Hybrid activism under the radar: Surveillance and resistance among marginalized youth activists in the United States and Canada

Abstract

Social media and digital platforms have become essential tools for the new generation of youth activists. However, these tools subject youth to both new (and old) forms of surveillance and control. Drawing on in-depth interviews and social media walkthroughs with 61 youth activists, I examine hybrid tactics that these youth employ to resist surveillance and other forms of digitally mediated control as they participate in politics and social movements. I show that even in democracies like the United States and Canada, for individuals along intersecting axes of marginalization (e.g. race, gender), public political acts do not capture the full range of young people’s political repertoires. Young people, especially those from marginalized groups, adopt hidden, under-the-radar tactics in response to pressures of social, state, and corporate surveillance. I develop the concept of “digital infrapolitics” referring to the ways in which digital politics and activism go below the radar under surveillance and control.

Keywords

Countersurveillance digital activism digital repression marginalized youth networked social movements social media surveillance youth political participation

Introduction

Across the globe, a new generation of youth is leveraging social media to participate in politics and social movements (Kahn et al., 2015; Jenkins et al., 2016). Black Lives Matter, March for Our Lives, the Youth Climate Strikes, and Hong Kong pro-democracy protests offer examples of the creative ways in which young people (and others) can use digital tools to connect with peers, create shared narratives, and mobilize allies and resources (Clark, 2016; Milkman, 2017). As the use of social media and other digital platforms create opportunities for new players and forms of assembly, such tools also subject youth to surveillance, censorship, and other forms of control (Benjamin, 2019; Costanza-Chock, 2012; Shresthova, 2016; Tufekci, 2017).

Surveillance has become a defining feature of young people’s lives. Growing up in the digital world, young people, whether they are aware or not—and whether they consent or not—are being surveilled one way or another. Young people are subjected to various forms of monitoring and surveillance when they attend school, use parent monitoring apps, sign onto health apps, or travel across national borders (e.g. Harwell, 2020; Keegan and Ng, 2021; Koreh, 2019). Fueled by the datafication of everyday life, this kind of pervasive surveillance is truly unprecedented in history.

In the political realm, digital tools and trails enable states and corporations to engage in surveillance of citizens and activists (Howard and Hussain, 2013; Tufekci, 2017). In a global trend toward “networked authoritarianism” (MacKinnon, 2013: 31), authoritarian policing practices in democracies are increasingly monitoring movements on digital platforms and targeting citizens with facial recognition systems and other surveillance technologies (Garvie and Moy, 2019; Owen, 2017). In 2020, the US Department of Homeland Security gathered aerial surveillance footage of Black Lives Matter protests (Kanno-Youngs, 2020). Black and brown youth, minority-led movements, and communities of color are particularly vulnerable to repressive policies and practices that involve surveillance technologies (e.g. Bellrichard, 2020; Crosby and Monaghan, 2018). For instance, the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programs in the United States incorporate social media surveillance and predictive algorithms to identify and track “at-risk” Muslim youth (ACLU, 2016). The CVE programs also task social service providers, teachers, and community members with monitoring these youth and reporting their activities to law enforcement (ACLU, 2016). Emerging surveillance practices augment older forms of surveillance and social control, and produce new forms of digital inequality and oppression (Browne, 2015; Noble, 2018).

In addition, young people are subjected to multiple layers of social surveillance, in which “people of relatively equal power are watching each other and acting on the information they find” (Marwick, 2012). For today’s youth activists, social surveillance may come from countless directions, including parents, peers, schools, counterprotesters, employers, communities, and so on. Surveillance is implicated in everyday power relations that young people encounter at home, at work, and in schools and communities.

Consequently, young activists’ digital practices may be circumscribed and conditioned by these intersecting forms of surveillance and control that converge in their everyday lives. Despite the important consequences pervasive surveillance can have on young people’s political lives and agency, relatively little is known about how young people navigate digital activism and politics under surveillance and repression, and how the consequences of surveillance may be differentially distributed across different groups of youth.

Youth organizing under surveillance

Studies of social movements and media offer some insights into how both old and new forms of surveillance may influence young people’s political repertoires. According to the political process model, the adoption and diffusion of tactics are influenced by variations in political opportunities and levels of repression (Costanza-Chock, 2003; Tarrow, 1994). For example, in the wake of 9/11, the passing of legislation constraining civil liberties (for the “war on terror”), together with the rising tide of nationalism, muted protests and disruptive tactics of all kinds (Costanza-Chock, 2003). In particular, the introduction of the Patriot Act limited the use of disruptive electronic tactics, a category of tactics that target the disruption of electronic sites, systems, or networks (Costanza-Chock, 2003). The Patriot Act incorporated clauses for life imprisonment for activists using disruptive electronic tactics against the government or corporations (Costanza-Chock, 2003).

