Crime, Justice and Social Media

Michael Salter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317419051
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

How is social media changing contemporary understandings of crime and injustice, and what contribution can it make to justice-seeking? Abuse on social media often involves betrayals of trust and invasions of privacy that range from the public circulation of intimate photographs to mass campaigns of public abuse and harassment using platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, 8chan and Reddit – forms of abuse that disproportionately target women and children.

Crime, Justice and Social Media argues that online abuse is not discontinuous with established patterns of inequality but rather intersects with and amplifies them. Embedded within social media platforms are inducements to abuse and harass other users who are rarely provided with the tools to protect themselves or interrupt the abuse of others. There is a relationship between the values that shape the technological design and administration of social media, and those that inform the use of abuse and harassment to exclude and marginalise diverse participants in public life.

Drawing on original qualitative research, this book is essential reading for students and scholars in the fields of cyber-crime, media and crime, cultural criminology, and gender and crime.

1

Towards a critical theory of online abuse

Social media has an ambivalent place in public discourse. Over the last 10 years, it’s been heralded as the augur of a new ethos of ‘sharing’ and sociality, trivialised as the playground of children and adolescents, demonised as the tool of paedophiles and terrorists, and credited with the overthrow of tyranny and revitalisation of political dialogue. This kaleidoscope of competing images is testament to the far-reaching implications of new media technologies, not the least of which is the challenge that it poses to established media interests. The rise of social media and an increasingly technology-savvy citizenry has undermined the business model of newspapers and television in particular. This has led to major falls in revenue as ‘old’ media reorientates itself, somewhat reluctantly, within a new technological landscape. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that ‘old’ media has enthusiastically disseminated stories about the apparent threats the social media poses to social order and safety. ‘Sexting’, ‘revenge porn’, cyber-bullying, cyber-harassment, and online child exploitation are now familiar examples of the pitfalls of social media. However, populist presentations of online abuse as a new and pressing threat to children and young people can obscure the intersection of new technology with existing patterns of abuse and violence. Online abuse is underpinned by entrenched power differentials on the basis of gender, age and other factors, and ‘crosses over’ with ‘offline’ harms such as domestic violence, bullying and sexual harassment. Social media has come to saturate social life to such an extent that the distinction between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ abuse has become increasingly obsolete, requiring a nuanced understanding of the role of new media technologies in abuse, crime and justice responses.

The aim of this chapter is to provide a critical overview of the history of online abuse on social media and to propose a critical theory of online abuse that situates new technology within the power relations that shape its development and deployment. The chapter challenges the focus of public debate on the sexual victimisation of children by strangers on social media and foregrounds the ways in which online abuse has changed with the rise of social media platforms. Crucial to this discussion is the status of social media as a network of corporate platforms that profit from the commodification of user data. Communication on social media is induced by software architecture that actively encourages the publication and circulation of private, emotive or provocative material that drives market share and revenue. It is within the tension between communication and commodification that online abuse takes shape and meaning, and exerts its impacts on users and public debate. Avoiding simple dichotomies, the chapter recognises that social media can host meaningful interpersonal and political dialogue; however, the dynamics of commodification can encourage an instrumental attitude amongst users that is conducive to abuse and exploitation. The chapter draws on the traditions of critical theory to interrogate the place of online abuse within the forms of sociability enabled by social media, and the implications of social media for the circulation of claims of crime and injustice.

The history of abuse on social media

In the late 1990s, a number of high-profile internet companies and ventures failed when stock prices in the internet sector collapsed, leading to a prevailing sentiment that the potential for ‘e-business’ had been over-hyped. In 2005, publisher and internet commentator Tim O’Reilly began promoting what he called ‘Web 2.0’ as part of a concerted effort to identify viable online business strategies and resuscitate investor enthusiasm in the internet (O’Reilly, 2005). Web 2.0 described a new e-business model in which the online activities and interactions of users provide the content for web platforms and services, and generate data that could be monetised, usually by selling it to third parties and providing targeted advertising services. The search engine Google is one of the paradigmatic examples of the Web 2.0 model. It is an online-only service based on a vast dynamic database of information gleaned from other web pages, utilising a search algorithm that provides customised results to individual users (including targeted advertisements) (O’Reilly, 2005). Previously, software had usually been sold pre-packaged through retail outlets to be installed directly onto a computer. During this period, the online experience was characterised by web pages with limited interaction and a focus on conveying content to the reader. Web 2.0 was premised on applications and services that are only available online, often for free to the user, whose engagement with the service generates data that can be sold at a profit by the service (Gehl, 2012).

