ABSTRACT
State scrutiny and control over populations is both challenged and enhanced by digitisation. This chapter troubles assumptions that user-led practices and state use of media are mutually exclusive. As a point of departure, it considers cases where politicians make appeals to audiences to watch over and report antisocial behaviour among civilians, including in public health contexts, political polarisation (e.g. ‘leftist indoctrination’), but also in more mundane and routine incidents. Shame-based assemblages can serve state agendas, with unanticipated outcomes and offshoots. Yet states can openly distance themselves from initiatives they implicitly support and from which they may benefit. Civilians are at the same time an extension of and liability for the state. The ‘court of public opinion’ invoked by civilians through platforms is also perpetually in a liminal position between a tool for the state, and at times beyond state control. This chapter spotlights China and Russia as models of state involvement in and influence over civilian practices. This provides insights towards how to globally frame and analyse state policies towards online shitstorms in the coming years.
