Surveillance as Providing Security and Invoking Insecurity: Social Media Sense-making and Narratives of U.S. Surveillance in 2020

This paper examines the intersection of state surveillance and protest to identify narratives of security and insecurity amongst the individuals of three social movements in the U.S. in 2020. The United States has a long history of utilising crisis narratives to increase state power and implement social control practices, one of the most common being surveillance measures. With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, we entered a new global crisis, and with it witnessed subsequent increases in surveillance, rooted in ideas of vaccination records and passports, contact tracing, and movement restrictions in order to protect the public (Newell, 2021). At the same time, several social movements were reaching new peaks, movements characterised by distrust of the government and spurred on by the idea that greater good could be achieved through resistance and defiance of government (Krishnamurthy, 2015; Hasen, 2020; Nyugen & Gokhale, 2022). With this paper I contrast several narratives of what security looked like in 2020. This first is the government narrative, rooted in ideas of collective good and inevitably concluding that individual privacy rights must give way to the collective right to security (Duncan, 2019, p.58). When paired with movements’ inherent distrust of government, this representation of security is not likely to be accepted by protestors. The other narratives develop from this distrust in government that connects our three movements: Black Lives Matter, Stop the Steal, and Operation Gridlock. Using tweets gathered across several 8-week periods throughout 2020, I perform discourse analysis to examine the conflicting discourses and narratives being created online by participants in these movements around ideas of security, surveillance and policing. In this examination I observe the various attitudes towards surveillance, the greater good, and the state as a positive or negative actor in the lives of the individual participants. Analysing these tweets, I aim to identify: 1) How do protestors create discourse in response to new surveillance technology? 2) What is the relationship between the aims of a movement and the micro-level frame construction and narrative creation of individual protestors? 3) How do protestors understand their role and relationship with politics considering their distrust of the government? In doing this, the paper witnesses the refusal of these movements to accept the state’s crisis narrative and their promotion of a new narrative of security, one where safety is found at a community-level and through resistance to the state, not reliance upon it. This observation offers an empirical contribution to social movement studies and political communication, suggesting that movements play a crucial role in community creation of narratives of security and safety, using social media to provide an alternative discourse field upon which to have these conversations.