Watching the Watchers: Commercial Surveillance and Public Scrutiny

Online political discourse increasingly takes place on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which have primarily apolitical user bases. These new mixed-use online spaces, which support encryption and user pseudonymity, can often be difficult for states to control, because states cannot readily determine who is a user, what they are saying, or with whom they are communicating. This new reality has forced an evolution in online information control practices: censorship of content, where still possible, is supplemented with surveillance to identify and arrest or monitor undesirable users. This type of surveillance often requires measurable interventions with a target's environment, such as inducing a user to click on a link, open a file, or otherwise unwittingly reveal information to an inspector. This paper argues that the commercialization of these surveillance tools and techniques makes these interventions appear substantially similar, and thus opens up ‘inspectors’ to greater scrutiny by activists.