They Are Watching, Are You Behaving?

Published in

thecontextmag

6 min readOct 9, 2020

Have you ever disagreed with a popular Instagram post or a trending Twitter hashtag? Felt afraid of offending someone by saying something in disagreement? Chosen to stay silent and not engage, not because someone told you to, but because you felt like you couldn’t? Well, this isn’t some accidental harmless feeling but a phenomenon that is plaguing the world and its people, triggered in part by the rise of surveillance. A phenomenon that many consider the doom of democracy: self-censorship.

Public opinion, or the “voice of the people” is an age-old concept that has stood the test of time. A great power lies behind this seemingly mundane occurrence, a power that can shape national policy through simple observations, thereby controlling the trajectory of political happenings. It doesn’t mean that every politician is going to listen to the populace, but even the most detached politician cannot afford to upset a majority of the population. This makes people and their own individual opinions one of the strongest core facets of democracy, thereby making self-censorship a hindrance to the proper functioning of such a state.

Ever since Edward Snowden’s giant curtain reveal on the National Surveillance Agency and its “intelligence work” in the United States, surveillance, digital or otherwise, has become a heavily discussed subject. The NSA was accused of collecting insurmountable data on all of its citizens, an accusation that followed through with a guilty verdict. Thanks to his role as a whistleblower, people across the world first realised that they were being watched, in every sense of the word. This prompted a chain of revelations around the globe, wherein various governments, like that of Iran, Australia, U.K. and Russia, were outed for surveilling their citizens without their consent, immediately transforming this into a worldwide crisis. Authorities often rely upon standard explanations along the lines of “to monitor illicit activities”, “to counter terrorism”, “to protect national security”, etc (“The Ethics (or not) of Massive Government Surveillance”, n.d.) in order to justify monitoring a large chunk of the population without their knowledge. Regardless of reasoning, it is necessary to call it what it is: mass or state-sponsored surveillance.

Courtesy of Srutika Sabu (https://chandrakari.com)

Almost immediately after this bomb was dropped, our collective bubble of obliviousness was pricked. The fear of being watched by an unknown, unfathomable entity became a staple of our lives, trickling into our unconscious. This fear soon sprouted another head and people became terrified of becoming targets of suspicion. Instantaneously, there was a sharp decline in Wikipedia searches related to terrorism. A 20% decline was seen in articles that had the terms “car bomb”, “al-qaeda” or “Taliban” (Greenwald, 2016). A few studies were cropping up, showing that people were less likely to search terms that might get them “in trouble” with the U.S. government. The “spiral of silence” is a psychological trend often spotted and cited in the case of social media, wherein people conceal unpopular opinions to fit in and not be socially isolated, thereby creating a difference between one’s social activity and actual beliefs. Surveillance adds a new layer, wherein most non-conformist ideas are concealed from others. Such studies, as done by Stoycheff, indicate that people who believe that they are being watched are more likely to behave submissively, and to comply with and conform to the status-quo (Turner, 2016). Much like the behaviour elicited from Bentham’s Panopticon, it means people don’t have to actually be constantly monitored, they just need to know that there are structures in place that make it possible, forcing them to walk on eggshells, paranoid of what they could get tied up in. Mental taxation arising from near constant vigilance.

More disturbingly, research has found that the reach of surveillance extended beyond the average citizen as well. As individuals that are more likely to emerge as dissenting voices, writers, journalists, academics, and activists tend to worry about this surveillance as well, with some going to great lengths to protect themselves. Some have been evading social media, dodging certain topics in conversations over the phone and on email, and hesitating to write about them in an act of self-censorship. A participant in a study stated that they would not broach topics in the same way today as they did in a pre-surveillance era, while another said they stopped covering issues of child abuse as they were fearful of how their digital footprint would look to another. This takes the issue from being solely about expression to the availability of information itself.

What we essentially see here is that even in the mildest of interactions, self-censorship is rearing its ugly head. A fear bred by mass-surveillance, it betrays an actual, rational risk of censorship and dire resulting consequences. It is a fear manufactured by censorship itself, to not only control one individual and their voice, but to make them an example and a warning to all who choose to go down the same path.

By examining our ground realities, we observe a fundamental shift caused by the fear of surveillance. Individuals belonging to ‘minority’ groups were and are the first to be targeted by acts of surveillance and hence exercise a greater degree of self-censorship over themselves. This makes it almost impossible to protect the rights of these people when the floor of discussion is inaccessible to them. In a reactionary effort by a few, there has been a rise in voices that promote greater amplification and inclusion of minority fears and affairs as well. Moreover, enhanced surveillance tools compound this issue. For example, facial recognition softwares has been used to spy on and later apprehend protesters, peaceful or otherwise, and have been used in both the Hong Kong riots as well as the anti-CAA/NRC protests in India. Many Indian lawyers, activists and journalists have come out and accused the government of violating their constitutional right to privacy by “spying” on them, decreeing it a witch-hunt and an attempt to silence dissent. And it has not ended there — real criminal charges, with material consequences, have been slapped on scholars like Dr. Anand Teltumbde, student activists like Umar Khalid, and journalists like Prashant Kanojia, vocal critics of the incumbent government. The stories of these men and of many others are meant to serve as stark warnings that mask a rather insidious agenda.

A democratic state is built upon its people, with public opinion and the right to express oneself laying the foundation. A world that allows mass-surveillance to thrive almost unregulated cannot be one where democracy coexists. The key reason why surveillance is craved by institutions and governments is because it has the power to radically change individual and collective behaviour, induce fear and elicit collective obedience, and limit the accessibility of information.

There is no reality now where surveillance can be done away with; which is why a collective understanding and empowerment needs to take place. As the saying goes, the power lies within the masses. We as a populace need to make ourselves more aware about issues that grapple our states and join the strong voices leading the fight and standing up to political giants. People, the true handlers of democracy, are more powerful than they realise. It is protests that have changed the world. Dissent drives development. Your voice matters: let nothing silence it. Not even yourself.

They Are Watching, Are You Behaving?

Written by Sarah Gazder