Social Intelligence Screening Errors

If a Social Intelligence social-media screening report is the reason a job offer disappeared, an inaccurate or misattributed report is not something you have to accept. Social Intelligence operated as a consumer reporting agency under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which means you have the right to see what was reported about you and to make it corrected. One thing to know before you start: Social Intelligence no longer exists as an independent company — it was acquired in 2023, and disputes today run through its successor. Our Employment Background Checks page explains how employment reports work generally; this page covers what is specific to social-media screening.

What was Social Intelligence?

Social Intelligence Corporation was a Santa Barbara, California social-media background screening company, incorporated in June 2010, that sold employers a report on an applicant's public online activity. It was one of the first companies to build a business on the idea, and for a while it was the best-known name in the category. Its analysts searched public social networking content and flagged material in a small set of categories — aggressive or violent acts or assertions, unlawful activity, discriminatory activity such as racist statements, and sexually explicit activity — while redacting information that would reveal an applicant's protected-class status. The company's leadership included founder Max Drucker and, later, president Bianca Lager. In January 2016 it sold its government solutions business to OMNIPLEX World Services Corporation, a partial divestiture that should not be confused with the later sale of the whole company. We were unable to verify Social Intelligence's state of incorporation from public records and will not assert one.

What happened to Social Intelligence

Fama Technologies, Inc. acquired Social Intelligence on April 18, 2023. Terms were not disclosed. Fama said the deal expanded its screening-partner network by more than 75 percent and brought over Social Intelligence's client base and roughly 80 HR-system partnerships. Source Today socialintel.com simply redirects to fama.io; the old consumer pages are gone, and the CFPB's directory now carries the entry as "Fama Technologies (formerly Social Intelligence)."

The practical consequence for you: if you are trying to dispute something a Social Intelligence report said, or you are trying to find out whether such a report exists, the company you actually have to deal with is Fama. See our Fama social media screening errors page for the successor's current dispute channels, and address correspondence to Fama Technologies while identifying the report as a Social Intelligence report by date. We could not verify whether the Social Intelligence corporate entity still exists as a legal shell, so do not assume a letter addressed only to Social Intelligence will reach anyone.

How to contact the company about a Social Intelligence report

Contact information for this company is split between an out-of-date federal listing and the successor's own site. Use both:

• Address (CFPB listing): Fama Technologies, 735 State Street, Suite 211, Santa Barbara, CA 93101 — the same suite Social Intelligence used
• Phone (CFPB listing): 888-748-3281, the legacy Social Intelligence number
• Phone (Fama's own site): (877) 550-0629, published as a sales line, Monday to Friday
• Candidate contact: a web form at fama.io/candidates for people who have received notice from a potential employer about a report
• File copy and data removal: privacy@fama.io, which the privacy policy identifies as the way to see a copy of a report created about you

What is missing is as important as what is there. The successor's candidate page is a form with no mailing address, no phone number, no email, no identification requirements, and no stated timeline, and its own explainer on handling a screening dispute gives none of those either. Put your dispute in writing, send it by mail to the Santa Barbara address with tracking and by email to privacy@fama.io, and keep dated copies of everything. If you never received a copy of the report, ask for the file first and say so plainly in the letter.

Where the CFPB's official directory is out of date

The CFPB's list of consumer reporting companies is the directory consumers are told to use, and on this entry it no longer matches reality on three checkable points. Source

• The report-request link is dead. The directory points consumers to a socialintel.com page to request their report. That domain now redirects to a generic privacy policy on fama.io, which is not a file-disclosure mechanism.
• The phone numbers do not match. The directory carries the legacy 888-748-3281 number; the successor's own site publishes only a sales line.
• The product description may no longer describe the product. The directory describes screening "powered by a team of FCRA-trained analysts who can identify wholly human patterns like parody, context, sarcasm, or innuendo so that nothing is misinterpreted or falsely attributed to an employment candidate." The successor's current product page describes an automated system searching roughly 10,000 online sources with a compliance filter, and mentions no human analyst step. Source

None of that is proof of wrongdoing. It is a reason not to treat the federal listing as current, and a reason to document exactly which channel you used and when.