‘Social media’ describes those Web 2.0 applications that are specifically designed to facilitate interaction and communication between users. While arguably all media and technology is ‘social’ in the sense that they are produced and deployed within societies, Fuchs (2014b) characterises ‘social media’ platforms as specifically orientated towards enabling communication, collaboration and community-building. This is in contrast to earlier iterations of the internet in which the transmission of information was more static and less interactive, and more closely aligned with the ‘broadcast’ model of the mass media. With a critical mass of users, social media platforms provide fora for sustained patterns of communication between large numbers of people. The popularisation of social media has occurred contemporaneously with the proliferation of wireless access, and the convergence of camera, phone and internet technology on inexpensive mobile devices. This has gone some way to bridging class-based and global inequalities in internet and computer access, once referred to as the ‘digital divide’ (Norris, 2001), providing ‘everyday’ users with the ability to instantly transmit text, video and images to a global audience. Another consequential impact of social media is that it has proven particularly appealing to girls and women, driving an influx of female users into what had been previously a male-dominated internet (Ahn, 2011).

The first generation of social media sites emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s although many faltered due to design and technical faults, and the challenges of managing a large amount of user-generated content. For example, Friendster launched in 2002 and reportedly had over 3 million users within months (Rivlin 2006). A year after launch, Friendster declined an offer from Google to purchase the company for US$30 million (McMillan, 2013). The exponential growth of the site caused major engineering challenges. Slow loading times triggered vocal complaints from users (Chafkin, 2007). Once users had built their user profile, Friendster provided limited interactive opportunities and began to lose market share to emerging social media sites with more dynamic design features (Pachal, 2011).¹ From around 2004, the music-orientated Myspace emerged as the internationally dominant social media site. At least initially, Myspace was trumpeted as the realisation of the economic potential of Web 2.0. Myspace’s user base grew exponentially within months of launching and the site was purchased by News Corp in 2005 for US$580 million dollars (Siklos, 2005). In 2006, Myspace registered its 100 millionth account (Adest, 2006) and, by 2007, the site was rumoured to have been valued at US$12 billion (Jackson, 2011).

By 2008, Myspace had entered into a steep decline as it began haemorrhaging users to rival Facebook, only to be sold for US$35 million to an advertising network in 2011 (Gehl, 2012). A number of explanations have been offered for the demise of Myspace, including the focus of News Corp on building the site’s advertising revenue and a corresponding lack of innovation in enhancing and developing the Myspace platform (Chmielewski and Sarno, 2009). However, the risk of online abuse and crime had become a major public relations headache for the site. This was due in part to its roots in the indie rock and hip hop music scenes, which leant the site a visual style that was attractive to young people but largely alienated their parents (boyd, 2013). User profiles and conversations on Myspace frequently contained text and images with sexual content and references to drugs and violence (Moreno et al., 2009). This content was difficult if not impossible for Myspace to regulate given that Myspace profile pages were customisable to the point where users could rewrite its coding, so content was being generated in non-standardised ways across millions of profiles (Gehl, 2012). The subcultural look of the site, including the prevalence of sexualised and violent content, contributed to the view that it was unsafe. A largely overblown media narrative about ‘online predators’ and paedophiles on Myspace followed high-profile reporting of cases in which men lied about their age online in order to meet teenage girls for sexual activity (Marwick, 2008). In 2006, the suicide of US teenager Megan Meier, following harassment and abuse on Myspace from a user with a fake profile, contributed to growing concern about the vulnerability of young social media users (Gehl, 2012).

