In 2024, the German cabinet approved a draft law that expanded deportation criteria to include public expressions that “approve” or “promote” terrorism on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Although the Ministry of the Interior subsequently clarified that a single “like” would not automatically suffice, the proposal nevertheless made newly visible a broader development in migration governance and the growing relevance of digital activities, including its affective and often highly ambiguous dimensions, to questions of risk, legitimacy, and deportability. By early 2025, deportation orders were already being issued under these expanded provisions, especially in cases involving protest speech and accusations of antisemitism or incitement. While these cases did not in fact hinge on isolated reactions alone, they made clear that nonverbal expressions on social media had acquired a distinct evidentiary potential within migration casework.

In this blog, I will not primarily analyse the legal status of migrants and the use of likes itself, nor will I argue that online expressions have straightforwardly replaced older forms of migration control. Passports, interviews, case files, and biometric checks remain central to contemporary migration control. Rather, I am interested in how the field of bordering has expanded, so that digital traces such as posts, comments, emojis, reactions, affiliations, and other small residues of everyday online life become increasingly available for institutional interpretation, and in doing so, alter the conditions under which migrants become legible to authorities. Migration scholars, like Petra Molnar (2024) and Annaliese Pelizza (2021), have long shown that the border is no longer confined to the territorial edge, but is distributed across administrative routines, infrastructures of data collection, and dispersed spaces through which mobile lives are rendered knowable. What my Virtual Asylum project showed is that this process is now extending more deeply into the affective textures of digital life, where sentiments, moods, and symbolic gestures may be re-read as indicators of disposition, alignment, or credibility (Nagy 2024).

The argument I want to develop is relatively simple. Across Germany, Hungary, Turkey, Greece, and the Netherlands, migrants who arrived during the so-called migration crisis rarely described dramatic encounters with surveillance. Instead, they recounted more subtle and routine changes in their social media practices, shaped by expectations of bureaucratic monitoring.. These adjustments were often framed as routine preparations for asylum or residency procedures, comparable to gathering documents or organising interview notes. Yet they reveal something significant about the present conjuncture, a securitisation of sentiments, where affective traces do not become politically relevant only at the moment they are expressed, but at the moment they are evaluated. In what follows, I first examine these everyday adjustments, which clustered around practices such as precautionary deletion, affective neutralisation, account stratification, and anticipatory compliance. I then show how these practices illuminate a broader shift in migration governance, in which digital traces are increasingly integrated into administrative assessments not only as information, but as cues through which people are sensed and interpreted. I end by reflecting on what it means when emotion becomes evidence and when digital life, once valued primarily as a resource for mobility, communication, and support, also becomes a site of affective bordering.

Everyday Adjustments to Digital Surveillance

During my fieldwork, people didn’t talk about their online practices regarding data sharing and polymedia use as a break with their past networks or a social performance conducted by constant fear. Instead, they described small, practical routines they use to deal with migration bureaucracy in an increasingly data-driven system. Participants from conflict countries along the Western Balkan route – the primary land pathway for irregular migration from the Middle East and Asia into the European Union via the Balkan Peninsula did not usually present these practices as resistance, nor even necessarily as responses to confirmed surveillance. More often, they spoke of them as forms of preparation, actions taken because digital traces had become relevant enough to matter, even if the exact criteria by which they might later be interpreted remained unclear. In that sense, what emerged across interviews was not a common social response to avoid migration authorities, but a series of recurring coping strategies through which migrants sought to manage how they might appear once their digital traces entered administrative circulation.

One of these strategies is what I call precautionary deletion. Several respondents described reviewing and removing older posts before interviews or appointments, not because those materials were overtly political or obviously incriminating, but because they had become too ambiguous once digital histories were understood to have potential relevance for casework. An Afghan respondent in the Netherlands explained that before a scheduled interview, he went through years of older posts and deleted jokes, emojis, and anything that might look disrespectful. The phrase is telling, because the issue was not prohibited content, but interpretive vulnerability. Humour, irony, and casual sociability felt safe within their original context, but not once imagined through the evaluative frame of a bureaucracy concerned with credibility and risk. In that sense, the practice was shaped less by the certainty of monitoring than by the possibility that routine and context-dependent expression might later be read within a framework of risk.

