Agency claims from subjects in closed systems - Legalposting on social media
Context
I wrote this about two years ago, and have been cleaning up my Obsidian vault in anticipation of a new academic venture that will require a lot of note taking... I came across this old self-blog and thought I'd host it here.
Stimulus
I was recently delivering a security awareness training session for a client I was delivering a Security Awareness Training for a client in 2023, and was hit with a question that took me back to about 2015; "Sometimes you see those facebook posts that declare that you don't give them permission to use your data and things like that - does that hold any water?"It blasted me back to when I would sit at my laptop as a 15 year old facebook user and see these armchair solicitors - in very good faith, copy and paste viral statements regarding the new exploitation of your information by facebook or twitter, and attempt to opt-out of it with a legalese-ridden post.
Other examples I could remember were just simple acts of attempting to withdraw consent to data capture:
My answer to this question at the training was that there is no granularity in your consent when you use digital platforms that provide social media services, and if you have signed the EULA (Which is going to have been a requirement for you to access the platform), then the platform owner and team are the only ones who have a say in the exploitation of the information you provide them.
Of course there are settings that can be configured to alter or modify your privacy settings, but these almost entirely relate to how your data can be used or viewed by other third parties - the owner-operator of the platform has free reign with your data for the most part. There are currently some options to supposedly opt-out of the use of your data in training the AI models of certain platforms. When looking into this, I found that there was a new example of the legal-post phenomenon relating specifically to revoking access to your data for AI training:
Reflection
Users who feel that there is any chance of being able to directly modify the data relationship the given platform has to them by posting something are declaring something quite important; They declare that they believe they are able to use the bounded system provided by the platform to modify or escape the system itself. This signals a belief in the agency the user thinks they have to express themselves on the platform, and that they think this digitally enabled speech is equivalent to a public announcement or legal declaration. Quite confusingly, it really rather does declare that the user ought not to have their data exploited by the platform - because they can't have made an informed decision to use the platform in the first place if they expect such a post to have any sort of impact.
It also exposes that for the most part - we (as in people) still don't understand the nuts and bolts of social media as a common-sense, and tend to treat it like a public commons or political sphere. Facebook is intuited by many as a digitisation of your persona for use with your professional and personal peer group. It is used to plan events, buy and sell, and make groups that mirror or imitate real world counterparts of such processes. These processes - in the real world, are defined by people's participation, not by the platform of facilitation. We assume too readily that their digital and artificial counterparts provide the same core 'features' or 'freedoms'. They do not. They are designed as a data service, and have no 'social mandate' outside of the fact that they're being used.
The perceived experience from service users of social media that you are acting as your authentic 'digital self' on these platforms instead of accessing a locked-down and for-profit business platform shows how much educational work is needed to correct the ongoing social-media cultural campaign to convince users that they are "expressing themselves authentically" on their platform.
It's tempting to quietly categorise the type of user who would post a "just to be safe" pseudo-legal notice as an older user, less understanding of technology and it's mechanics - but of course this would be inaccurate. Younger users who have grown up in a post-explanatory consumer electronic landscape are using social media as a primary communication platform in their peer groups. Instagram and Snapchat are generally held in mind as 'identity communication' toolkits. While the campaigns to inform users of the impact of social media tends towards the social impacts, it may also be worth starting to look at educating users on how harmful it is to spend a majority of your social time on for-profit, data-driven platforms that seek to produce a service user that entirely understands their political or personal identity as a set of declarations, hosted (sponsored/mandated/permitted) by a tech company, with trips to the TikTok shop to make purchases acting as proof-of-identity.
Average users are conditioned from the outset to build or produce a digital identity that relies on declaration - declarations of hobbies, interests, and 'hot takes'. It may well be this hyper focus on the individuation of politicking in digital spaces that put such a focus on identity politics over materialism amongst onliners when they get into the real world. The whole shtick of social media is that you have been given permission to identify and express yourself on the platform, and need only declare who you are (the louder and more frequently the better) in order to successfully 'be yourself'. The platform becomes the observer and mediator of identity claims in this case. Is it any wonder that this class of digital-first service users get a nasty shock when they discover the gilded cage they've found themselves in can't be opened with the very same positivist identity claims the platform tells them they're made up of?