Common social-media screening errors we see

Social-media screening fails differently from criminal-records screening. The record is not a court file; it is a pile of public posts, and everything depends on whether the right person said the thing and whether the reader understood it.

Wrong-person account attribution

Searches are seeded with whatever identifiers the employer supplies — name, school, email address, city. Common names, recycled handles, and abandoned or impersonated accounts all produce the same result: someone else's online life reported as yours. Expanding to thousands of sources widens the net without necessarily improving the ability to tell two people apart.

Satire, quotation, and shared content read as your own speech

This is the hard problem the product was built to solve, and the CFPB's own description concedes it — the point of the human analyst was to catch parody, context, sarcasm, and innuendo "so that nothing is misinterpreted or falsely attributed." A retweet, a quoted screenshot you were criticizing, a song lyric, a joke, or a comment left on someone else's post can all be reported as a statement you made.

Old posts, and the seven-year conflict

Contemporary reporting on Social Intelligence disagreed about what "seven years" meant, and the disagreement was never resolved publicly. One 2011 account described a file that "will last for seven long years" — a retention period. Another, expressly correcting it, said the company "doesn't store seven years worth of your social data. Rather it looks at up to seven years of your history, and stores nothing" — a lookback window. Both readings are in the record and we publish both. The successor publishes no retention period today, saying only that legal or contractual requirements may require limited retention. Either way, something you posted as a teenager can surface as though it described you now.

Protected-class information that slips past redaction

Redaction was central to the original pitch: reports were supposed to black out anything revealing race, religion, national origin, disability, or other protected characteristics — in one journalist's test, even images of his hands. Written EEOC testimony submitted by attorney Renée Jackson on March 12, 2014 described the industry practice the same way, saying leading providers "redact information regarding an applicant's protected class status before providing the report to the employer, which can help insulate employers from discrimination liability." Source Redaction is a filter, and filters fail. When one fails, the employer sees information it is not allowed to consider and cannot un-see.

The accuracy of a judgment call

Unlike a conviction date, a flag for "aggressive" or "sexually explicit" content is an opinion about tone and intent. The company's own founder acknowledged the subjectivity, saying that because the reviewers were human beings they could "discern to the best degree possible" what explicit meant. The FCRA's maximum-possible-accuracy standard still applies to a report whose core output is that kind of judgment — and the FTC said as much in 2011.

From human analysts to automated review

The federal directory still describes trained human analysts; the successor's current product page describes an AI system with a compliance filter. We verified that the two descriptions differ. We did not verify current staffing, so we raise this as an open question rather than a finding: if the human review layer that justified treating these judgments as reliable has changed, that is directly relevant to whether a flag about your tone or intent is accurate. It is a fair thing to ask in a dispute letter.

How a social-media screening error hurts you

These reports usually reach the employer after a conditional offer, at the point where a single flag can end the process quietly. You rarely get to see the post that was cited, and "cultural fit" is an easy explanation for a withdrawal nobody wants to document. The damage is compounded because the accusation is about character rather than about a record — an employer who believes you posted something violent or bigoted is not going to reconsider on its own. That is exactly why the FCRA gives you the right to obtain the report, dispute what is wrong, and require the reporting company to investigate.

Social Intelligence's track record with regulators

Social Intelligence's regulatory history consists of one 2011 FTC matter that is very widely misdescribed, and nothing else that we could locate. There is no CFPB enforcement action, no FTC enforcement action, no state attorney general action, and no reported data breach that we found for either Social Intelligence or its successor. The rest of this section explains the 2011 matter, because getting it right matters more than anything else on this page.