The majority crossing Schengen borders employed practices that I describe as affective neutralisation. Participants, especially those who were hoping to settle in Germany, spoke of refraining from reacting publicly to posts during politically charged periods, not because they lacked anger, grief, or solidarity, but because they wished to avoid generating visible emotional signals that might later be interpreted without context. One respondent explained that she had stopped reacting to public content altogether because “you never know how they read it,” a statement that captures well the uncertainty of these adjustments. The issue was not simply self-censorship in a classical sense, but the effort to minimise expressive traces in an environment where affective gestures, even a heart, an angry emoji, or a supportive comment were taken not only as momentary reactions but as indications of deeper ideological or social orientation. What was being managed here was less the content of speech than the risk of misalignment between intention and institutional interpretation.

The most impressive practice, mainly described by Syrian refugees in Europe, was the maintenance of multiple digital identities for different audiences and purposes. Across Greece and Hungary, respondents described keeping one relatively sparse and predictable account that appeared neutral and ordinary, especially where visibility to institutions was thought possible, while reserving other accounts or channels for more intimate, familial, communal, or politically expressive forms of communication. This was not usually framed as concealment in a dramatic sense, but as a practical way of organising visibility across different social and institutional settings. It reflected an understanding that not all digital spaces are encountered equally, and that emotional expression may be acceptable in one setting while framed as problematic in another. The segmentation of accounts thus worked as a way of separating audiences, obligations, and vulnerabilities, allowing migrants to maintain social connectedness while also managing the risks of being made legible to institutions through the wrong kind of digital exposure.

Running through these different practices in various stages of the mobility paths along the Balkan route, refugees emphasised a broader pattern that can be understood as a form of anticipatory compliance. Participants did not present themselves as reacting to explicit instructions from authorities. Rather, they adjusted in advance, in response to the uncertain but real possibility that online traces might be mobilised during interviews, assessments, or decisions. They had heard of posts being referenced in asylum interviews, or of online material being used to question credibility and some participants had even encountered this directly, while others knew of it through wider migrant networks. Their concern, then, was not abstract surveillance in the general sense, but the concrete and selective use of digital traces in decision-making. This anticipatory dimension is important because it shows that border effects do not only arise when digital content is formally used as evidence, but also when the possibility of such use becomes embedded in the practical reasoning of those subject to migration governance.

According to these narratives there was a clear polymedia culture of affective legibility explained by mobile user refugees as an administrative requirement on the road. Beyond documents and narrative coherence, digital histories and emotional tone are increasingly perceived as relevant to how a person is assessed. Respondents did not usually describe this through legal or policy language. Instead, they spoke through familiar routines of deleting, withholding, separating, cleaning, and simplifying personal responses via online platforms on smart phone devices. Yet these routines indicate that digital platform use has become incorporated into the labour of preparing oneself for bureaucratic encounters. They do not suggest fear-driven withdrawal from digital life, nor do they point to an all-encompassing regime of surveillance. Contextually speaking, these routines show how emotional and digital self-presentation have become part of navigating institutions whose evaluative frames now reach further into the small and often ambiguous traces of everyday online life.

Affective Governance Expands Migration Control

The incorporation of digital activity into migration casework is not occurring in isolation. It reflects a broader administrative shift in which risk-oriented governance increasingly relies on pre-emptive assessments rather than solely on past actions, and in which online expressions, such as comments, reactions, symbolic gestures, and visible affiliations become supplemental indicators of disposition, credibility, or possible alignment. During my fieldwork, I observed how this expansion of scrutiny operates through three interconnected mechanisms. First, the datafication of everyday interaction flattens the thick context of social life into discrete, legible data points, turning fleeting gestures into permanent “traces” for administrative review. Next, affective inference allows officials to judge a person’s character based on their emojis and comments. Finally, through the administrative integration of these traces, these digital fragments are woven into formal evidentiary procedures, transforming the messiness of lived experience into a solidified legal fact used to support legal decision-making processes.