In addition, how young people perceive the risks associated with surveillance and other forms of control should also matter for their political repertoires, as they adjust their tactics in response (Tarrow, 1994). In the post-9/11 United States, Shresthova (2016) finds that Muslim youth turn to humor to tread carefully between expression and silence in what they perceive as “precarious publics” (p. 150). Studies variously describe silencing, political disengagement, and chilling effects that digital surveillance can have on citizens and activists (MacKinnon, 2013; Tufekci, 2017).¹

Studies also document how changing forms of protest policing influence protest activities and collective action repertoires (Della Porta and Reiter, 1998). Earlier research about how protesters adapt their tactics in response to traditional forms of repression (Della Porta and Reiter, 1998; McAdam et al., 2001; McPhail and McCarthy, 2005) does not consider the influence of new forms of digitally mediated repression on protest tactics. The emergence of new technologies of control such as social media surveillance, facial recognition software, and data analytic tools is also changing how protest activities and collective action are policed around the world, with serious consequences for political life (Crosby and Monaghan, 2018; Garvie and Moy, 2019; Owen, 2017). Today, surveillance practices are spread across government authorities, commercial actors, and social institutions (e.g. family, education, and employment). This is in contrast to the traditional “panopticon” model of surveillance with its centralized structure of viewing and control (Foucault, 1977).

Infrapolitics: hidden resistance under repression

Scott (1990) argues that where there is power and domination, there is resistance. However, it is risky for subordinate groups to challenge the powerholders publicly. To resist publicly may be to risk immediate repercussions. Subordinate groups critique, challenge, and subvert powerholders behind their back, although they may appear acquiescent. Scott (1990) refers to this subversion of power that goes on offstage as “hidden transcripts.”

In his study of peasants and slaves in the pre-digital era, Scott (1990) goes on to describe a wide variety of low-profile resistance, which he calls “infrapolitics” (p. 183). Infrapolitics is a politics of ambiguity and disguise that takes place in the public view, and it relies on hidden transcripts that remain obscured from the view of powerholders. Infrapolitics remains hidden “like infrared rays, beyond the visible end of the spectrum” (Scott, 1990: 183). For example, the Malay peasants in Scott’s (1990) study spread rumors and gossip about their oppressors, rather than confront the powerholders directly. In this way, they give oblique expression to their hostility and aggression while shielding their identity. For powerless groups, everyday forms of resistance provide a means of building shared understanding and collective action (Scott, 1990). Therefore, to focus only on public political actions is to overlook the subtle but powerful everyday forms of resistance.

In this study, I examine vernacular forms of resistance under digitally mediated surveillance and control. Extending Scott (1990), I develop the concept of “digital infrapolitics.” Digital infrapolitics refers to the use of under-the-radar tactics in digital politics and activism. In an earlier study, I found that youth in an authoritarian regime adopt hidden, under-the-radar tactics on social media to engage in contentious politics without being caught or sanctioned by the government (Lee, 2018). These more private, hidden forms of mediated contention include tactics such as using coded images to expose corrupt government activities (Lee, 2018). The #MeToo movement in China used the coded hashtag #RiceBunny and emojis to circumvent censorship (Jun, 2020). A considerable amount is known about young people’s online political repertoires in liberal democracies under the conditions of a free press and robust civil society (e.g. Earl and Kimport, 2014; Jenkins et al., 2016). Less is known about how young people in democracies—especially marginalized youth—navigate networked publics under digitally mediated surveillance and other forms of control.

Infrapolitics goes hybrid: under-the-radar tactics in a hybrid world

Although technocentric accounts of contemporary activism and movements may maintain a singular focus on social media, activist tactics are often hybrid, tying together the digital and the physical, new and old tactics (see also Treré, 2018). Simultaneously, surveillance mechanisms are increasingly hybrid, spanning the physical and the virtual. For instance, during the George Floyd protests, the FBI tracked down a masked protester by triangulating across aerial surveillance footage, along with social media data from Instagram, Vimeo, LinkedIn, Poshmark, and Etsy (Dellinger, 2020).

Existing studies of youth and privacy offer important insights into how young people negotiate privacy of their social media content and online interactions in the social context (e.g. Marwick and boyd, 2011; Marwick et al., 2017; Vickery, 2015). For instance, Marwick and boyd (2011) show how youth manage the challenges of “context collapse” on social media by segmenting different audiences and staying away from certain kinds of public channels (Marwick and boyd, 2011: 114). Low socioeconomic status youth in Marwick et al. (2017) avoid social media, obfuscate their online posts, or self-censor on social media. Vickery (2015) finds that low-income, ethnically diverse youth turn to both non-use (or refusal) and the use of multiple platforms to resist context collapse. It is less clear how young activists respond to the hybrid dimensions of surveillance and repression as they engage in political action. For example, Hong Kong protesters responded to facial recognition systems by toppling surveillance lampposts in the physical world (Fussell, 2019).

The use of digital platforms has also structurally changed the ways in which movements, networks, and organizations coalesce and develop. While earlier collective action networks were organized around formal organizations, people now leverage digital media to form “connective action” networks (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012: 739). These networks remain structurally flat and center on personalized action frames with decentralized leadership (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012). The Internet also expands the possibilities for “network backchannels” where activists can engage in backstage communication (Karpf, 2012: 651).

