TikTok: The Surveillance State and Your Role

Lately, you cannot walk down a busy street, go to work, eat at a restaurant, workout at the gym, or go grocery shopping without seeing either a Ring light and its accompanying dancer, monologist, storyteller, or a gaggle of influencers—or want-to-be-influencers.

As a result, you become a nonconsensual unpaid background actress while trying to go about your day, and it isn’t always clear what your role is or how significant it’ll be. On some level, given the ubiquity of constant filming and photographing what we are doing, we are all unpaid background actors in someone else’s film.

What this also means is you’d be hard press to find a private moment that is indeed, well, private, outside your home. Implied private spaces like school, work, restaurants, cafes, and the gym are all now treated like the public sidewalk and considered fair game for filming whomever for whatever reason.

At any one moment, you can be the unintentional muse, or target, for someone’s virality. Unbeknownst to you, individuals can post an image or video of you to multiple social media sites, in which it becomes parodied by AI, or memed and gif’d all while you are sleeping, working, eating, and doing other things that keep you from looking through social media before you realize you either have become the next person cancelled or trending.

TikTok has emerged as a more sophisticated form of chronicling our lives that online spaces like MySpace, Facebook, Vine, and Instagram started in the late 90s to early 2010s. It allows us to connect and share our gamut of experiences with long-distance family, friends, and even strangers.

It has also given amateurs and the everyday person the leading role in their show or film of their own creation featuring content like ‘get ready with me,’ ‘TeaTok,’ various forms of tutorials, ‘day in the life,’ dance, baking or cooking, ASMR, educational content, and live streaming. Many philosophers have commented on this phenomenon and its relation to cancel culture, the shaming industrial complex, gamification of communication and value capture, epistemic bubbles and echo chambers, polarization, and fake news.

Even during my lectures, students feel entitled either to film or photograph the lecture slides, me, themselves, or other students, without consent. This is because TikTok has normalized people filming everything; what they do, where they go, who they are with, what they are wearing, their “hauls,” and when they get ready.

Gone are the days when a photobomb in the background remained in the Polaroid and became either funny or disappointing later on. Now, you could be walking down the street, trip, and become immortalized. A mistake you made now comes in cycles instead of being resolved and remaining in the past. Something you said is taken out of context, misconstrued, and now forever attached to you like a barnacle. Or, internet strangers might name-call or issue death threats over someone liking mint chocolate chip ice cream and posting about it online.

TikTok isn’t all bad, of course. It has decentralized knowledge in many important ways that as a polycentrist I enjoy, especially during such a fraught election year, in a time marked by the prevalence of fake news and social media censorship of certain content.

However, what users, especially younger users, don’t realize is that, by using platforms like TikTok to constantly post what they are doing, they are not only surveilling themselves but also their classmates, colleagues, me, and you. The cost of these free social media platforms is our privacy and data, regardless of if we consent. Consequently, strangers, tech companies, advertisers, and the government all have access to our privacy and data due to whatever role we play, either as a nonconsensual background actor or the lead role.

We aren’t the only ones surveilling each other with our constant posting to online platforms like TikTok. In 2020 during the George Floyd protests, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the FBI, local law enforcement, and the US Marshals Service regularly scoured through videos uploaded to social media to compile intelligence on protestors. Similarly in 2021, during the January 6 capital riot, videos uploaded to social media became the lynchpin of identifying, catching, and prosecuting the seditionists.

Keeping up with the trends, the FBI, DHS, local law enforcement, and intelligence agencies regularly monitor social media posts and pages as a part of their protocols and procedures. So, like you and me, they log on to TikTok and view cake decorating videos just as much as they view political content related to dissent to build and compile files on people. Allegedly, this is so they can monitor potential threats.

However, being in the background or sharing the picture or video from your lecture hall, classroom, work, café, or gym can wrongly implicate you or your group of friends, suppress freedom of speech, normalize disrupting an individual’s privacy, and misconstrue and intentionally misinterpret what someone does or a situation for political gain or for likes and followers. While these social media platforms, especially TikTok, have given us unprecedented access to knowledge, to people from all over the world, and to our friends and family members, we are also making it easier to suppress freedom of speech, police one another, and diminish each other’s right to privacy.

Understanding the constant need to film and post everything we do as an extension of policing and the surveillance state can help us be more intentional with what we share. This may mean that we forego the instantaneous opportunity to become viral at any second in order to protect the privacy of those around us, including ourselves. Because so far, that access is coming at a greater cost than people are willing to admit.

We can take action and follow recommendations that Christina Nicholson makes in her TEDx talk on fake news, articulating the principle of ‘care before we share.’ We can also take into account Bernard Williams’s understanding of the internet in his book Truth and Truthfulness as a form of theater. Then, we can approach filming our every move as potentially casting each other as unpaid background actors or ourselves as the lead role, at the cost of our privacy. So, although there are several benefits to platforms like TikTok, there is a malign influence that stems from the need for constant documentation of our lives on the internet without ethical concern for how this impacts others. Right now, this takes the form of unmitigated surveillance.

Siobhain Lash

Siobhain Lash is a Business and Environmental Ethicist Research Fellow at the Kendrick Center for an Ethical Economy in the John Chambers College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University. Dr. Lash completed her PhD in Philosophy in two years at Tulane University under the direction of Chad Van Schoelandt, Oliver Sensen, and Caroline Arruda. Her work has appeared, among other places, in Constitutional Political Economy and Public Philosophy Journal. Dr. Lash works at the intersection of political economy and environmental, spatial, and climate justice, urban ecology, community-engaged scholarship, and information and artificial intelligence(AI) ethics.