Illustration by Michael Hogue.An investigation by The Dallas Morning News and the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism reveals for the first time that as more students have embraced social media as a digital town square to express opinions and organize demonstrations, many college police departments have been using taxpayer dollars to pay for Social Sentinel’s services to monitor what they say.For public colleges, the use of the service sets up an additional conflict between protecting students' Constitutional rights of free speech and privacy and schools’ duty to keep them safe on campus, said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law.White also received a KSU police intelligence briefing from a colleague about the event.The document, obtained by The News in response to a public records request, singled out one progressive activist group, the liberal grassroots network Indivisible, and cited conservative conspiracy theories that George Soros funded the protesters."