Affordances-based resistance to digital surveillance

This article introduces the notion of affordances-based resistance to digital surveillance as a practice mediated by the socio-technical architecture of digital platforms: a type of countersurveillance that is not organised or structured by the norms and practices of social and political movements, but is instead structured and held together by the technical features of digital media and the participatory cultures thriving on them. Specifically, we consider this resistance passive and mechanical because it is: driven by the affordances (and not resulting from an active manipulation of them); individualised and dispersed on a large scale, not localised in or governed by traditional social organisations (e.g. civic associations); and a form of resistance in which actors are more nudged towards resistance behaviours than deliberately pursuing them. To illustrate, we develop a cross-platform analysis of Twitter and the Google Play Store, examining 270,656 tweets and 23,469 reviews about the contact tracing app Immuni. The article contributes by introducing a novel concept for studying resistance to datafication and by proposing a methodological approach linking low- and high-level affordances through cross-platform analysis.