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Publicising privacy, weaponising publicity: The dialectic of online abuse on
social media
Michael Salter

Salter, M. (2018) Publicising privacy, weaponising publicity: The dialectic
of online abuse on social media. In Dobson, A., Robards, B., Carah, N. (eds)
Digital Intimate Publics & Social Media, Palgrave Macmillan.



Introduction

At first glace, online intimacy is a study in contradictions; sexual, romantic, filial
and other intimate spheres of human life that have long been understood as
deeply private. However, through mass social media platforms, private life is
now mediated by technologies purpose-built for instantaneous and global
publication. Social media scholarship has emphasised how the private can now
become public in ways that are exciting and even emancipatory in some
instances, and personally devastating and politically oppressive in others (Salter,
2017). The tension between the public and the private structures the
possibilities of online intimacy in important ways, shaping the production,
circulation, reception and impact of online content upon individual and social
life. The aim of this chapter is to examine how dialectical theorizing can help us
to interrogate further the relationship between publicity and privacy in ‘intimate
publics’, with a particular focus on violations of privacy evident in practices of
image-based abuse such as ‘sexting’ and ‘revenge porn’.

From a dialectic perspective, phenomenological and material reality are co-
constitutive, arising via interacting forces whose apparent contradictions
prompt new developments and resolutions, only to spark reactions that
perpetuate the dialectical process (Adorno, 2017). Under dialectic examination,
the apparent contradiction of ‘intimate publics’ reveals multiple axes of power:
particularly, the reification of economic and political relations inherent in liberal
constructions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ life, and the role of media technology and
gender practices in reinforcing but also contesting and transforming these
constructions. Such an examination leads to an analysis of the relationship
between online abuse and the technological conditions of its possibility; that is,
how does social media make abuse and humiliation possible, meaningful and
impactful?

Disputing instrumental accounts of technology as merely ‘tools’ of human action,
technology is presented here as the materialisation of the worldviews and
orientations that shape technological design, production and application. Online
abuse arises due to the imbrication of misogyny and capitalist instrumentality
within the underlying technological architecture of social media. Hence, the
chapter argues, the availability of this technology for misogynist abuse is no
coincidence. Rather, the design and affordances of social media reflect and
reproduce the same cultural and material conditions from which a misogynist,
objectifying worldview emanates. This dialectic approach moves away from one-
dimensional accounts of online abuse as merely the online expression of cultural
pathology, and addresses questions of historical contingency and economic and
political relations. It is suggested that online abuse is indicative of the ways that
technological configurations mirror and naturalise the conditions of their
emergence.

Online abuse and harassment

Networked technologies such as the internet have democratized content
production and distribution in unexpected ways. While mass media content
(whether print, radio or television) is controlled by multiple layers of
‘gatekeepers’ (journalists, editors, lawyers, media executives and so forth), the
internet facilitates the unregulated, potentially global circulation of content and
interaction of users. The anarchic, transgressive potentials of online
communication have been the subject of numerous laudatory tributes from
academics and journalists alike (Mason, 2013; Castells, 2012). This cyber-
utopianism has been recently checked as online political tendencies towards
misogyny and racism have developed a full-throated presence on otherwise
mainstream social media platforms such as Twitter (Salter, 2018). Indeed, online
racist and misogynist groups have come to exercise unanticipated political
power as an important constituency for the current United States administration
under Donald Trump (Nagle, 2017). Nagle (2017) argues that the naïve
celebration of online transgression by digital scholars camouflaged the scope
and danger of reactionary online politics. The normalization of online
transgression included a high level of tolerance for online abuse, harassment and
other online harms that differentially target women, racial and sexual minorities
and groups who have historically been marginalized within the public sphere.

