From “Twitter Revolutions” to “Black Lives Matter,” digital communication technology has changed political activism. On the one hand, technologies can help political activists stand up against oppressive governments and exploitative companies. On the other hand, when speaking up, these users face increasing challenges in protecting their online privacy. Critical scholars argue that in a digitized world, preemptive mass surveillance has become the new modus operandi ignoring the legal principle of probable cause. In such a surveillance society, political activists’ privacy is under high pressure. Political activists need considerable skills to navigate this tension, and these skills remain under-researched. We interviewed political activists in Germany, Switzerland, and France to explore how political activists use digital technology in their activism, how they experience surveillance, and how they protect their privacy online. Results show that digital technology has become crucial for political activists, but is attached to wide-ranging surveillance threats that are experienced as opaque, unlawful, and oppressive. The interviewed activists respond with sophisticated privacy protection, which is a time-consuming, complicated task that requires advanced internet skills. These skills and strategies they employ to counter surveillance have a wide range of social implications, such as lower transparency of social movements or activists' self-censorship in the form of chilling effects.

Yik Yak is a hyperlocal social media platform that allows users to post short messages anonymously and to upvote, downvote, and comment on the messages posted by others. Hyperlocal anonymous apps such as Yik Yak are popular on many college campuses, and critics of these apps often point out that the apps can frequently serve as sites for various forms of cyber-bullying (Liu and Sui 2016) and for the blatant expression of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other toxic attitudes (Martin and Sharp-Grier 2016). However, these apps also can function as a space for students to vent frustrations, call out problems, or create moments of connection and solidarity without the pressure of being immediately visible and recognizable. This form of online anonymity may be particularly valuable for students who are members of visibly minoritized, marginalized, and/or underrepresented groups in the context of small, rurally located, wealthy, and predominantly white institutions. My current research project is an ethnographic study on students’ use of Yik Yak at one such institution, Redacted University. The project focuses on the following questions: why and how do students choose to seek online anonymity? How does Yik Yak fit into the broader social media landscape and university context that students navigate on a daily basis? What are the benefits and drawbacks of online anonymity for underrepresented students in particular?

The growing deployment of automated facial recognition technology invites consideration of the broader implications of a world in which automated systems link automated mass-individualized recognition with automated and customized response. This paper draws on a case study of the marketing and deployment of facial recognition “solutions” during the COVID-19 pandemic to develop a theoretical approach to the prospect of the widespread deployment of automated real-time recognition “at-a-distance.” To do so it builds on and adapts the Foucault inspired work on “environmentality” – a form of governance that intervenes not at the ideological level, through the milieu of the surrounding environment. Drawing on data from several industry trade shows, we consider the forms of “environmental” governance envisioned by those developing and deploying the technology for the purposes of security, risk management, and profit. We argue that the “contactless culture” that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic anticipates the normalization of a form of mass customized biopolitics: the ability to operate on the population and the individual simultaneously via automated forms of passive identification. This form of governance relies not just on machinic recognition, but on the real-time reconfiguration of physical space via automated access controls and the channelling of both people and information.