Dataveillance inhibits legitimate communication: causal evidence for chilling effects

Abstract Chilling effects are an undesirable consequence of the datafication of communication: people may refrain from entirely lawful online activities due to fear of negative repercussions based on their digital traces. Our preregistered, longitudinal online field experiment randomly exposed 827 participants to accounts of dataveillance at 19 prompts across six weeks. Within individuals, this reduced comfort with online opinion sharing, information seeking, and information disclosure. Across individuals, greater total exposure was not robustly associated with lower comfort. Women, older, and less-educated participants reported lower overall comfort, with no evidence of sociodemographic moderation of chilling effects. Follow-up focus groups validated these results. Our study advances chilling effects theory and contributes causal evidence for dataveillance-induced self-censorship in a representative sample. The implications of this subtle relinquishing of autonomy are relevant for individual well-being and democratic participation in societies increasingly shaped by dataveillance.