As the problem of online abuse and harassment has become more apparent,
social media companies and the police have often framed it as the “cost” of being
online. The potential online sexual exploitation of children has been the focal
point of considerable attention (Marwick, 2008), but evidence of routine sexual
harassment and abuse of adult women, in particular, has been largely overlooked
by authorities and the technology industry (Salter, 2017). This neglect of online
sexism has been politically consequential in a number of ways. After all, it was
within the misogynist depths of the internet that the seeds of the current far-
right political resurgence began to germinate (Nagle, 2017). Furthermore, the
sheer pandemic force of online abuse has resulted in considerable personal harm
to the girls and women who have been targeted. It constitutes an additional and
significant obstacle against women’s equal participation in public life, as online
abuse and harassment has become the seemingly inevitable correlate of
pursuing an active online or media presence for girls and women (Jane, 2016).

The differential targeting of girls and women on social media can be understood
in terms of the blurred and reconstituted boundaries between ‘public’ and
‘private’ life. Social media is founded on the generation and exchange of content
by users, encouraging them to ‘publicise’ the private and intimate details of their
lives, opinions and experiences (boyd and Ellison, 2007). The ‘private’ sphere of
intimate and personal relations now provides the raw material for a series of
interconnected ‘publics’ offered by social media platforms (boyd, 2014). While
this re-structuring of the public by the private (and vice versa) offers new
opportunities for dialogue and consensus-building on previously suppressed
issues (Salter, 2013), it has also created new platforms for public shaming and
humiliation. This has been evident in the use of social media and other online
platforms to distribute intimate images and video of girls and women without
their consent, sometimes known as ‘revenge porn’ or abusive ‘sexting’ (Salter
and Crofts, 2015). The next section draws on dialectic thought to begin to
interrogate the constituent historical and social forces behind online abuse,
specifically in relation to the apparent contradictions between privacy and
publicity.

The dialectic relation of ‘public’ and ‘private’

The concept of the dialectic first emerged in Platonic philosophy, evident in the
dialogues in which Socrates pointed out the internal inconsistencies in the
common sense propositions of his interlocutors. While dialectical thought has
been developed and elaborated upon by subsequent philosophers, Hegel and
Marx in particular, the fundamental ground of dialectical critique remains the
same: to confront apparently obvious concepts and understandings with their
own contradictions, and in doing so, develop a deeper and more dynamic
analysis. Phenomena whose nature appears, at first, self-evidently fixed and
immutable are revealed via this method as historically contingent, determinant
and interconnected. In this approach, “truth does not consist in defining some
concept in isolation, treating it in isolation as if it were a mere sector, but rather
by taking it in relation to the totality in which it stands” (Adorno, 2017: 23). This
process inevitably blurs simplistic binaries between subject and object, or
idealism and materialism, finding instead that ‘bare facts’ are entangled with
human experience, mediated by schemes of meaning and perception, and come
into being through the constant unfolding of causal processes.

Dialectic theory provides a useful analytic in interrogating the notion of ‘intimate
publics’, and its blending of the spheres and concepts of privacy and publicity.
Contrasting notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ are so commonplace as to be taken
for granted. They are interlinked to the point where publicity can be defined as
what is not private, and privacy can be defined as what is not public
(Papacharissi, 2014: 148) In liberal democracies, privacy denotes individual
control of personal information and the shielding of interpersonal, bodily and
familial details from public exposure or scrutiny (Tavani, 2008). Privacy is
juxtaposed to publicity and the public sphere, associated with public life,
including the mass media, politics and the economy. Whereas the geographic
locus of the private sphere is generally understood to be the ‘home’ or private
abode, the public sphere is associated with the public spaces of the street, as well
as the institutions of politics, business and the circulation of information via the
mass media.

