital imaginaries. Building on studies of policing and digital media, we develop a framework for examining the use of digital imaginaries in contemporary policing efforts. We draw on documentary research on Europol and demonstrate how digital imaginaries are put to work in transnational policing. We identify the articulation of two main digital imaginaries: (i) an imaginary of agency, and (ii) an imaginary of prophetic data. We show how such digital imaginaries operate as tools that can be wielded for good or for evil, and we discuss their underlying assumptions around human agency as well as the politics of platform technology and temporality in policing.