All told, while the conception of networked publics has come to be largely associated with what is visible and overtly political, a more complete account of networked publics may require capturing the full spectrum of political action, from highly visible to strategically invisible or ambiguous. Even in democracies, public displays of political action may not capture the full range of digital civic action. In particular, individuals along various intersecting axes of marginalization (e.g. race, gender, socioeconomic status, and citizenship status) may experience heightened levels of repression (e.g. Muslim youth and Indigenous youth).

Therefore, drawing on empirical data from the United States and Canada, I address the following research question in this study: What hybrid tactics do a diverse sample of young activists adopt as they engage in politics under surveillance and other forms of control, and how, if at all, do these tactics vary across or within democracies?

Method

I conducted in-depth interviews, social media walkthroughs, and surveys with 61 youth activists in the United States and Canada (33 US-based; 28 Canada-based). The initial data collection took place between February and December 2019. Participants were involved in a range of progressive issues: climate change, racial justice, gun violence, gender equality, women’s rights, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) rights, immigration, voting rights, wealth inequality, access to education, worker rights, youth political engagement, Indigenous rights, healthcare, mental health, Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, and so on.

In both countries, I used purposive sampling, targeting diverse youth, aged 18 to 30, who considered themselves to be civically active and were engaged in social movements and politics. I selected young activists who use (or have used) social media extensively across a spectrum of issues and in various roles. Given my interest in diverse forms of political engagement as well as diverse experiences of surveillance and control, I oversampled youth from marginalized groups. My sample for each country consisted of diverse youth along the lines of race/ethnicity, gender, and socio-economic status. In the US-based sample, 16 self-identified as female; 13 as male; 2 as non-binary/gender non-conforming; 6 as members of the LGBTQ+ community; 7 as low-income; and 1 as a person with disability. In the United States, 2 participants identified as American Indian or Alaskan Native; 4 as Asian; 10 as Black; 7 as Hispanic or Latino; 2 as Middle Eastern/Arab/North African; and 15 as White/Caucasian.² In the Canada-based sample, 16 self-identified as female; 11 as male; 2 as trans/non-binary/gender non-conforming; 5 as members of the LGBTQ + community; 4 as low-income; and 1 as a person with disability. In Canada, two participants identified as Indigenous or First Nations; eight as Asian; four as Black; two as Hispanic or Latino; two as Middle Eastern/Arab/North African; and 12 as White/Caucasian. Many were from immigrant families. The US sample also included undocumented youth.

Each interview lasted, on average, 90 to 120 min. The interview guide included questions about participants’ life history, perception of the media landscape, information behavior, social media history, political participation (spanning on- and off-line), tactics, and support toward political participation. The interviews and surveys were conducted after obtaining informed consent from the participants.

The interviews incorporated social media walkthroughs. The walkthrough method is used to examine how users interact with an app (Light et al., 2018). I augmented the walkthrough method with visual methods to observe participants’ everyday use of social media platforms (Prosser, 2011). During the interview, participants were invited to walk me through their social media profiles and talk about digital artifacts they created as part of their activism. The visual artifacts served as dialogical tools to stimulate conversations about how participants appropriate social media platforms for political ends (Prosser, 2011).

Data collection and analysis took place in tandem, and analytical strategies were modified as new data and analyses became available. In line with the analytical strategy of the grounded theory, I developed coding categories inductively and refined them in parallel with data analysis (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser and Strauss, 1967). To protect the participants, all identifying data have been removed. All subject names used in this article are pseudonyms.

Findings

Youth activists’ tactics are often hybrid, tying together the physical and the digital tactics. Table 1 shows a typology of physical and digital tactics found among youth in the two democracies. Young people incorporate traditional, physical tactics such as school walkouts and rallies into their activism. In parallel, young people use digital tactics such as virtual rallies and online petitions, either as standalone tactics or as a way to complement the physical tactics. Together, the physical and digital tactics comprise the repertoire of youth “hybrid” activism.

Table 1.

Youthful repertoires of contention: a typology of hybrid tactics

Visibility	Hybrid activism and tacticsSpans (1) and (2)
Visibility	(1) Traditional/physical tactics(Examples)	(2) Digital tactics(Examples)
Publicly Visible	Petitioning Demonstrations Strikes Sit-ins Teach-ins Rallies School walkouts Site occupations Boycotts *See also Tilly (2006) for further discussion of this category of tactics.	Online political commentaries Creating political blogs, video, TikToks, etc. Online petitions Crowdfunding Email campaigns Virtual sit-ins Virtual rally Virtual teach-ins Hashtag takeover
Strategically Invisible, Disguised, or Ambiguous (Tactics Under the Radar)	Traditional infrapolitics such as: Anonymity Gossip Evasion Humor Songs, chants Feigned compliance Religious rituals and ceremonies Creating autonomous social space and dissident subcultures *See also Scott (1990) for further discussion of this category of tactics.	Digital infrapolitics such as: Coded communication on social media Organizing political meme groups and anonymous humor groups on social media Creating hybrid enclaves and closed groups Livestreaming rituals, memorials, and chants with political subtexts Using pseudonyms, anonymous accounts, or group accounts to participate in disguised resistance or hidden networks

The typology also reveals a whole realm of tactics that remains under the radar. Even in democracies like Canada and the United States, for individuals along various intersecting axes of marginalization (e.g. race, gender, socioeconomic status, and citizenship status), publicly visible tactics do not capture the full spectrum of their political action. Young people strategically adopt under-the-radar tactics that keep their political acts partially or wholly hidden in response to the pressures of state, corporate, and social surveillance.