The 2011 FTC letter was a closing letter, not an approval

On May 9, 2011, Maneesha Mithal, Associate Director of the FTC's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, sent a letter to attorney Renee Jackson of Nixon Peabody LLP regarding Matter No. 112 3014. The letter confirmed that Social Intelligence was a consumer reporting agency subject to the FCRA and that it had to take reasonable steps to ensure the maximum possible accuracy of information reported from social networking sites. It then closed the investigation, stating that no further action was warranted at that time. Source

What the letter expressly did not do is just as important. On its face, it says the determination "is not to be construed as a determination that a violation may not have occurred," and it reserves the FTC's right to take further action as the public interest may require. That is standard language for the FTC's closing-letter library, which describes itself as the place the agency records instances where, after investigating possible violations, it decided against immediate enforcement action. Source

This gets over-read constantly. Trade press in 2011 reported it as the FTC saying "yes" to social-media background checks, and the successor company's own candidate FAQ today describes its processes as having been "formally reviewed by the FTC." A closing letter is not a review that ends in approval, it is not a safe harbor, and it is not a finding that the company complied with the law. The letter says so itself. If you are told that a social-media screening product was FTC-blessed in 2011, read the letter.

What FTC enforcement actually looked like

The contrast makes the distinction unmistakable. Roughly a year after the Social Intelligence letter, the FTC brought a real enforcement action against a different online data company: United States v. Spokeo, Inc. produced a complaint for civil penalties and a stipulated consent decree with an $800,000 payment, on allegations that the company marketed consumer profiles for employment screening without complying with the FCRA. Source In February 2012 the FTC also sent warning letters to marketers of mobile background-check apps, and even there it was careful to say it had made no determination whether those companies were violating the FCRA. Source Enforcement action, warning letter, closing letter: three different things, and only one of them involves the agency concluding anything against a company.

An empty docket and zero complaints — read carefully

We found no federal FCRA case naming Social Intelligence in the federal docket index, and no CFPB consumer complaints against Social Intelligence or its successor. Neither fact is a clean bill of health. Federal docket coverage does not include state-court filings or private arbitrations, and screening companies' agreements frequently compel arbitration, so disputes can exist without ever appearing on a docket. Zero CFPB complaints is largely a routing artifact: a job applicant who is rejected over a social-media flag rarely thinks to file a consumer-reporting complaint with a financial regulator, so nothing gets recorded. Read the empty record as an absence of data, not as evidence of accuracy.

Your rights under the Fair Credit Reporting Act

A social-media screening company is a consumer reporting agency, and the FCRA applies in full. It must use reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy of what it reports about you (§1681e(b)) — a standard the FTC applied to this exact company in 2011. It must reinvestigate what you dispute and delete or correct what it cannot verify (§1681i). Where a report for employment purposes includes public-record information likely to have an adverse effect on you, it must either notify you at the time or maintain strict procedures to keep that information complete and up to date (§1681k). And before an employer rejects you based on the report, it must give you a copy of the report and a summary of your rights (§1681b(b)(3), the pre-adverse-action requirement) — which is your best chance to see the flagged content before the decision is final.

How to dispute a social-media screening report

1. Ask the employer for the copy of the report and the summary of rights it is required to provide, and note the date the report was produced.
2. Request your file in writing from Fama Technologies as the successor to Social Intelligence, identifying the report by employer and approximate date.
3. Identify every item that is not yours or is mischaracterized — the account, the post, the quotation, the context — and gather proof such as account records, screenshots showing the original context, and identification.
4. Dispute in writing, by mail with tracking to 735 State Street, Suite 211, Santa Barbara, CA 93101 and by email to privacy@fama.io, and keep a dated copy of everything you send.
5. Ask the employer to hold its decision during the reinvestigation — and if the report is not corrected, or it already cost you the job, contact an FCRA attorney.

This information is general and is not legal advice for your specific situation.

Did an inaccurate Social Intelligence report cost you a job?

Social-media screening reports are consumer reports under the FCRA, and the companies that produce them have to follow strict accuracy rules. If content that was never yours, a joke read as a threat, or a post from years ago was reported as a reason to reject you, and it cost you the job, you may be entitled to money damages — and our review is free.

