What is it about?
This chapter explores how individual digital activists in Turkey think about and experience informational privacy while using the digital media platform X (formerly Twitter). Rather than asking what people do to protect their data, we ask why privacy matters to them, why it is valuable, or it is not. Drawing on interviews with individual activists from feminist, queer, ecological, and migrant rights communities, we examine how they balance privacy concerns with other norms or demands, such as public visibility, political risk, and identity performance in a highly polarized political environment. We argue that these users do not treat privacy as a universal value but negotiate its meaning depending on the context, regarding what they are pursuing, who they are interacting with, and what the digital space allows or restricts. The result is a need for more scrutiny of how digital activism in non-Western contexts is shaped by technological affordances, cultural codes, and lived digital experience.
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Why is it important?
Privacy is sometimes treated as a universal and fixed value especially in Western discourse. However, this lens might fail to account for how people actually make decisions or value judgments in diverse contexts and pursuits. This chapter, while still reflecting on such universalist accounts on the value of privacy, tries to push back against such universalist assumptions by foregrounding activists’ own narratives from Turkey, where digital platforms are both crucial lifelines for dissent and potent tools of control. We show how individuals develop highly situated strategies to negotiate safety, visibility, and authenticity in consideration of their privacy. By doing so, the chapter contributes to a growing body of work that offers a more contextual and user-centered understanding of digital rights and risks.
Perspectives
Privacy has become a buzzword, a floating signifier of some sort. However, the value we assign to privacy is open to question and likely to be shaped by the very context of the informational flow. With this article, we aimed to explore how the value judgments of a particular risk prone group, individual digital activists, are shaped in their pursuit.
Yusuf Yüksekdağ
Istanbul Bilgi Universitesi
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Privacy Expectations and Norms: Perceptions of Individual Digital Activists in Turkey’s Xsphere (Twittersphere), July 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004711396_008.
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