In Lee (2018), I have shown that the use of under-the-radar tactics—or “digital infrapolitics”—is particularly salient among youth in a repressive regime. In the current study, I find that even in liberal democracies, young people, especially those from marginalized groups, adopt under-the-radar tactics that are comparable to those I found in a nondemocratic country. In the United States and Canada, such tactics coexist with publicly visible forms of contention. Table 1, therefore, situates digital infrapolitics within the larger spectrum of visible and strategically invisible tactics that young people deploy. Youthful contention in democracies spans all four quadrants in what can be seen as “hybrid activism.”

Together, these findings offer insights into how young activists seek to exert influence on public issues using social media in highly contentious, high-risk political contexts. As Tarrow (1994) also highlights, these categories can overlap, and a given action may involve one or more categories of tactics. Nevertheless, typology remains a useful analytical tool.

Why youth take up digital infrapolitics or under-the-radar tactics: agency and resistance under surveillance

Young people report facing both new and old forms of surveillance and control in their activism. They experience multiple intersecting layers of surveillance including social, state, and corporate surveillance. Consequently, their hybrid tactics are circumscribed and conditioned by their experience and perception of these external forces.

In general, concerns about social policing and social surveillance—surveillance and monitoring coming from family, peers, schools, community, current, and future employers—are more salient in the two democracies than immediate concerns about state or corporate surveillance. This finding echoes earlier US-based studies, which suggest that young people express less immediate concerns about governments or corporations watching their online activities than individuals in their personal and professional networks (see also, Marwick, 2012; Marwick and boyd, 2011).

However, for youth from historically oppressed groups, who have been policed heavily and criminalized for political dissent (e.g. Muslim youth, Indigenous youth, and Black youth), concerns about state surveillance run high. Youth from marginalized communities are disproportionately targeted by both old and new forms of state- and police-sanctioned surveillance (e.g. physical policing and dataveillance; see also Benjamin, 2019; Stuart, 2021). Youth from marginalized communities express a deepening sense of anxiety and unease around their political visibility and police surveillance practices.

DeShawn (18), a Black American youth from a low-income neighborhood of color, is concerned about police brutality, while Alex (22), a gay Canadian youth, shares that he has experienced heightened policing in his LGBTQ activism. Youth organizers like DeShawn and Alex sense that the police recognize them through cross-analyzing data that circulate on social media, mass media, and facial recognition systems (see also Kanno-Youngs, 2020; Owen, 2017). DeShawn was uneasy about a chance encounter with police officers who recognized him at a local Starbucks:

Just two days ago, I spoke to this media outlet about how police brutality is literally getting out of control . . . We posted like a whole video of me . . . And they [the police officers] looked at me, and they clearly recognized me, and I’m just like, hmm, well they can’t arrest me, I know my rights. I was like, hmm . . .

Although DeShawn tries to laugh it off, there is a sense of uncertainty and fear.

Alex thinks that such surveillance practices increase the risks of activism. When Alex organized an LGBTQ parade-within-a-parade to protest a xenophobic politician, he did not expect to encounter heightened and hostile police presence on every street corner:

[T]he police were watching me at one point, and they knew my face. And I have a friend who tells me like if he shows his face at events, the police already know who he is, and he’s like a leader of the Black Lives Matter protest. So yeah, I think it puts us more in danger.

Michael (23) who is involved in pipeline protests in Canada points to the lack of transparency around state surveillance: “[I]t’s this weird situation of sort of controlling risk without really knowing what you’re going against.”

Such concerns about surveillance do not necessarily stop young people from participating in activism. Here we may think of Foucault’s (1977, 1982) concept of “capillary power.” In the traditional model, power is conceptualized hierarchically as something that is “exerted over things” by powerholders as in the sovereign who exercises power over his subjects (Foucault, 1982: 786). In an alternate model of power, Foucault conceives of power as decentralized and omnipresent in all relationships (“capillaries of power”; Foucault, 1977, 1982). Similarly, resistance also becomes capillary, as surveillance becomes ever-present and fluid in the digital age. Resistance manifests through alternate channels, and digital infrapolitics is one way in which capillary resistance takes place.

Key dimensions of digital infrapolitics

In this section, I turn to the ways in which these concerns about surveillance and control inflect young people’s repertoires of contention. My analysis reveals three dimensions along which digital infrapolitics manifests (Figure 1):

• Expression-based tactics: Engaging in hidden, covert, or coded expression

• Space-based tactics: Organizing and/or participating in hidden subcultural spaces, networks, or channels

• Role-based tactics: Taking up low-profile, disguised, anonymous, or pseudonymous roles

Figure 1.

Conceptual model of (in)visible repertoires.

Subsequently, I highlight each of these dimensions while being attentive to young people’s understandings of their own actions. To contextualize how youth deploy digital infrapolitics, I situate specific examples of digital infrapolitics in the broader scale of hybrid tactics.

