A Research Agenda for Social Media Surveillance

In comparing one type of information leak to another, a comedian portraying Julian Assange stated, “I give you private information on corporations for free, and I’m a villain. [Facebook creator Mark] Zuckerberg gives your information to corporations, for money, and he’s [Time Magazine’s] Man of the Year” (SNL 2010). The real Assange had much harsher words for Facebook, calling it “the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented” (Emmett 2011). Facebook is now synonymous with surveillance. Interpersonal, institutional, and other kinds of scrutiny take place on social media. Moreover, they interact with each other in ways that scholars and users are only beginning to understand. The full consequences of social media’s expansion remain to be felt. Uncertain conditions of visibility are a certainty on social media. In adopting a surveillance studies approach, this paper will examine the complex and multi-faceted nature of social media. Facebook and other social media are online services where users submit personal information for any number of reasons. Surveillance on social media involves numerous kinds of watchers. These include friends, family and employers, but also law enforcement agencies and those who control sites like Facebook. This paper reflects on the growth of social media services, and considers their implications for surveillance studies. It proposes a framework for understanding how social media brings together different social spheres, making a range of personal data from those spheres searchable and visible. It also considers two topics that warrant specific focus: investigative surveillance on social media and surveillance by social media developers themselves. This approach is aligned with a science and technology studies perspective that focuses on technologies as they are taken up in society (Grint and Woolgar 1997; Nye 2006). Such a perspective highlights the design stage as well as the circumstances surrounding technological growth. Facebook is perpetually redesigning itself, and its overall trajectory remains opaque to users. While scholars from various disciplines are studying social media, the increased visibility of personal information through services like Facebook makes them a crucial topic for surveillance studies. This perspective considers surveillance to be the focused and systematic collection of personal information (Lyon 2001). Moreover, the leak is the principal means by which information from one context migrates to other contexts. Leaks often result from malice or incompetence, but Facebook operates precisely to exchange information from one context to another. The leak becomes standard. Surveillance practices result in privacy violations (boyd 2008), but also compromised social relations, social sorting, and an ever-mutating political economy of personal information (Cohen 2008). Surveillance on social media comprises a range of activities, from casual, consensual sociality to covert scrutiny. We can distinguish between instances that are harmless and those that have devastating effects, but they operate on the same interface and use the same information. Moreover, harmless surveillance on social media can trigger harmful consequences, as sites like Facebook lift the boundaries separating peer sociality from large-scale information management and social sorting. This paper addresses social media more generally, with Facebook as its focal point. In less than eight years, Facebook has accumulated nearly one billion users (FB Statistics 2011). These users share their lives with each other, including over thirty billion pieces of content per month (ibid.). Facebook was launched for university students, A Research Agenda for Social Media Surveillance