When “Following” Becomes Non‑Consensual Surveillance
Junho Jung
Social media platforms like Instagram have quietly normalized a relationship model that would look deeply unsettling in any offline context: strangers can subscribe to your life without your permission, appear and disappear at will in your social metrics, and leave you to manage the emotional and logistical fallout. The design is framed as “freedom” and “openness,” but for many users it feels more like a subtle form of coercion.
At the heart of this problem is a structural conflation: the platform treats “making something visible” as identical to “granting everyone a right to subscribe.” If you choose to make your posts public—because you are a social being, because you want to participate in public discourse, because your work depends on visibility—you are automatically deemed to have consented to anyone following you without your approval. The only alternative you are given is to lock down completely and retreat into a private bubble.
In other words, the system silently encodes a harsh trade‑off:
be visible and accept non‑consensual, persistent watching,
or be safe and accept social invisibility.
Visibility Is Not the Same as Consent
There is a basic ethical distinction that current platforms refuse to acknowledge: the difference between access and attachment.
Access: someone visits your public page, reads a post, then leaves. In offline terms, this is like overhearing a stranger speaking in a public square.
Attachment: someone establishes a persistent channel to your life—your posts are pushed to their feed, your numbers change because of them, their presence becomes a recurring fact in your digital environment.
Platforms collapse these two into one. Once you post publicly, they treat both occasional viewing and long‑term subscription as equally authorized. But for many users, this is not what they intend. They are willing to be seen; they are not willing to be permanently “held” by people they never explicitly accepted into their social orbit.
This is why the experience can feel like a kind of “visual violation.” The discomfort is not only about being watched; it is about being structurally granted no say over who is allowed to convert occasional watching into an ongoing, system‑recognized relationship.
The Violence of Asymmetric Control
Consider the asymmetry built into the current follow model:
Anyone can follow a public account without prior approval.
Their presence is immediately reflected in the account owner’s numbers and social environment.
They can leave at any time, silently, without explanation.
The emotional and administrative consequences are borne entirely by the account owner.
Even if you never wanted that follower in the first place, their eventual departure can still sting: the number goes down, their name disappears, and you are left wondering what you did wrong. The platform has designed the system so that their freedom to attach and detach at will is prioritized over your sense of stability, dignity, and control.
When platforms respond, “You can always remove or block followers you don’t like,” they are shifting both labour and blame onto the user. It is not a neutral option to say: “We will let everyone enter your space by default, and if that overwhelms you, you are responsible for cleaning up the mess, one account at a time.” What looks like a minor convenience feature for followers becomes a continuous moderation burden for the followed.
This is not unlike giving everyone a key to your front yard and then telling you that if you dislike their presence you should personally escort each one out.
Structural Coercion Disguised as Choice
Platforms insist that users are free because they can set their account to private. But this is a false choice for many people:
Creators, freelancers, and small businesses rely on visibility for income.
Students and job seekers know that online presence often plays into hiring and social inclusion.
Ordinary users feel cultural pressure to be “present” and “findable” in the same spaces as their peers.
For these users, going fully private is not a realistic option; it is a social or economic cost. That means the “choice” is not between public and private, but between accepting non‑consensual following and paying a penalty in opportunity and belonging.
Ethically, this looks less like freedom and more like structural coercion. The platform defines the architecture, narrows the options, ties benefits to the most invasive setting, and then claims that users “chose” what was in reality the least damaging option in a bad menu.
The Psychological Cost of Being “Handled” by Others
The current design also externalizes psychological costs onto users. Because followers can come and go without explanation, users are repeatedly nudged into self‑doubt:
“Why did this person follow me?”
“Why did they unfollow?”
“Did I post something wrong?”
This matters especially because follower counts are displayed and socially meaningful. They function as an implicit status metric. When people you never invited can influence that metric at their whim, your perceived social worth becomes vulnerable to strangers’ micro‑decisions. You are, in effect, handled by people who never had to earn a relationship with you in the first place.
The cruelty is subtle: even if you never wanted them there, their departure still hurts, because the platform trained you to care about the numbers they affect.
A Different Design Is Possible
None of this is technically inevitable. There are straightforward design alternatives that maintain public visibility without enabling non‑consensual attachment:
Public content, consent‑based following
Anyone can view posts and profiles that are public.
“Follow” (or subscription to the feed) requires approval from the account owner, even for public accounts.
Invisible bookmarks instead of uninvited following
Users can bookmark or “favorite” profiles or posts for their own convenience.
These bookmarks do not change the creator’s follower count, do not appear as relationships, and do not intrude into the creator’s sense of who is “attached” to them.
Stricter defaults and reduced management burden
Privacy‑respecting defaults: by default, following a public account might still trigger an approval step, unless the owner opts into auto‑accept.
Batch controls: tools for reviewing and pruning followers in bulk, instead of forcing manual, one‑by‑one management.
These designs preserve openness of information (anyone can read what is publicly shared) while restoring relational sovereignty: the right to decide who is formally connected to you, who shows up in your metrics, and who gets algorithmic proximity to your life.
From “If You Don’t Like It, Leave” to Respect by Design
The deeper issue is that platforms have normalized a dismissive logic:
if you don’t like being watched, stop posting.
if you don’t like being followed, go private.
if you don’t like managing followers, that’s your problem.
This logic is ethically lazy. It assumes that any discomfort is a user’s personal sensitivity, not a signal that the architecture itself is exploitative. It ignores the reality that the digital public sphere has become infrastructure: a basic part of how people work, socialize, and participate in culture. The burden should not be on individuals to withdraw from that infrastructure in order to feel safe.
What we need instead is a shift from “freedom through exposure” to “freedom through meaningful control.” Public expression should never automatically imply surrendering your right to decide who gets a persistent, system‑backed channel into your life. Being visible is not the same as consenting to be followed, measured, and emotionally jerked around by people you never invited.
The fact that platforms could implement alternatives—and choose not to—shows that this is not a technical limitation but a value choice. As long as they prioritize data collection, engagement metrics, and frictionless growth over users’ psychological and relational integrity, non‑consensual following will remain a built‑in feature, not a bug.
And many of us will go on feeling what you have already articulated: that being treated as a public object first and a person second is not just inconvenient.
It is a quiet, persistent form of violence.