Beyond Panopticon to Platform: Online Surveillance and the Criminalization of Pro-Palestine Student Activism

Abstract

This article discusses the overlap between the digital platforms and the university infrastructures in the case of surveillance and criminalization of pro-Palestinian student activism, in case of the Student Intifada of 2024-2025. Based on the panopticon of Michel Foucault, algorithmic governmentality (Melis, 2019) and data colonialism (Couldry & Mejias, 2019), we conceptualize a platform-panopticon nexus: a socio-technical arrangement in which dissent is transformed to risk data, securitized, and monetized. In this nexus, the hashtags, livestreams, and even the emojis are made readable by the disciplinary authorities and at the same time become invisible to the general population. We will analyze a mixed qualitative body of data that includes YouTube videos of campus protests and interviews of student activists from North American and European universities that were disclosed because of Freedom of Information requests. There are three major forms of repression. First, the algorithmic shadow-banning makes the content related to Palestine unseen by slowing down its visibility. Second, pro-Israel watch-lists contribute to networked doxxing, which subjects students to harassment, investigation, and deportation. Third, links between the risk analytics are built into institutional monitoring processes to identify keywords, geotagged materials, and student metadata to give them a reason to act against them. The results indicate an intersectional risk calculus where Muslim, Arab, and racialized students are disproportionately victims, which has resulted in digital chilling effects and material consequences, such as being placed on probation, having their visa revoked, and being excluded upon graduation. These dynamics not only place the neoliberal university into the role of a knowledge production facility but make it an appendix of platform capitalism and securitized government. The paper ends with the foregrounding of emerging counter-practices, such as encrypted archiving, sous-veillance live streams, and hashtag steganography, which all instantiate a pedagogy of digital disobedience and reconstruct the university as a site of epistemic justice and not, as it has been made to be, a place of data-driven repression. 

Keywords: Digital Surveillance, Algorithmic Governmentality, Platform Panopticon, Shadow-Banning, Securitization of Campuses, Activism in Palestine, And Epistemic Justice