Closer interrogation of this apparently polarized schema reveals considerable
interpenetration between public and private. For instance, Solove (2007) gives
the example of a young couple canoodling on the street: an intimate and private
display in a public space. Such activity has been attended by some expectation of
‘privacy in public’ (Solove, 2007); the belief that the discretion granted to the
private sphere should be extended in a limited way to public life. However, it is
at the point where privacy and publicity begin to blur that the specifically
gendered nature of the public-private divide becomes apparent. From the
earliest iterations of liberal theory, public places and discourses have been
understood as masculine, and unsuitable for female participation (Pateman,
1988). This ideology was pervasively used to deny girls and women access to
public life (including education or work), and to blame girls and women who
were assaulted or harassed in public spaces for being there in the first place
(Valentine, 1989). In contrast, men have historically enjoyed considerable
mobility between public and private dimensions of life, and greater license to
transgress norms that govern the distinction between the two (Davidoff, 2003).

Under dialectic analysis, then, the ‘common sense’ opposition between publicity
and privacy becomes more complex, and contingently related to changes in the
social, political and gendered order. As Papacharrisi (2014: 148) observed “[t]he
economic, sociocultural, and political texture of systems is woven as public and
private concerns intersect to form distinctions between what is termed private
and what is commonly understood to be public”. These distinctions are not
purely conceptual, but rather have a crucial technological dimension grounded in
class relations. In his history of the public sphere, Habermas (1989) described
how the boundaries of publicity have been delineated by the properties of
available media technologies, whose ownership become centralized within a
ruling class of bourgeois white men. The possibility of the early public spheres of
the 18th century depended on printing machines for cheap newspapers and
pamphlets, followed by the development of the telegraph, radio, television and
now the various modes of online communication.

Each new permutation of media technology resulted in an expansion of the arena
of publicity, and shifted the relation of ‘private’ citizens to ‘public’ life. For those
forcibly sequestered in the ‘private’ sphere, such as women and others whose
interests were excluded from public representation, new media technologies
offered novel means through which to participate in public life (Salter, 2013). In
this process, the definition of what is ‘public’ and what is ‘private’ has been
continually contested and redefined. Fraser (1990) has examined how women’s
groups have used alternative media to create counter-hegemonic ‘publics’ in
which issues of collective concern, such as domestic violence, have been
reconstituted as a legitimately ‘public’ area of concern, rather than a private
matter. However the expansion of the public sphere is not without risks.
Baudrillard (1990) critiqued what he saw as the ‘metastatic’ growth of media
systems during the 20th century and the subsequently ‘obese’ production of
information. He was particularly critical of the role of the mass media in
publicizing the private ‘where the most intimate processes of our life become the
virtual feeding ground of the media’, characterised by a ‘useless, excessive’ focus
on intimate and explicit details (Baudrillard 1990, p 130).

Baudrillard’s suggestion was that the publicity of new media technology is at risk
of eclipsing or cannibalising the private. This cannibalisation has particular
implications for subaltern groups, who are disproportionately vulnerable to
public shame and stigma (Salter, 2016). When women and other subaltern
groups enter into public life, the coercive publication and circulation of their
private information is a powerful means of reinforcing what Fraser (2013: 168)
described as ‘social subordination - in the sense of being prevented from
participating as a peer in social life’. In misogynist online abuse, the ‘private’ is
appropriated and exploited within the online ‘publics’ of the internet with the
effect of restoring gendered hierarchies through the shaming and silencing of
women. Thus, while access to publicity and public participation is a core goal of
many social movements, this publicity can be turned against disadvantaged
groups in the maintenance of the status quo. The publicity offered by social
media thus has a highly ambivalent quality. This ambivalence is examined in the
next section, using the nonconsensual circulation of intimate images and video as
an example.

