mojatu .com
32 Arts & Culture
HOW REFUGEES & ASYLUM SEEKERS
MANAGE PRIVACY ON SOCIAL MEDIA
By Matt Voitgz
I’m a PhD student at the University of
Nottingham, practicing anthropology.
I research culture – what people do. I
do so by talking to people as I spend
time with them.
often described, but difficult to define, though a commonly
cited definition is ‘the right to be let alone’. As it relates to digital
technologies like phones and Facebook, it often is applied to
the control one has over one’s data. That is – if the messages
one shares are read by others, how services like Facebook use
what we post, or how these services are subject to surveillance.
I like the following description of privacy as the ability:
y To discuss some things with certain people and some things
with others. We don’t necessarily share the same things we
would with our friends as with our doctors, and the ability
to choose what to share helps us to be able to conduct our
lives in different situations.
My research is about how refugees and asylum seekers in
Europe manage privacy on social media like WhatsApp,
Facebook, Viber, Imo, and Telegraph. I’ve been working with
several local organizations, including Mojatu, who invited me
to share my research.
This kind of research is important because often what
people in one place think is ‘normal’ isn’t the same for people
everywhere. Anyone who moves to a new country, of course,
quickly finds this out – as I did when I moved to the UK to study
from my home in America.
The challenges refugees and asylum seekers face when they
move are particularly big. Refugees and asylum seekers move
due to war and threats of violence. There are over 65 million
displaced people worldwide today. International laws made
to help them were written not long after World War II, and
imagined situations where safety and threats were easy to
define. If one nation was at war, the one next door had an
obligation to shelter those who fled until it was safe for them
to return.
The reality is that most refugees and asylum seekers will spend
years away from home. Many will travel multiple times over
many years - for example, moving from Eritrea to Sudan to
Libya and onward through Europe, never exactly knowing
where the destination might be.
Through this journey, what ‘home’ is can be a challenging
question. People move to new places after already spending
months or years abroad. News of a changed homeland reaches
them. Asylum seekers start new lives, make new friends, but
still – through digital technology – stay in touch with friends
and family back home. How they stay in touch is where my
research comes in.
Presently, researchers and designers who make and study
technology have many concerns around ‘privacy.’ The topic is
y To advocate for ourselves politically. That is, we might
attend political rallies or express ourselves in a democratic
process without fear that the government or businesses will
watch us closely and use knowledge of our participation
against us.
y To take a break from social pressures. We can go to our
homes and relax.
Yet the ideal of the ‘home’ one could be ‘let alone’ in is
complicated by digital technologies, and may not reflect
the lives of refugees and asylum seekers. These ideas about
privacy are based around a certain baseline conception that
people have or want a particular kind of ‘home’ – one that
in reality, few people have. There is, for example, little in
descriptions of privacy that talk about how families who live
together negotiate space – who, for example, gets to choose
what channel is on television.
One’s social circle changes dramatically when one travels,
and how to ‘present’ oneself to multiple people involves
negotiating different cultures. Yet the risks and benefits of
information management may also be higher for refugees
and asylum seekers. For example, a Facebook photo may
support evidence in an asylum claim by showing the life one
has led, or political participation that has led to danger. Yet,
the public display of such information – as evidence of one’s
life, journeys, and activities – may also create more danger for
one’s family abroad. These challenges come amid the same
everyday messaging with family and friends that many people
do worldwide.
The goal of this research is to understand challenges like these
in more detail – and I hope to report some of the findings back
in a later issue of this magazine!
If you would be interested in talking to participate in my
research, please email [email protected], or
07541 488 296 for text or WhatsApp