# Social Listening Social listening is the systematic observation of public conversations, recurring themes, questions, sentiment, and behavioral signals across networked channels. It can inform customer service, public communication, research, crisis response, and narrative analysis. Social listening is a form of [[wiki/Surveillance|surveillance]], not an escape from it. Lawful access, proportionality and disciplined inference govern what an observer may do with the resulting model; they do not undo the observation. Public traces can support aggregate pattern recognition without supporting every claim about an individual, and [[wiki/Information Asymmetry|information asymmetry]] grows when the listening system can profile a population that cannot inspect the system in return. Related: [[wiki/Surveillance|Surveillance]], [[wiki/Information Asymmetry|Information Asymmetry]], [[wiki/Audience Analytics|Audience Analytics]], [[wiki/Narrative Detection|Narrative Detection]], [[wiki/Behavioral Signal|Behavioral Signal]], [[wiki/Crisis Communications|Crisis Communications]].