Intimate publics on social media and the dialectic of abuse

The previous section has highlighted how concepts of publicity and privacy have
evolved in dynamic relation to one another, as an expression of social and
economic but also material relations. In particular, socio-technical arrangements
play a crucial role in determining the boundaries and characteristics of public
and private life: specifically, who controls the means of cultural production, how
content is distributed, to whom, and how far. The link between socio-technical
arrangements and the public-private dialectic is particularly evident in relation
to social media. While the popularisation of the Internet from the mid-1990s
increased the accessibility and speed of publicly available information, it did not
radically shift the public-private divide. During this period, the available modes
of online communication were limited to technologies such as websites, email
lists, bulletin boards and chat rooms. These technologies approximated the
existing mass media ‘broadcast’ model, in which users create content for a larger
audience, albeit with some expanded possibilities for interaction (Fuchs, 2014).
Internet use and culture was male-dominated, and sexual harassment and
gendered abuse were routinely used to discourage women from online
participation (Herring, 1999). In this sense, the internet reproduced similar
gender disparities as the existing mass media. Online communities were
constructed and administered by men, and displayed ‘macho’ communicative
norms (Kendall, 2002), much as the majority of journalists and editors have been
(and remain) men operating within a masculine professional culture (North,
2012).

Social media platforms, designed specifically to facilitate interaction between
large numbers of users, began to attract significant numbers of users from the
mid-2000s, with significant effects on the public-private divide. Firstly, social
media actively encouraged the mass exchange of personal and intimate details,
including images and video, as cameras, broadband and wireless technology
became more integrated and accessible. Indeed, the business model of social
media is grounded in the development of interactive platforms that induce users
to share personal and private information, which in turn is commodified for
profit and utilised for targeted advertising (Gehl, 2012). Secondly, social media
drew significant numbers of girls and women online, rebalancing online gender
disparities (Ahn, 2011). Third, shifts in online demographics have driven
changes in online discourse, with increasing discussion of the concerns of
women, sexual minorities, racialized groups and others who previously had
limited access to the mass mediated public sphere. This in turn has influenced
mainstream media and discourse.

It is at this point that the phenomenon of ‘intimate publics’ becomes possible and
coherent. ‘Publics’ or ‘public sphere/s’ are generally understood as
interconnected, participatory and communicative fora ‘where such a thing as
public opinion can be formed’ (Habermas cited in McKee 2004: 4). Mass social
media sites such as Facebook are now major brokers of public opinion, however
they are founded on user publication of intimate and personal materials. Public
discourse and opinion is now entangled within the publicised minutiae of
everyday life. Far from Habermas’ (1989) ideal of the ‘rational-critical’ public
sphere, social media facilitated mass publics whose tone and content are
dominated by the intimate and the personal, with particularly enthusiastic
participation from girls and women. This shift in online participation has been
linked to politically significant developments in the public discussion and
recognition of gendered issues such as sexual assault and the justice needs of
girls and women (Salter, 2013).

However, these changes in the constitution and structure of public sphere/s have
not displaced older norms of publicity and privacy. Instead, the new possibilities
of publicity co-exist alongside traditional and misogynist notions of feminine
modesty and privacy. This double standard continues to be mobilised – indeed,
weaponised – online in order to sanction girls and women for participating in
public life in various ways, such as by bringing unwanted publicity to personal or
private content. For example, abusive partners and ex-partners routinely use the
threat of public online humiliation and embarrassment to control and punish
girls and women. This has been evident in widespread practices of image-based
abuse, such as ‘revenge porn’ in which (predominantly) men seek to punish their
partners for leaving them by circulating sexual or nude images and video online
(Salter and Crofts, 2015). Such images and video are so popular online they have
come to constitute a distinct category of pornographic commodity: one that is
exchanged by boys and men for social capital as much as for sexual pleasure and
used for threat and blackmail (Salter and Crofts, 2015).

While such forms of abuse can negatively impact men as well, norms of ‘modest’
femininity position girls and women as particularly vulnerable to reputational
damage when ‘private’ images are made ‘public’ (Salter, 2016). Such
technologically-mediated forms of coercive control can go ‘viral’ where the
perpetrator recruits existing online networks of misogynist men and boys,
resulting in women being targeted by innumerable strangers (Salter, 2018).
Phillips (2015) and Nagle (2017) provide compelling accounts of mass
coordinated attacks by boys and men in response to female online participation.
Women’s gender, sexuality and other ‘intimate’ aspects of life are consistently
abused by these groups to sanction women deemed inappropriately public or
vocal online. A Catch 22 situation emerges where women’s participation in the
‘intimate publics’ of social media, and those forms of employment and economic
activity that depend upon social media, is often leveraged through gendered
forms of self-disclosure and identity construction, which increase women’s
vulnerability to mass harassment and online attack (see Elliot 2018, this
volume). This can prompt women, and other marginalised groups, to curtail or
withdraw from public participation altogether (Salter, 2017).

