ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the shifting relation between citizens and state actors as a result of the continued adoption of social media platforms. In particular, it considers the emergence of different kinds of policing on these platforms. This includes individual users performing their own kind of citizen-led surveillance. Such practices are a kind of digital vigilantism, made meaningful through discourses and practices about empowered users. The social software, mobile hardware and telecommunications networks required to perform social media policing often market these products as empowering users by enabling them to coordinate social action. Thus, these practices mark a tendency to bypass existing state branches such as the police—all while maintaining a dependency on corporate social media platforms—in order to perform actions that would otherwise be monopolised by the state. While some commentators focus on positive outcomes associated with user counter-power (Shirky 2008), there is evidence of citizens using social media to harass and persecute fellow citizens.
