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Record W4416189656 · doi:10.58445/rars.3402

Internet Surveillance and the Role of Social Media Companies

2025· article· W4416189656 on OpenAlexaff
Nishant Raj Sarraf

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Language
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicPrivacy, Security, and Data Protection
Canadian institutionsTrinity College
Fundersnot available
KeywordsThe InternetSocial mediaContext (archaeology)Key (lock)Internet research

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Social media platforms collect and analyze large amounts of user data.This enables pervasive surveillance that shapes attention, advertising, and civic life.This paper asks: How do individuals perceive social media surveillance?How do those perceptions relate to privacy behaviors and demographic factors?Building on existing literature about targeted advertising, platform design, and privacy harms, the study combines a technical review of social media infrastructure with an empirical survey.The survey used Google Forms, with 127 responses from August to September 2023.Survey measures were ordinal-coded and analyzed with pairwise exclusion for missing data.Results show 72.4% of respondents believe their activity is monitored.Half (50.4%) are "partially worried" about data being sold.About 68.5% have either deleted platforms or are considering doing so (27.6% deleted; 40.9% considering).Statistical tests indicate a significant association between gender and worry level ((8) = 21.091,p = .007,V = .228).The relationship between worry and deleting a platform approached significance ((12) = 19.027,p = .088,V = .137).Age was not significantly associated with worry.These findings challenge generational privacy indifference and support targeted interventions for gender-specific concerns. Introduction: Overview of Social Media SurveillanceSocial media apps have transformed how people form relationships, consume news, and construct their identities.This connectivity depends on systems that collect and analyze large amounts of behavioral and social data.Platforms focus on capturing attention and enabling targeted advertising.These commercial logics drive surveillance practices that shape political persuasion and civic life [1][2].Companies also share data with or respond to requests from state actors.This extends surveillance into governance and law enforcement [3].Scholars describe social media surveillance through distinct practices: collaborative identity construction, monitoring of social ties, searchable social relations, shifting interfaces, and combining diverse social contexts into single profiles [4].To understand how these elements contribute to surveillance, we can utilize the framework of contextual integrity.This highlights the importance of context and the proper movement of information in privacy.This framework illustrates how platform design fosters surveillance by disrupting contextual norms for information flow.This paper examines how users perceive social media surveillance and how these perceptions relate to privacy behaviors and demographic factors.The study combines a brief technical review of platform mechanisms with an anonymous survey.The survey was administered via Google Forms using snowball sampling (N = 127, August-September 2023).Survey items were ordinal-coded and analyzed with pairwise exclusion and chi-square tests.Key findings are concise.Most respondents (72.4%) believed they were monitored on platforms.Concern about companies selling information was moderate.In total, 50.4 percent reported partial worry, 22.0 percent expressed worry, and 7.9 percent expressed extreme concern.Protective intentions were common.About 68.5 percent had either deleted platforms or were considering it (27.6 percent deleted; 40.9 percent considering).Statistical tests show a

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.543
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.276
Teacher spread0.258 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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