With the rapidly increasing datafication of everyday interactions, the refugees from my research did not describe elaborate intelligence operations or systematic monitoring in a strong sense. Surprisingly, they normalised encounters in which officials referred to digital behaviour, public posts, or content that remained visible online, sometimes from years earlier digital data that were regularly investigated without consent. These instances indicate that digital traces are gradually moving into existing evidentiary frameworks, not necessarily as primary evidence, but as contextual material that can support or complicate judgments about coherence, sincerity, or trustworthiness. What began as a resource for maintaining social ties and accessing information during migration has gradually evolved into a source of administrative data, extending social media’s role into governance and surveillance practices. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are no longer just for connection but also provide persistent, accessible data that is easily tied to an individual’s identity. Consequently, these digital footprints have become key indicators in migration casework. In this sense, digital interaction becomes not only socially but archivally useful. This practice also relies on a newly digitized affective inference as an assessment logic. This does not always depend on advanced emotional AI or formalised algorithmic analysis, even if those developments form part of the wider landscape discussed in contemporary scholarship on migration control. More immediately, affective inference (Hesp et al 2021) often occurs through modest but consequential acts of interpretation of officers, deciding whether an online expression appears hostile, sympathetic, supportive, provocative, or politically aligned. Respondents repeatedly described uncertainty about how reactions, comments, or expressive symbols might be understood, especially during periods of heightened political tension. The key issue here is that affect is not judged only for what it says, and how language and semantics could matter, but for what it is presumed to reveal about the person who produced it. A reaction becomes legible not only as emotion, but as a possible sign of disposition. This aligns with broader work on emotional AI and soft biometrics, which shows how affective cues are increasingly turned into actionable information. Yet in my fieldwork, I identified how this appeared as a mundane process of making interiority legible by translating private affects into bureaucratic facts, where institutions read the ‘vibe’ of digital traces as a way to fix a person’s character.

Most importantly, these easy-access personal digital traces become administratively integrated into existing procedures of border control practices. The significance of this step lies in the fact that online material does not necessarily need to stand on its own as decisive proof to matter. Participants described religious and politically sensitive posts being discussed during interviews, public profiles being checked for discrepancies, and older content becoming newly relevant because of developments elsewhere. In this way, digital material enters what anthropologists might call an administrative archive (Stoler 2008, Zeitlyn 2012), a digitized cumulative repository of heterogeneous materials used to build an image of a person’s background, reliability, and orientation. Once digital affect enters this archive, its interpretation gains institutional weight, even if selectively and contingently. This is why the distinction between expression and evidence becomes increasingly unstable. A post does not have to be conclusive to become consequential. It only needs to be legible enough to support an inference.

As my research exposed, these digital administrative screening processes do not unfold uniformly across national contexts. In Germany, the expanded deportation framework made people particularly attentive to the possibility that online expressions of political sympathy, anger, or protest might be scrutinised. In the Netherlands, respondents were more likely to describe the removal or cleaning of older posts reflecting their social networks as part of preparing for credibility interviews, reflecting the centrality of coherence within Dutch asylum procedures. In Hungary, concerns often focused on the misreading of multilingual expressions or non-standard dialects, especially where linguistic opacity could heighten the risk of interpretive error associated with terrorism or radicalisation. In Greece, participants more frequently described separating accounts and managing visibility across different social worlds including gender sensitive content. These differences matter because they show that affective governance is not a single coherent apparatus, but a differentiated set of practices shaped by national asylum systems, local bureaucratic cultures, and recent political developments. What ties them together is the techsolutionist perception grounded in concrete encounters that digital affect is relevant to institutional decision-making. Accordingly, what this amounts to is a shift from the evaluation of discrete behaviours to the assessment of affective legibility of the foreigner. Migrants from authoritarian conflict countries quickly understood that their digital presence is not assessed only for explicit wrongdoing, but for what it may signal about them more broadly. Managing visibility, then, becomes part of navigating asylum and residency procedures and daily safety measures, not because digital life has become wholly securitised in an abstract sense, but because expressive traces now travel more easily into evaluative settings where they can acquire new meanings. The border thus expands not only through more data, but through new ways of reading the atmospheres and dispositions that digital life leaves behind.

Experience of Bordering

One of the most striking features of these practices is that they are experienced not as dramatic political acts, but as ordinary forms of maintenance. Migrants described reviewing posts, withholding reactions, simplifying profiles, or dividing accounts much as they described collecting documents or preparing narratives before interviews. This ordinariness matters because it shows how affective bordering does not only take place at moments of enforcement. It becomes woven into the temporalities of everyday life, into habits of checking, editing, pausing, and anticipating. What changes is not simply what people say online, but how they sense themselves being potentially read. This is why it may be useful to think not only in terms of surveillance, but in terms of perception and legibility. The issue is not just that online traces can be seen. According to their testimonies, these can be sensed as clues, referring to fragments of tone, mood, sympathy, irritation, grief, or alignment that may later be folded into judgments about credibility or risk. Participants did not often articulate this through explicit theoretical language, but their practices visualised a shift in the sensory politics of migration governance. Administratively, they were not simply managing information, but the possible feelings and impressions their digital presence might evoke once translated into a bureaucratic setting, considering the risk of misidentification and therefore rejection of authorization of any kind, healthcare, visa, jobs or social housing.

