“Do I Post This or Not?” LGBTQ+ Youth Experiences of Social Media Under Parental Surveillance

Sammanfattning: As social media has become more entwined with society, parents are facing fears around how their children use them, and who they connect with. As a result, some resort to parental control technologies that enable them to surveil their children’s online activities. However, for LGBTQ+ youth this can have large consequences, since the access to like-minded community is important for these peoples’ abilities to cope with their minority status. The study therefore explores in what ways LGBTQ+ youth (ages 18-27) experience of using social media is shaped by experiences of living under surveillance and control enabled by design and practices used by parents. This includes both general surveillance practices on social media, rather than focusing on explicit parental control technologies. The research employs a qualitative case study approach, combining self-reporting diary entries and semi-structures one-to-one interviews with six participants. The data was analyzed through a thematic analysis. We took great caution in how we conducted the study, since it can be a sensitive topic for the participants, and as a part of this examined our relation to the setting and how that could affect the research. We found that surveillance was far more diffuse than expected, consisting by an ever-shifting landscape of methods and counter-methods by parents and children respectively. However, we found that the less control the participants have over the audience of what they share, the less free they are to share their lives. This ends up alienating them as users, and risking isolating them from the possibilities of alternative support networks that could escape control and surveillance. These alternative support structures are necessary for the participants, because the reason they can’t escape the control is often due to dependency on their parents, often economic. The participants experiences underscore the lack of prioritization for minority groups such as the ones in the LGBTQ+ in platform design, something that we think must change.