Technology and gender relations

Thus, the dialectical examination of taken-for-granted conceptual binaries such
as ‘public’ and ‘private’ opens up a vista of contingent, unfolding relations that
implicate unexpected forces and actors in the phenomena of online abuse. What
emerges, perhaps suprisingly, from a dialectic interrogation of online abuse is
the centrality of technology to gender relations. While online abuse involves a set
of social practices and cultural expressions of misogyny, these take place within
the technological conditions that make them possible. Internet and social media
theorists make the point that communication does not simply “happen” online,
but rather the shape and form of communication is specifically written into
online architecture (Van Dijck, 2013; Gillespie, 2015). The design of online
platforms embodies specific assumptions about who the users will be and how
they will interact. Technology is, therefore, not politically or ideologically
neutral. The aim of this section is to situate technology within gender relations in
order to expand the dialectic analysis of online abuse, emphasizing the
imbrication of the cultural and technological dimensions of online abuse.

The computing and technology industries from which the internet and social
media emerged has been a crucible of masculine libertarianism since it became
an economic behemoth in the 1980s. This libertarianism has translated directly
into the competitive and aggressive communicative mechanics and culture that
have characterised a variety of online platforms since the 1980s (Kendall, 2002).
For example, Massanari (2017) analyses the “toxic technocultures” of mass
platforms such as Reddit and 4chan, and observes how the particular design
features of both platforms reinforce and legitimize communicative norms of
masculine aggression and abuse. Social media is host to a more diverse user
base, but nonetheless specific platforms, particularly Twitter, are characterized
by highly combative mechanics and a competitive hierarchy of users. Most social
media platforms are built in order to incentivize self-disclosure and the mass
circulation of attention-grabbing content, since social media profits hinge on the
traffic and commodification of private information and. Users are publicly
“ranked” and compared to each other in terms of their number of “friends” or
followers, and the number of “likes” or other indices of appreciation that their
content accumulates (Van Dijck, 2013).

These indices necessarily promote an instrumental, objectifying milieu in which
intimate and personal life become the ‘raw material’ for conversion into online
capital, whose expansion is linked directly to the profit motive of social media
companies. Thus, communication online exists in a fundamental tension with the
commodifying tendencies of its underlying architecture (Fuchs, 2007). While
users seek to control how and where their online content circulates, social media
companies maximize their profits by incentivizing users to publicise private
information and images to the greatest extent possible (Gehl, 2012). The profit
prerogative is reflected in online platforms that maximize exposure with limited
safety features in the way of content regulation or mechanisms to protect oneself
or others against abuse or unwanted invasions of privacy (Salter, 2017). This
creates as somewhat Darwinian online environment that aligns with, and
reinforces, the very same libertarian, competitive masculine industrial culture
that the technology was crafted from within.

In this sense, the current epidemic of online abuse is not an accident of history,
nor does it reflect the ‘wrong’ use of otherwise ‘neutral’ technological tools.
Rather, it is more accurate to say that the internet projects a lifeworld in which
misogyny can unfold and exert meaningful effects upon individuals and
collectives. This lifeworld is co-constituted by capitalist instrumentality and
aggressive masculinity, which permeate the technology industry from which
social media emerged, as well as the assumptions and prerogatives that
informed the design of social media. This is not to say that the applications and
possibilities of technology are pre-determined, and cannot be shaped by human
agency and creativity (Dyer-Witheford, 1999). Rather, as the concretization of
dominant logics, technology has a central role in the “social mode of production”,
creating an all-compassing environment that naturalizes and reproduces those
logics (Marcuse, 1964).