Hidden expression—between the lines

Political expression can range from overtly political, public expression to covert, strategically ambiguous, seemingly non-political expression. Compared to tactics reported in Lee (2018), I find a wider range of expressive tactics on the visible-to-invisible spectrum in democracies. There is also a wider gray area in which young people mix and match highly visible tactics with strategically ambiguous, less visible expressive tactics.

Aisha (Black, 19, United States), for one, uses both visible and hidden expression tactics. A high school senior in a major metropolis in the northeastern United States, Aisha is currently working on making her Feminist Club a more intersectional space: “Everyone in the room is cis-gender. I don’t know if like trans women have been feeling welcome into this space . . .” Although she is publicly visible about LGBTQ advocacy at school, she has religious family members and family friends on Instagram who are not accepting of LGBTQ identities. On her Instagram, her family friends and relatives have formed a kind of parent monitoring network.

Rather than being silenced, Aisha resorts to “subtle, coded” communication in order to bypass their watch when engaging in LGBTQ advocacy on Instagram:

So it’s like, I am not able to like be completely honest about that [LGBTQ issues] . . . I try to support in subtle, coded ways. It was on Trans Visibility Day, and like I have close friends who are transgender. So it’s like basically, I was trying to say that they are valid . . . I tried to like use the transgender flag.

To someone who may not be familiar with the colors of the transgender flag (Figure 2), the pastel colors of Aisha’s fonts can be barely made out (Figure 3).

Aisha:

That’s the post . . . So like the blue, the pink, the white, the pink, the blue, white.

Interviewer:

I don’t see the pink.

Aisha:

Oh, sorry. Yeah, it’s like there’s a pink, yeah.

. . .

Aisha:

No really, I tried to be like subtle about it . . . I had a friend slide up, and they like knew what I was trying to say.

Youth like Aisha are using digital infrapolitics to circumvent hybrid social surveillance that extends across digital platforms and humans. Parental monitoring and social surveillance intended to “protect” young people can ironically become barriers to their participation. Focusing on protecting youth, adults may overlook young people’s political agency and rights in the present.

Figure 2.

The transgender PRIDE flag.

Figure 3.

Aisha’s Instagram post.

Young people’s experiences of surveillance are inseparable from the intersecting dynamics of social, corporate, and institutional power relations that structure their everyday lives. Students like Joey have faced scrutiny and censorship from their school administration for their activism. Some youth have faced threats of discipline and suspension for participating in political action. Such experiences may be especially salient among students in low-income communities of color or young dissenters in ideologically homogeneous communities.

Joey (18, United States), a March for Our Lives activist and a member of the LGBTQ+ community, comes from a small town in a mountainous Western state. Joey describes her experience being a progressive in her red-state high school as socially isolating. When Joey designed and posted flyers in her high school hallways for her gun violence walkout, her peers reacted with hostility and trashed them. The school too increased efforts to keep such “controversial” civic spaces from expanding and viewed them as spaces that needed monitoring.

Pushed out from these spaces, Joey turned to “network backchannels” to get the word out (Karpf, 2012). Engaging in digital infrapolitics, Joey decided to use veiled language and advertise her gun violence protest as a “memorial” for Parkland students on social media. She recruited participants on social media by circulating protest information on Snapchat and Instagram Stories to her personal networks:

Interviewer:

So thinking back to organizing that march, how did you get the word out?

Joey:

Um, it was a lot of social media . . . Through Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter . . . I was allowed to hang up posters in the hall if I specifically said that it wasn’t a protest, but it was a memorial, which, one, is BS, but I had to advertise as that, as a memorial for the Parkland students . . . That was like one of the caveats of them allowing me to do it, and me not getting suspended . . . I was like, why don’t I do this as a memorial? . . . Well that’s not what I spoke about. I mean I spoke in memoriam. Like we need to do something.

To avoid getting suspended from school, Joey framed her political protest as a depoliticized ritual. A small group of youth came out to join the “memorial,” many of them looking “scared” and uncertain about the consequences of leaving class. Another group of students came out to monitor and film the event and trolled Joey on social media.

Joey’s story shows “capillaries of power” at work, in which social control is decentralized and exercised through students, teachers, and school administrators who are all monitoring and policing the ideological boundaries of their community (Foucault, 1977, 1982) Joey’s response is not to give up but to engage in “capillary resistance” by feigning compliance and staging thinly disguised resistance by tapping into her social media networks.

Hidden spaces of resistance: creating digital enclaves and hybrid subcultural spaces

Sites of mediated contention may also range from overtly political, publicly visible spaces to hidden, clandestine, or seemingly nonpolitical spaces. Lee (2018) showed that digital networks of youthful dissent remain submerged from the view to avoid political sanctions by the authoritarian government in Cambodia. In the United States and Canada, young people similarly leverage social media to cultivate subversive spaces of resistance. In contrast to the authoritarian regime, though, it is common to see young people participating in and oscillating between a mix of overtly political spaces, digital enclaves, and hybrid subcultural spaces (see also Florini, 2019).

