Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Social media are used by billions of people every day. Social media may be a powerful tool for targeting and monitoring social activity of people online (e.g., detecting social events, tackling terrorism and violent extremism) (Lee et al., 2018). Social media are also interesting for political interference (Badawy et al., 2018; Specht & Ros-Tonen, 2017), bots for mining public opinion (Woolley, 2016), spreading fake news (Sivasangari et al., 2018; Steinebach et al., 2020), and radicalization activities (Tundis et al., 2020). Due to their potential for tackling various societal issues, social media may be seen by their users as a hunting ground prone to government surveillance (Watt, 2021). Governments may achieve this by involving internet service providers (ISPs) in their countries. ISPs are relatively easily influenced by governments as the latter have several leverages to do so, from legislation to more direct means (i.e., direct contact between government agencies and ISPs) depending on the country.
Another way to monitor social activities of social media users is to involve social media providers. Compared to ISPs, social media providers are not as easily influenced by governments around the world simply because their infrastructure is not limited to a single country, and they operate in various countries. For example, Facebook is headquartered in the US, and banned in countries, such as China, Iran, North Korea, etc. (Comparitech, 2021; Erdbrink, 2013; Talmadge, 2016). Therefore, social media providers may have more leverage to decide whether to aid governments in their endeavors or not than ISPs. If governments are not aided by social media providers, they may still be able to use their platforms for surveillance through infiltration. Although it is known that social media providers try to tackle the spread of fake news and political interference on their platforms, little is known regarding their response to such infiltration which may still fall under the umbrella of unauthentic behavior.
Besides governments, other actors are threatening social media users in the cyberspace as well. Cybersecurity incidents and privacy violations related to social media appear to be growing as high-profile incidents seem to emerge on a regular basis (Bordoff et al., 2017; M. Xu et al., 2018). For example, the hacking of Twitter in 2013, the hacking of LinkedIn and Myspace that surfaced in 2016, and Google Plus data exposure. Such cybersecurity incidents can have considerable consequences for social media users (Uldam, 2016). These cyberthreats are complemented by those enabled by social media providers themselves, such as the Facebook – Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. Facebook enabled third-party companies, such as Cambridge Analytica, to create apps that could capture private data of their users. Cambridge Analytica used this feature to target particular individuals based on their profiles (Isaak & Hanna, 2018). Although the policies of social media providers changed in a way that such privacy scandals may be harder to realize, social media is still free to use because their users' data is being sold to third parties in the background (Lutz et al., 2020). Essentially, the core business model of social media providers, surveillance or data capitalism (Lutz et al., 2020), did not change.