Monitoring social media and protest movements: ensuring political order through surveillance and surveillance discourse

ABSTRACT

Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are often claimed to be central in their role as a facilitating medium for contemporary protest movements. Protestors are able to coalesce around particular keywords such as found in the use of ‘hashtags’ on the SNS Twitter, while sympathetic audiences across the globe are able to follow events in real time. While the role of Twitter use in protests has been celebrated as a means of reducing the information asymmetry between protestors and police, this article problematises this view by exploring the ways in which social media data are beneficial to law enforcement agencies and the state. The article examines the extent to which intelligence agencies are able to monitor activists, drawing on the Edward Snowden revelations of widespread SNS surveillance, and the ways in which internet users are altering their online activities as a result of the revelations. Far from challenging the state, social media use and the data it provides offer the state a multitude of resources to extend its reach and to ensure political order.

KEYWORDS:

• Surveillance
• social media
• social movements
• protest policing
• information asymmetry
• repression
• securitisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See Jarman (2014) for a discussion on the use of ‘kettling’ and other forms of detention without arrest in relation to the increased securitisation of protesters and protest movements.