How The Kim Law Firm helps

We are consumer-protection lawyers who handle FCRA cases nationwide. We help people whose social-media screening report is inaccurate — an account that is not theirs, someone else's speech attributed to them, satire or a quotation read as a sincere statement, stale content presented as current conduct, or protected-class information that surfaced when it should have been filtered out. We do not help people trying to hide their own accurate conduct.

Admitted in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; available to appear pro hac vice in other federal courts.

Because this company was acquired, part of the work is procedural: identifying the right entity to serve a dispute on, establishing which company produced the report and when, and making sure the employer's own adverse-action obligations are on the record. We pursue the correction and any damages, and you do not pay unless we win.

What a screening report is allowed to contain

Not everything that is true and findable belongs in an employment report. The Fair Credit Reporting Act restricts how far back certain adverse items may reach, and separate federal and state law limits what an employer may consider at all — protected characteristics, political activity, union organizing, lawful off-duty conduct. Social media screening runs directly into these limits, because a person's public feed reveals religion, national origin, disability, pregnancy and political opinion whether or not anyone went looking for them.

• Ferretly — scanning public social media activity and sorting what it finds into red-flag categories.
• Fama — a Los Angeles company analyzing applicants' online activity for employers.
• HireRight — a national screener selling social media screening alongside record searches.
• Sterling — another large vendor whose product range covers the same ground.
• Checkr — a high-volume platform screener supplying reports to employers at scale.

Request the report and read what was actually included, not just the conclusion. Content that reveals a protected characteristic, activity outside the permitted reporting period, or material the vendor's own methodology says it filters but plainly did not, are all worth raising. Where the company that produced the report has since been acquired, the dispute goes to the successor, and it inherits the obligation to investigate what the original report said.

Screened by a different company? We also handle Fama social media screening errors, Ferretly social media screening errors, and Checkr background check errors — and you can start with our overview of the major background check companies.

Frequently asked questions

How do I dispute a Social Intelligence background check?

Because Fama Technologies acquired Social Intelligence in 2023, send the dispute to Fama at the Santa Barbara address and to privacy@fama.io, identify the report by employer and date, explain exactly what is wrong, and attach your proof. Ask the employer for its copy of the report at the same time.

The screening company says my report is still being reviewed — can a delay violate the FCRA?

It can. Once you dispute, the FCRA generally requires a reinvestigation within about 30 days, and an employer that lets an offer lapse while a wrong report goes uncorrected can create its own exposure. Write down every date and every response you get.

Did the FTC approve social-media background checks in 2011?

No. The May 2011 letter was a closing letter, not an approval and not an enforcement action, and it states on its face that it is not a determination that no violation occurred. It also confirmed that the company was a consumer reporting agency required to assure maximum possible accuracy.

Can I sue over a social-media screening error?

Possibly. If inaccurate or misattributed content was reported about you, a dispute was not properly reinvestigated, or the pre-adverse-action rules were ignored and you were harmed, you may have a claim against the reporting company, the employer, or both.

What if the report already cost me the job?

That concrete loss is what the FCRA exists to address. Keep the offer letter, the rejection or withdrawal notice, the report, and all correspondence, and contact us.

Is the case review really free?

Yes. There is no charge and no obligation, and you pay nothing unless we win.

Where we practice, and what to do if you are somewhere else

The Kim Law Firm is licensed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and that is where we handle matters directly.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act is a federal statute. It applies the same way in every state, it is enforced in federal court, and the deadlines and remedies do not change when you cross a state line. So the answer to "does this apply to me in Ohio" is yes — but the answer to "can you represent me in Ohio" depends on the case and on where it would be filed.

If you are outside Pennsylvania and New Jersey, contact us anyway. Some matters can be handled from here. Some are better sent to a consumer lawyer admitted where you are, and we will tell you that plainly rather than let a deadline run while you wait. Either way you will get an answer, and the review costs nothing.

The one thing that does not wait is the clock. A claim under the Act generally must be brought within two years of the date you discover the violation, and in no event more than five years after the violation occurred. Finding out late does not extend the outside limit.