Activist self-surveillance strategies can backfire by arming police with the same data.

Evidence

These insights resonate with an important strand of critical data studies (Seaver 2018; Donovan 2017; Daniels and Gregory 2016), which have also challenged the disproportionate emphasis on the passivity of individual social media users under the shadow of surveillance capitalism. Jean Donovan’s (2017) work underlines the complexities of grassroots attempts to weaponize the politics of hypervisibility through the use of image and video data as an activist strategy. Donovan discusses the possibilities and the limitations of this strategy; she shows, for instance, how protesters in the Occupy movement actively engaged in practices of self-surveillance (producing a ubiquitous visual documentation of their rallies) to expose incidents of police violence, but in doing so they also made themselves more vulnerable to police departments that drew on the same data to support their own monitoring of protesters. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 188

Categorization

• FICTION: The two-way weaponization of self-documentation could seed a story about activists whose surveillance archive is turned against them.
• XREF: connects to: Behavioral modulation attempts backfire because the activity itself re-confirms the data relation’s power. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 140