Can you really implement self-surveillance on social media?

Waz and Bruno define self-surveillance as the attention one pays to one’s behavior when facing the actuality or virtuality of an immediate or mediated observation by others whose opinion he or she deems relevant - usually, the observers of the same or superior social position . For example, we may control ourselves from sharing certain posts on Facebook fearing that our friends might not like it. Sometimes, we scroll back through our timeline and delete any embarrassing posts that we’ve made in the past before someone else finds it and trolls us. It can be seen as censoring oneself or controlling oneself. You may control yourself from consuming harmful substances because you know they’re unhealthy.

Self-surveillance is very important for celebrities who are active on social media. If a celebrity makes a statement, she must ensure that she has not made even a slight negation of that statement in the past. Else, she’d be charged with hypocrisy and get trolled. Media outlets today have people dedicated to scrolling through a celeb’s tweets. Once a malicious tweet is found, an entire article is written on it exposing the celeb. The article is carefully framed to attract readers and gain virality. The readers usually don’t see how old the malicious tweet is and assume that it is a recent one.

To illustrate, let us consider the case of stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra. Kamra is known for his anti-authoritarian humor and has been attracting a lot of hate from right-wing activists. Recently, his haters furiously retweeted old tweets wherein he made dark jokes on Muslims. Not only was he criticized by his followers for being offensive, but also lost a lot of them. To avoid further damage, he was forced to deactivate his Twitter account. After the backlash subsided, he reactivated his account offering an explanation. He claimed they were very old tweets he made before gaining popularity, and his thoughts have matured over the years

Kunal Kamra's Youtube channel

Right-wing news outlet OpIndia's article exposing Kamra

How would a celeb avoid such situations? She can have control over what she says in the present, but what about the past? This is where self-surveillance comes in. Celebs have hired PR teams to take care of their accounts. PR teams conduct regular checks of the account and see to it that there are no trailing malicious tweets. However, if such tweet is found by trolls before the PR team does, deleting it would be of no help as screenshots are taken. You could delete the tweet and claim that the screenshot is doctored, but that might not help either, because of Wayback Machine - which could be storing your tweets.

Wayback Machine, in layman terms, is a storehouse of web pages. It sends out bots to crawl across the Web and take snapshots of whatever they see. Suppose you made a malicious blog post 10 years back and shared the link on Facebook. No one has read it then as you weren’t popular. Now you are a celeb, and realize that you made a stupid blog post years ago, so you delete it. When I grab hold of the link you shared via FB and click on it, I’d not find any content as you deleted the post. However, if I search for the same link on Wayback Machine, I’d find your content as at some point of time a crawler would’ve taken a snapshot of your page. I could use this to expose you. Methods of exposing using this technology are being explored nowadays in Indian media. Web pages use a robots.txt file to avoid being crawled upon.