In response to the increasing convergence of state and corporate surveillance, youth like Sara build digital enclaves and hybrid subcultural spaces of resistance. While some hybrid subcultural spaces start virtual and branch out to the physical world, Sara’s hybrid space is loosely organized around a student cultural network in the physical world (see “connective action network” in Bennett and Segerberg, 2012: 749).

Sara (21, United States), who identifies as a bisexual Muslim youth from a low-income family, is acutely aware that the US government heavily surveils Muslim communities and criminalizes their dissent. This awareness severely constrains the range of tactics that Sara uses on (and off) social media to participate politically. Engaging space-based infrapolitical tactics, Sara leverages social media to build and participate in subcultural spaces and networks that are not quite political enough to be perceived as such. These space-based tactics include participating in closed meme groups and cultivating hybrid subcultural enclaves.

For the longest time, Sara has trained herself not to leave any trace of personal expressions of feelings on social media because of the threat of both new and old forms of police surveillance, such as the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program and related efforts to predict youth at risk of radicalization.

[Muslim youth are] like forced to form relationships with police officers and talk to them about stuff going on at home. And if police officers find anything like suspicious, which is often racialized, then . . . they can like send them for further questioning, they have the power to like take them away . . . And usually like things that they consider like paths to radicalization are things like when somebody expresses . . . feeling of being isolated or frustrated that they’re not accepted.

Social surveillance further intersects with and extends state surveillance as fellow citizens engage in monitoring and policing minority youth. Sara talks about the racism and alienation she experienced growing up in a wealthy, suburban neighborhood on the US East Coast: “Like they [my neighbors] just thought that we were dangerous people.” She recalls her brother being tackled in the school locker room because his classmates thought that he had a bomb. Police were called. Sara was traumatized by the experience.

When asked whether she posts about political issues she cares about on social media, Sara replies, “If it was something that would put me on a list, I would not.” That includes any kind of socialist views, anti-US imperialist stances, or views on Israel-Palestine issues. Sara chooses not to share or “like” any content that may be potentially construed as radical or critical of the US government on social media. However, she participates politically in closed meme groups: “So I don’t, unless I’m in a meme page, like that’s like a closed meme page then maybe. Yeah . . . But there aren’t like pictures of me at protests . . .”

Digital infrapolitics is a key element of her hybrid activism. In addition to participating in closed meme groups, Sara uses social media to cultivate a hybrid cultural space for Muslim students that is not overtly political. Cultural forms of organizing, although they may not be perceived as political, are vital to the political life of marginalized groups (e.g. Lee, 2018; Chang, 2007). Similar to the Muslim youth in Shresthova’s (2016) study, Sara shares that the youth in this group are looking to take a break from the outside world where their identities are politicized. They are seeking a community to form friendships or to simply practice shared cultural rituals: “[L]ike we have a right to just be a normal people. You know, like, and do normal things . . . We eat food, we meet people, that kind of stuff.”

As a group leader, Sara uses social media to recruit members, connect with other Muslim cultural organizations, and organize cultural and religious activities that are not explicitly political. For instance, she hosts community meals to collectively break the Ramadan fast. To protect her network from state surveillance, Sara keeps its social media pages free of explicitly political content. However, as youth hang out, political discussions organically seep into these spaces that are not recognized as “political”:

Um, sometimes you watch like . . . Patriot Act, Homecoming, or just like, have dialogue. Like what does it mean to wear a hijab? Like . . . what does it mean to be a Muslim man? . . . So we talk about like what is the history of Islam in America, or what does anti-Blackness look like in the Muslim community or stuff like that.

This hybrid enclave sits in the gray area of infrapolitics—between publicly visible and strategically ambiguous, between political and non-political. It is a space for collective self-care and the practice of culture, something that can also be seen as part and parcel of the political struggle for Muslim-American identity.

Some enclaves like Sara’s are hybrid in form, while others live online. Sheepishly, Mona (18) confesses to me halfway through our conversation that she runs an anonymous meme group on Instagram: “Um, actually, this is so embarrassing. I own a meme page on Instagram, a meme page for Libyan jokes.” Mona, who works with Syrian refugees in her community, is a Canadian-born Muslim youth whose parents immigrated from Libya. Like Sara, she recounts experiences of Islamophobia in her high school in a progressive Canadian city. These experiences, in part, have led Mona to create an anonymous meme group for her close friends. Initially intended as an insider joke page for her close-knit friends, the anonymous meme page on Instagram has gained a large following among the Libyan diaspora internationally. Mona’s meme group affords relative safety for members to engage with authoritarian politics while avoiding potential sanctions by the Libyan government. At the same time, by cultivating the Instagram humor group, Mona seeks to construct an autonomous space that aspires to be free from anti-Muslim discrimination and evade state surveillance of politically active Muslim youth (see also Nasser, 2019).

Leveraging social media—but at the same time, resisting surveillance on these platforms—youth incubate hidden networks, digital enclaves, and hybrid subcultural spaces where they can talk about and cope with their shared experiences and struggles, and build shared identity and collective action.

Hidden roles: low profile, disguised, chameleon tactics

Participants and non-participants, leaders and followers, are some of the ways in which roles are classified in the traditional literature on social movements and political participation (e.g. Barker et al., 2001). With the proliferation of horizontalist movements and “connective action networks,” I find that young people recognize and take up a wide spectrum of roles on and off social media—ranging from highly visible, overtly political roles to low profile, covert, and backstage roles (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012: 749).

