"My Phone Is Listening": Listening Narratives, Perceived Surveillance, and Self-Censorship among Older Adults in Turkey
Planetary surveillance : 11th Biennal Conference Surveillance Studies Network, Lille, France, 9 - 12 June 2026, (Unpublished)
- Publication Type: Conference Paper / Unpublished
- City: Lille
- Country: France
- Anadolu University Affiliated: Yes
Abstract
Claims such as ”my phone is listening to me” have become a common way for social media users to explain targeted advertising and platform behavior, shaping how people interpret surveillance, assess risk, and regulate everyday communication. While recent research has documented the prevalence of perceived listening and framed such beliefs as folk theories or individual cognitive responses to opaque technologies (Segijn et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2024), less is known about how these narratives circulate socially and how they shape everyday practices, particularly in politically sensitive contexts. Drawing on surveillance imaginaries, folk theories of algorithms, and everyday sense making under conditions of opacity, this study examines listening narratives as vernacular surveillance imaginaries that extend beyond individual belief and produce tangible consequences for communication and expression. The study is based on semi structured, in-depth interviews with older adults from diverse social and educational backgrounds in Turkey, which were analyzed using a thematically informed narrative approach attentive to how perceived surveillance is constructed, responsibility is attributed, and consequences are articulated. The findings show that participants overwhelmingly interpret targeted advertisements as evidence of covert listening or monitoring by social media companies and often extend responsibility to state actors, reflecting a blurred boundary between corporate and governmental surveillance. In the absence of accessible explanations of tracking and personalization mechanisms, listening narratives gain credibility through personal experience and circulating stories. Importantly, these narratives have concrete consequences, including political self-censorship, avoidance of sensitive topics, and the narrowing of online expression due to fears of monitoring and punishment. The paper argues that listening narratives function as informal mechanisms of surveillance that discipline speech and reshape digital conduct without requiring direct monitoring, highlighting how opaque platform infrastructures and political uncertainty generate chilling effects through imagined surveillance rather than explicit coercion.