Online exposure produces paranoia that redraws the boundary between government and public surveillance.

Evidence

‘To be honest, I have slowed down with my openness on Twitter because I feel very unsafe, I feel very vulnerable. There was a time I felt so vulnerable just being in the UK because of my Twitter account. I became paranoid, that everybody might be watching me, the government, people, everyone really.’ (Bilal) ‘The only thing that the government is after is intelligence. — Irene Zempi and Imran Awan, Islamophobia, 249

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The collapse of state and civilian watchers into one indistinguishable gaze — ‘the government, people, everyone really’ — is a genuinely novel formulation of how surveillance dissolves social trust rather than merely restricting speech.
• XREF: Echoes the Islamophobia-in-America material on state policing of Muslim speech producing self-censorship; also resonates with Orwell’s surveillance-of-family-life reading discussed in ‘Along the Archival Grain.’