This paper explores how two different startups, Flock Safety in the United States and Gabriel in Brazil, are directly involving communities in the infrastructuring of algorithmic surveillance. Both companies employ a platform for surveillance-as-a-service that allows law enforcement and community members to collaborate in establishing an ‘intelligent’ surveillance network in neighborhoods. Within the literature, the platformization of surveillance has mainly been interrogated across two levels: on one hand, scholars have discussed how platform logics continue to penetrate police work, while others have observed how platforms come with built-in logics of surveillance that affect everyday usage. The paper contributes to critical data studies with an empirical exploration of community participation in the platformization of algorithmic surveillance. In this process, not only does the reach and scope of surveillance expand, but platform logics reshape surveillance practices and renew power imbalances. While the rhetoric of community empowerment is pervasive throughout their marketing claims, these two surveillance platform businesses are directly integrating their data infrastructure with the surveillance state, diminishing the ability for communities to self-govern. This paper argues that the communities’ adoption of platform surveillance only fuels the capabilities of law enforcement to expand its access – but not full control over – algorithmic surveillance infrastructure and data. Communities themselves are restricted to the position of subscribers to a service, which does not allow them to fully govern or control how the platform is used.

While the nascent scholarly research on doorbell cameras reveals their myriad harms on users and non-users alike – disproportionately impacting those across gendered, classed, and raced lines – this scholarship largely takes on an industry frame. It focuses on the agendas and power asymmetries of Big Tech corporations and the State, such that the use of these tools is often relegated to that of a lack of agency, knowledge, or care for others. This project, however, centers the user to better understand the ways they experience and make meaning out of these tools. It examines a world where the use of doorbell cameras is experienced as a responsible and empowering investment – a world where this surveillance is a solution – in order to uncover the issues that it supposedly solves. Drawing on interview data, this study disrupts the dominant frames that characterize surveillance use, privileging, instead, the practices and narratives of everyday users. It finds that users enact a combination of defensive and symbiotic practices, ranging from the intensely self-protective to the community-based self-sacrificial, and that these practices are structured by both the user’s identity and the racial make-up of their neighborhoods. I argue that what lies at the core of these experiences is a critique of the institution of law enforcement, a response to community isolation, and a growing bidding war on the politics of safety in an information age.

Social media has transformed global tourism by amplifying visually-driven travel trends, particularly in high-risk natural environments such as aquatic locations and national parks. While prior research has explored the mental health effects of social media, less attention has been given to its real-world safety implications and capacity to lead to injury and death in the environment.

This study seeks to investigate how social media imagery and discourse may contribute to hazardous behaviours at popular aquatic locations, creating a rupture in traditional risk communication and safety governance, by analysing publicly available Instagram posts from the Meta Content Library, integrating content analysis of geotagged Instagram posts, discourse mapping of visual and textual elements promoting risk-taking, and sentiment analysis of user engagement.

The study is in its initial stages of development. Expected findings include the identification of patterns in high-risk content that receive significant engagement, the role of influencer culture in promoting dangerous behaviours, and gaps in current safety messaging that fail to counteract the allure of social media-driven tourism.

The governance challenge is exacerbated by a lack of collaboration between social media platforms, policymakers, and public safety agencies, leaving gaps in effective intervention strategies. Expected recommendations from this research include developing co-regulation strategies between digital platforms and local authorities, integrating safety warnings into platform interfaces, and leveraging machine learning algorithms to detect and de-emphasize hazardous content.

Perceiving dataveillance – the pervasive collection and analysis of digital traces – as salient can increase internet users’ sense of dataveillance and expectations of negative consequences from digital communication, leading to self-inhibited online use. This process, known as chilling effects, can limit participation in today’s digital society, where being online is a need and norm. Given these potential consequences, the conditions under which chilling effects hold require empirical attention. This study investigates whether need- and norm-based motives for digital communication mitigate the chilling effects of dataveillance, i.e., the effects of a heightened sense of dataveillance on self-inhibited digital communication. Drawing on uses and gratifications (U&G) and social norms research, we argue that users are motivated to engage in digital communication based on needs and perceived norms, reducing their susceptibility to chilling effects. Using survey data from a representative sample of Swiss-German internet users (N = 898), we conducted mediation, moderation, and moderated mediation analyses. Supporting the core chilling effects hypothesis, preliminary results revealed that higher perceived salience of dataveillance (driving one’s sense of dataveillance) and expected consequences from digital communication were significantly associated with self-inhibition in response to a sense of dataveillance. Contrary to expectations, need- and norm-based motives did not mitigate these relationships, suggesting the robustness of chilling effects. This novel work advances our limited understanding of chilling effects’ boundary conditions by integrating U&G and social norms approaches into chilling effects and user-centered dataveillance research. It provides representative evidence aligning with theoretical mechanisms of chilling effects.