SOCIAL MEDIA PROFILING: A PANOPTICON OR OMNIOPTICON TOOL?

Online Social Networks and Media indicate and incorporate the shift to interpersonal, horizon-tal, and mutual communication and, thus, information aggregation. Online content (namely YouTube videos and comments or Tweets) along with online relations (friendships, followings, mentions, comments etc.) may be crawled and utilized for a variety of purposes including u-ser/usage profiling and behavior prediction. In our previous research we have demonstrated that it is possible and even potentially trivial (by utilizing a simple personal computer and a broad-band internet connection) to extract sensitive, personal information such as political beliefs, psychosocial characteristics (narcissism and predisposition towards law enforcement) etc. abo-ut social media users in an automated manner via data crawling, data aggregation, machine learning and graph and content analysis of the collected dataset of YouTube and Twitter Open Source Intelligence. Web 2.0 technological features combined with voluntary exposure to an indefinite audience in social media give rise to traditional surveillance as Government is enabl-ed to connect the dots, combine information about political beliefs and every-day activities and generate mass user profiles on the base of identifying patterns. Despite the lack of centralized control over the Internet, its platforms and applications allow multilevel and latent surveillance, thus pose new risks for individuals by forming new power relations and asymmetries. Our re-search highlights how Web 2.0 and social media (YouTube and Twitter) may become a topos of participatory panopticism, an omniopticon in which the many watch the many, and can re-construct sensitive information out of seemingly anonymous data/content. Individuals may be confronted with social exclusion, prejudice and discrimination risks both in their workplace and in their social environment. In our paper we focus on the results of this type of surveillance which facilitates the exculpation of such penetrating and privacy-violating technologies and amplifies the threshold of societal tolerance towards a panopticon-like state of surveillance