Corporate Management of Visibility: Social Media and Surveillance

Abstract

Social media have been welcomed as arenas with the potential to provide civil society with increased possibilities for debating and publicizing business-society relations and holding corporations to account by ‘potentially increas[ing] the importance of individual citizens relative to corporations and their (functional/formally organized) stakeholders’ (Whelan et al., 2013: 778). However, what tends to be overlooked is the fact that the proliferation of social media also provides corporate actors with new possibilities for monitoring social movements that they consider a potential risk. Government surveillance of activists is well-documented in both scholarly research and the media (Juris, 2005). At the intersection of social movement and media studies, particularly, government monitoring of activists and protest activities in the wake of the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999 has been examined (e.g. Eagleton-Pierce, 2001; Juris, 2005; Kahn & Kellner, 2004), as well as the exposure of several undercover officers from London’s Metropolitan Police who infiltrated activist groups across Europe, primarily in the climate justice movement.¹ However, corporate monitoring of social movements remains significantly under-researched (Lubbers, 2012; Pickerill, 2003). In surveillance studies, recent research has started to critically address corporate organizations’ uses of the predictive capabilities of ‘big data’ from social media for identifying issues, contexts, events, and groups that could potentially damage their reputations (Andrejevic, 2014; Trottier & Lyon, 2012).