The border, in this sense, is not only encountered at the territorial edge or across an interview desk. It also lingers in the feed, in the archived post, in the hesitation before pressing “like,” and in the late-night work of deciding what to keep and what to delete. This also helps clarify why the effects are often subtle yet consequential. Humour becomes risky because it depends on shared context. Solidarity becomes risky because it may be detached from the event that gave rise to it and reclassified as ideological alignment. Multilingual or culturally specific forms of expression become risky because they do not travel easily into standardised interpretive frames. Under these conditions, neutrality often appears safer than nuance, predictability safer than irony, and sparse self-presentation safer than emotionally layered visibility. The cumulative effect is not necessarily silence in an absolute sense, but a narrowing of the expressive range that feels administratively safe.

The smartphone, long recognised in migration research as indispensable for communication, navigation, and support, therefore appears here in an increasingly ambivalent light. It remains a vital infrastructure of mobility and connection, but it also stores the emotional residue of everyday life in forms that may later become administratively consequential. It contains routes, documents, and contacts, but also jokes, affiliations, grief, humour, and fragments of ordinary sociability. For people in precarious legal positions, this means that the border can no longer be encountered only as a physical line or an institutional procedure but transgressed through the possibility that one’s own digital history may be re-opened and re-read.

When Emotion Becomes Evidence

What began in public debate as a question about whether a single “like” could support deportation, actually points to a broader transformation in how migration control is enacted. Online expressions, including reactions, comments, emojis, affiliations, and other small affective traces increasingly acquire evidentiary potential once they enter administrative circulation. Digital activity now matters not only for what it explicitly says, but for what it may be taken to reveal about a person’s disposition, credibility, or alignment. Precautionary deletion, neutralisation and other forms of anticipatory compliance are not signs of radical withdrawal from digital life, but practical ways of managing how one becomes legible to institutions under conditions of uncertainty. People delete older jokes and emojis not because these are incriminating in themselves, but because they have become too ambiguous once digital traces are folded into case files. They maintain separate accounts not simply to hide, but to organise visibility according to different audiences, obligations, and vulnerabilities. Seen in this light, what is at stake is not only the datafication of migrant lives, a process already documented in digital migration scholarship, but the growing incorporation of emotional tone and online affect into the conditions of administrative legibility. Beyond documents and narrative coherence, the emotional residue of digital interaction is becoming part of how migrants are sensed and assessed. They show that affective traces become consequential at the moment of evaluation, when they are drawn into an administrative archive and made to support wider judgments about sincerity, risk, or political orientation. In that sense, this development resonates with broader discussions of the deep border, emotional AI, and digital migration infrastructures, even if, in practice, what participants encountered was often more ordinary: the selective and contingent use of visible online content in interviews and procedures.

The people I spoke with were above all, trying to avoid being misread. Their accounts suggest that contemporary border regimes increasingly operate not only by verifying facts or documents, but by interpreting atmospheres, dispositions, and expressive cues that are difficult to stabilise once removed from their social context. To recognise this shift is important because it clarifies how bordering expands into everyday digital life without always appearing as a dramatic new regime. The new border security regime lingers in the evaluation of moods, gestures, and sentiments, asking not only where someone comes from or whether they may stay, but what their digital life seems to say about who they are.

Veronika Nagy is a scholar of digital criminology, migration, and security whose work examines how data-driven systems reshape bordering, surveillance, and everyday experiences of institutional scrutiny. Her research focuses on the social and political consequences of digital governance for people in precarious positions.

References

Hesp, C., Smith, R., Parr, T., Allen, M., Friston, K. J., & Ramstead, M. J. D. (2021). ‘Deeply felt affect: The emergence of valence in deep active inference’. Neural Computation, 33(2), 398–446.

Molnar, P. (2024). The walls have eyes: Surviving migration in the age of artificial intelligence. The New Press.

Nagy, V. (2024). ‘Social sorting in Europe: Self-censorship in a digital asylum.’ Archiwum Kryminologii/Archives of Criminology, 46(1), 149-179.

Pelizza, A. (2021). Identification as translation: The art of choosing the right spokespersons at the securitized border. Social Studies of Science, 51(4), 487-511. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312720983932

Stoler, A. L. (2008). Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Princeton University Press.

Zeitlyn, D. (2012). ‘Anthropology in and of the archives: Possible futures and contingent pasts. Archives as anthropological surrogates.’ Annual Review of Anthropology, 41(1), 461-480.

Cite as: Nagy, V. 2026. “Surveilling Sentiments: When Emotion Becomes Evidence” Focaalblog October 16. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/10/16/veronika-nagy-surveilling-sentiments-when-emotion-becomes-evidence/