SOCIAL MEDIA SURVEILLANCE AND STATE CONTROL: A CROSS-COUNTRY ANALYSIS

Abstract

Social media has emerged as a space for political expression and also a significant monitoring and control area by the state. This paper examines social media surveillance through a computer science lens, considering it a multi-layered technical system that includes traffic control at the network level, identity and content requirements at the platform level, AI-powered analytics, and enforcement systems. The paper is based on empirical data from the 2022 Freedom on the Net (FOTN) dataset to build a cross-country comparative framework that spans eight countries with significantly different scores on internet freedom, ranging from the United States to China, Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Turkey, India, Brazil, and others. The analysis visualizes the known surveillance infrastructure of each country on a four-part technical map, which breaks down into network infrastructure, platform and identity, analytics, and AI, and finally enforcement. The paper shows that the level of technological sophistication of a state's surveillance stack, in terms of its ability to conduct deep packet inspection, to link people to real names or biometric data, and to classify contents automatically, is a better predictor of the suppression outcomes of citizens than regime type alone, and that centralized internet exchange points (IXPs) constitute a key technical choke point through which states can control their citizens, regardless of their type of regime. The paper concludes with considerations of the technical and policy compromises between national security goals, platform governance and digital civil liberties.