Privacy governing knowledge in public Facebook groups for political activism

ABSTRACT

Social media is increasingly used to share information about political issues and coordinate political activism. This paper examines privacy as governance in online knowledge sharing and organizing within the Day Without Immigrants, March for Science, and Women’s March movements. Structured by the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework, the study illustrates how rules-in-use creatively support appropriate information flows and govern information resources to balance community objectives and privacy. Interviews, contextualized by participant surveys and Facebook data, illustrate: the importance of (1) polycentric governance and (2) private decision-making in public Facebook groups used by activists, and (3) privacy protecting institutions governing common knowledge resources shared within and across movements.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movements
• social media
• politics
• surveillance/privacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo

Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo is a Postdoctoral IT Policy Scholar at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University and a former fellow of the Information Law Institute at NYU. She empirically studies governance of sociotechnical systems, as well as outcomes, inequality, and consequences within these systems, through mixed method research design. Her forthcoming book, Governing privacy in knowledge commons (co-edited with B. Frischmann and K. Strandburg, 2020), examines privacy as governance, as well as rules-in-use designed to support appropriate flows of personal information in a diverse series of case studies.

Katherine J. Strandburg

Katherine J. Strandburg, Alfred Engelberg Professor of Law and Director of the Information Law Institute at NYU, is an expert in information law, patent law and innovation policy. Her research considers the legal and policy implications of automated decision-making algorithms, of user and collaborative innovation, and of the interactions between innovation and privacy regulation. Her forthcoming book Governing privacy in knowledge commons (co-edited with B. Frischmann and M. Sanfilippo, 2020), continues her investigation of knowledge commons, developed throughout her earlier work in Governing medical commons and Governing knowledge commons.