Young people like Nisha (20, Black, United States) remind me that the costs of activism are different for different people, and political participation necessarily looks different for different people: “So like activism really looks different for so many people, but it’s like maybe what you could do within your own limits that really worked for you.” Nisha, a Black woman in the Southern United States, shares that she does not feel safe at public protests where Black bodies are heavily policed and criminalized for their dissent. Like many youth in this study (e.g. Black youth and immigrant youth), she and her mother have had repeat conversations about not putting her body on the line.

She [my mom] would just remind me that like as a Black woman, like doing anything and like existing in that space and like, just approaching that [space] in general is you just putting your body on the line. Existing within this identity as a woman of color really is like, it’s dangerous in and of itself. And so being in an environment that’s like highly hostile, that’s surrounded by police, police that have little regard for your life, especially if like it’s a whole crowd, they feel, is being dysfunctional . . .

Previous studies have shown that individuals who are willing to bear the costs and risks of collective action are more likely to participate in movements (Klandermans, 1997; Verba et al., 1995; Wiltfang and McAdam, 1991). At the same time, my findings show that the costs and risks of hybrid activism are differentially distributed among individuals. Nisha’s story further reveals that youth qualitatively change their roles and tactics to lower the costs and risks of hybrid activism.

Some youth adopt “chameleon” tactics where they take up and oscillate between visible and invisible roles for different movements or issues. They deftly employ tactics of calculated concealment and disclosure of their political roles. Mona incorporates this kind of role-based infrapolitical tactic in her hybrid activism. So far as her meme page is concerned, Mona stays an anonymous admin:

[P]eople have asked, “Who are you?” And I’ve said, I’m not telling you . . . They don’t know if I’m a woman or not. People DM me sometimes . . . some people will call me a girl. Most people call me a man. So it’s all so very interesting . . .

Notably, while her activities relating to Libyan politics and culture remain below the radar, when it comes to Syrian refugee issues, Mona takes a more public role. As an organizer for Syrian refugee issues in her school, she attends protests and works with local community organizations to raise resources. Gauging risk levels, and depending on what issues are at hand, Mona carefully places herself somewhere on the (in)visibility spectrum, running the gamut from fully anonymous to highly public.

Natalie (28, Canada), a climate justice organizer and an immigrant youth from Mexico, has found for herself a role that is not entirely exposed nor entirely invisible. Initially, when activists were showing up every day to protest and obstruct the construction of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline, Natalie found it challenging to find her role in the movement which is heavily surveilled and policed. Youth activists in this space talk about the dataveillance operation that the Canadian police are carrying out to identify and track Indigenous and environmental rights activists (see also Crosby and Monaghan, 2018). In the process of becoming a naturalized citizen, Natalie says that her participation in direct action (such as blocking a gate at the pipeline protest) may get her arrested, put her on a watch list, or otherwise jeopardize her citizenship status.

Eventually, Natalie found her place in the climate justice movement as an art and social media producer. Although she is not physically on the frontlines of blockades and protests, she uses art as a medium for social change and collaborates with activists and artists in frontline communities. For instance, she organizes art builds to capture the messages and demands of the movement. The resulting artworks such as banners and slogans are sent to frontline activists and captured in pictures and video. Keeping a low profile, Natalie then uses the movement’s group account to circulate these pictures and video clips on social media. These visual artifacts, created backstage, take centerstage as symbols of the movement.

Similarly, Lea (23, United States) has transitioned from a highly visible, exposed frontline role to a low-profile, backstage role. An Indigenous youth activist on a Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, Lea has been active in the Standing Rock protests. At Standing Rock, she has experienced firsthand how Indigenous protesters are targeted by state violence and surveillance. Today, having transitioned from the frontlines, Lea supports Indigenous rights movements by creating fliers and managing content on social media.

Social and digital media roles are not without risks either. Ryan, an Indigenous youth (20), talks about how the police actively jammed activists’ cell signal and wifi at the Wet’suwet’en pipeline protests to prevent the images of police violence from leaking out. As at Standing Rock in the United States, the Canadian police also deployed drones and flyover surveillance to track the activists and dispatched heavily armed tactical teams (Bellrichard, 2020). Ryan thinks that even as the police used these very tools to shut down the protests and target activists, the activists had to rely on social media to expose state violence. In the Indigenous activism space, Ryan sees his role as a witness of sorts. Practicing a form of “sousveillance,” he turns his camera on the powerholders to capture and expose injustice (Mann et al., 2003: 331): “[M]ost of my videos that I post . . . I’m just kind of like exposing a lot of things.”

Young people see that the consequences of confrontational resistance and costs of surveillance may be much more severe for those marginalized by race, gender, socioeconomic status, immigration status, and so on. Youth recognize these various constraints on participation and focus on creating a variety of role-based tactics to lower the risks and costs for themselves and others.

