Privacy Beyond Generation: Education, Gender, and Social Media Surveillance in Türkiye

Social media platforms make everyday visibility, interpersonal observation, and data collection increasingly difficult to separate. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted in Türkiye in 2022 with 21 participants from Generations X, Y, and Z, selected through stratified purposive sampling by generation, gender, and education, this study examines how participants defined privacy, managed visibility, and interpreted surveillance. The findings do not support a linear decline in privacy from older to younger cohorts. Generational differences were clearest in platform embeddedness, whereas education and gender cut across cohort lines: four of the six participants who acknowledged a privacy violation were university-educated, and the three primary-educated women, one in each cohort, did not see themselves as monitored. Across cohorts, a discourse of perceived control—“it is not violated as long as I do not allow it”—coexisted with continued participation, audience segmentation, and the observation of others. Because each gender–education combination was represented by one participant per cohort, these patterns are exploratory. The study conceptualizes privacy on platforms as situated boundary work by users who are simultaneously observers and observed, and treats generation as one social location among others rather than a stand-alone explanation.