The importance of dialectic theorising for online abuse

Liberal feminism is one of the dominant strains of theorizing in relation to online
abuse, and the basis upon which solutions to online abuse are currently being
formulated. For liberal feminist scholars and commentators, online abuse is
attributable to “rape culture” and cultural misogyny. They position online abuse
on the continuum of sexual violence and harassment, and propose solutions
focused on education, attitude change, law reform and corporate responsibility.
While these are necessary part of the solution to online abuse, they reflect the
liberal propensity to frame social issues as moral problems issuing from the
‘wrong’ values, a lack of education, and insufficient deterrence. This framing
overlooks the ways in which social practice is mediated by historical conditions
and material relations, and diagnoses the problem of online abuse with
insufficient depth. Alternative frameworks such as post-structural theories of
materiality pay closer attention to the material capabilities and affordances of
technology. However, in both cases, the political economy of social media is
ignored, including the logic of capital accumulation and exploitation as it is built
into online platforms. The historical and economic link to the phenomena of
online abuse is lost in either an essentialist account of ‘rape culture’ or a focus on
the ‘emergent’ properties of the encounter between people and their technology,
somewhat forgetting that technology is an historical artefact and the ossification
of human labour and relations.

A dialectic critique of online abuse is more thorough-going than these liberal or
post-structural approaches. It indicts not only cultural misogyny but also its
industrial and material instantiations in the high-tech industry and economy.
How does the profit motive of social media companies shape online
communication? What kinds of gender relations are promoted when online
interaction is based on hierarchies and combative communicative mechanics?
Why isn’t user safety built into platform design? Dialectic analysis foregrounds
these basic questions, but also suggests that online abuse is a likely outcome for
as long as socio-technological arrangements are orientated towards capital
rather than human ends. While there are many examples of creative or
subversive uses of social media and other technology, where technological
prerogatives towards masculine aggression and accumulation exist, it is naïve to
suggest that these prerogatives will not reassert themselves against individual or
local projects of resistance. Dialectic analysis suggests that safe and cooperative
online interaction requires technology to embody and concretise alternative
forms of social order if it is to give rise to “different effect” (Marcuse 1964, p
157).

Conclusion

When applied to the subject of online abuse, dialectic analysis brings into view
the technological “world” within which online abuse takes place, and its origins
in technological orders and cultures. Simple conceptual binaries such as “public”
and “private” are shown to posses a “field of internal tensions” (Adorno 2017, p
55) containing those historical, social, political and technological forces that
sustain and promote otherwise ‘taken-for-granted’ concepts. Online abuse and
harassment occurs within the relations, contradictions and hypocrisies of public
and private life, making it a fertile point of inquiry into this dialectic relationship.
A circular relation emerges in which online abuse is the product of those cultural
and technological conditions that make such abuse possible; conditions which
are, in turn, perpetuated by online abuse. An entire system is laid bare, without
which online abuse could not manifest. As Adorno (2017, p 24) says:

dialectic is the attempt to illuminate the individual phenomenon in such a
way, to tarry with the phenomenon in such a way, to determine the
phenomenon in such a way, that the latter passes beyond itself through
this very determiniation and thereby manifests precisely that whole, that
system within which alone it finds its role and place’.

This approach reveals the inherent ambiguity of the blurring of public and
private life offered by social media. On one hand, the gatekeeping functions that
regulated public discourse in the mass media (however imperfect it may have
been) is largely gone, resulting in a proliferation of false, defamatory and
humiliating content. On the other hand, it was precisely the removal of these
gatekeeping function, and the democratisation of media content production and
dissemination, that has enabled perspectives otherwise excluded from the mass
public sphere to find a greater audience, including those of girls and women
(Salter, 2013). The question remains about how this emancipatory dimension
can be enhanced, and how technology might project or express modes of
communication that promote comparatively greater degrees of freedom and
security.

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