Discussion

This study expands our theoretical and empirical understanding of how young people, especially those from marginalized groups, exercise their political agency under increasing levels of surveillance and social control in the digital age. Digital infrapolitics highlights the political actions of marginalized youth that have been obscured by the more traditional focus on public spaces and forms of participation. Youthful repertoires of contention span a wider range of visibility spectrum in democracies—especially when compared to non-democratic countries where under-the-radar tactics become expansive (e.g. Jun, 2020; Lee, 2018). To date, scholars of youth digital activism and networked social movements have tended to focus on public political action and overt political expression on social media, leaving out private and coded communication around everyday resistance (e.g. Jenkins et al., 2016; Kahn et al., 2015). As I have shown, to focus solely on public political action on social media is to overlook key political tactics of marginalized youth. Public contention (Tilly, 2006) and hidden resistance (Scott, 1990) can and do converge in contemporary hybrid activism of youth and marginalized groups.

Furthermore, the tactical choices of youth shed light on the fault lines and power asymmetries inflecting young people’s unequal political participation. My findings show how digitally mediated surveillance and control have a disparate impact on marginalized youth along the intersecting lines of race, gender, socioeconomic status, immigration status, and so on (Crenshaw, 1991). The convergence of corporate, state, and social surveillance contributes to multiple intersecting layers of surveillance, amplifying the risks of hybrid activism.

At the same time, youth accounts challenge technodeterministic narratives of digital repression which leave out how people resist technological control. Digital infrapolitics shows how power and resistance go hand in hand. Young activists today experience “capillaries of power” on a daily basis, as they are watched over, disciplined, and policed by various entities (Foucault, 1977, 1982). However, the story does not end there. When young people perceive or experience barriers—under the watchful eyes of parents, schools, corporations, state, and so on—they do not necessarily fall silent, but instead, they devise other means to exercise their agency. In other words, we witness the “capillarisation of resistance.” Thorson (2014) observes how ambiguities about audience reception on social media propel youth to devise new strategies for social interactions. Similarly, uncertainties about who is watching in the hybrid world prompt young people to innovate their political repertoires.

For these reasons, analytical models based on the online-offline dichotomy do not adequately capture the concerns and possibilities that arise from hybrid activism. A singular focus on social media actions and content privacy practices can miss how the physical and the digital have become tightly intertwined today. The conceptual model of hybrid repertoires surfaced in my findings shows the multiple dimensions (expression, space, and role) and nuances of strategically invisible or ambiguous activist tactics in the context of pervasive surveillance. The new conceptual model highlights the gaps where privacy design fails to meet the needs of youth and youth develop vernacular practices.

Young people’s tactics paradoxically reveal the possibilities and limits of using digital technologies for infrapolitical resistance. On one hand, young people, especially those in the margins, leverage social media to cultivate collective identity and action and build alternative networks of solidarity under the radar. Young people use social media to expand the gray area of politics—between overtly political and non-political—across the spectrum of expression, spaces, and roles. Through the lens of hybrid activism, digital infrapolitics reveals itself as the cultural substratum of youth movements that appear to come out of nowhere. In some ways, digital infrapolitics allows young activists to take back control of their visibility by obscuring some dimensions of their participation (e.g. expression, space, role).

On the other hand, there are limits to using such vernacular tactics of resistance in the emergent surveillance society. Some youth turn to corporate social media because of the repression of their physical communities or movements. Yet, this can also become double-edged, as state and corporate surveillance clamps down on digital spaces. For instance, if Sara posts something radically political that ties back to her own identity on corporate social media platforms, she could be classified as a terrorist by the algorithms that the CVE programs use to identify at-risk youth. What might be considered the affordances of social media for some youth (e.g. the ability to go viral) can be risks for marginalized youth activists like Sara. The dynamics of surveillance and countersurveillance point to deeper issues around state and corporate control of young activists’ data trails and civic spaces more broadly.

Marwick et al. (2017) argue that discussions of online privacy violations should be framed as structural discrimination rather than individual responsibility. Youth accounts of hybrid activism further show that a narrow focus on the privacy of social media content is an inadequate framework from which to address the larger concerns around protecting young people’s privacy, civil liberties, and human rights in the hybrid world.

There are several limitations to this study. For one, this study is based on a diverse but non-representative sample. Future studies can examine how these patterns bear out in a larger sample or among different populations. For instance, accounts of right-wing and extremist networks and their tactics suggest that digital infrapolitics may not be the sole territory of youth activists (Fleishman and Smith, 2016; Xu, 2020). Future extensions of this research may also consider the trajectory of youth activists as well as the development of hidden networks over time.

Often, research and policy debates fail to recognize the diversity of youth hybrid activism. To address the challenges of the emergent surveillance-driven society, it is vital to recognize the voices and experiences of marginalized youth who are often left out of important debates around the design and use of technology for democratic participation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the 61 youth activists for sharing their time and expertise with her. Special thanks to Lucy Bernholz, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Howard Gardner, Anne-Marie Livingstone, Mariel Garcia Montes, Toussaint Nothias, and Lynn Schofield-Clark for their comments at various stages of this project. The author would also like to thank the journal editor and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research has been financially supported by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University; the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Germanacos Foundation; and the Spencer Foundation.

ORCID iD

Ashley Lee

Notes

Author biography

Ashley Lee is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University.

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