boyd (2013) has argued that the shift of users from Myspace to Facebook was analogous to the ‘white flight’ of the middle class to the suburbs and away from the poor and racialised communities of the inner city. In contrast to Myspace’s origins in the music scene, Facebook originated as an Ivy League university social network, and built up a user base by expanding access to select universities and high schools over time. The ‘elite’ educational origins of the site appealed to middle-class parents and their children, in contrast to Myspace whose provocative displays of sexuality and racialised identity led to its stigmatisation as a ‘ghetto’ (boyd, 2013: 219). As users began to abandon Myspace, poor site security enabled fake and hacked profiles to proliferate, hosting malware, viruses and advertisements for pornography and dating sites. When combined with the often ‘messy’ look of Myspace profile pages, the site took on an increasingly abandoned and vandalised appearance (boyd, 2013). This only exacerbated the contrast with Facebook, whose promise of security and safety was reinforced by the site’s clean visual interface, which involves highly standardised profile pages in contrast to Myspace’s clutter. Facebook engages moderators to detect and remove material deemed inappropriate, such as nudity, sexually explicit or drug-related images or text (Chen, 2013, 2014), and actively seeks to ensure that profiles on the site are in the user’s legal name. It also has a range of evolving response mechanisms to potential or identified threats to child safety on the platform. The clean, simple interface of Facebook and the regulation of identity and content has been important in quelling user anxiety and attracting a much broader demographic of social media users. It also reinforced the role of social media in building a public-facing ‘self-brand’ (Banet-Weiser, 2012: 81) through which users promote and display a respectable identity. Teenagers interviewed by Livingstone (2009: 106) felt that Facebook’s streamlined templates were more mature and ‘sophisticated’ compared to Myspace customised profiles covered in ‘flowers’ and ‘hearts’ and ‘glitter’.

Online abuse and the threat of solicitation and harassment by strangers have been important in shaping the contemporary social media landscape. It is perhaps ironic, then, that the rise of social media has coincided with a major drop in reports of online stranger harassment. Prior to social media, group online interaction occurred primarily on chat rooms and discussion boards that tended to facilitate communication between strangers. Research at the time suggested that a significant proportion of users in youth-orientated chat rooms and other online sites were adults misrepresenting themselves as teenagers in order to engage young users in sexualised interaction (Lamb, 1998). Chat rooms were a particularly common site for the sexual solicitation of children and young people by strangers (Mitchell et al., 2001). The shift to social media, which facilitates contact between users known to one another, has resulted in a significant decline in this activity. Large nationally representative surveys of young Americans aged 10–17 found that reports of unwanted online sexual solicitations online in the past year more than halved from 19 per cent in 2000 to 9 per cent in 2010 (Mitchell et al., 2013). The authors suggest that, ‘rather than making youth more vulnerable, the social networking revolution may have provided an additional measure of protection’ from unwanted sexual attention from strangers online (Mitchell et al., 2013: 1233).

The shift to social media has not eradicated online abuse, far from it. As stranger harassment has dropped, online sexual solicitations by those known to the child appear to have increased (Mitchell et al., 2013), and so too have reports of harassment by acquaintances involving threats or other offensive behaviours (Jones et al., 2013). Young people’s use of social media is giving new shape and form to intimate coercion and sexual harassment. This effect is particularly acute for girls and young women, who are at disproportionate risk of humiliation and intimidation through online invasions of privacy (Salter, 2015). In high schools, sexual harassment can escalate with the collection and sharing of sexual or nude images of female classmates via social media and mobile phones (Ringrose et al., 2013). Similar patterns have been observed amongst adults, such as the case described in the Introduction, in which adult men circulated images of their ex-partner online. The use of social media to monitor and control partners or ex-partners (including releasing or threatening to release private images and video) is an increasingly common tactic amongst domestic violence perpetrators (Southworth et al., 2007). In these cases, the ‘inward’ turn of social media towards dense connectivity between known users effectively poisons the user’s social world with defamatory or embarrassing online content. Public figures, particularly women and those from racial or sexual minority groups, report consistent abuse on social media in an effort to silence them and drive them from public debate. Misogyny, racism and other forms of prejudice often intersect in social media harassment.

The business model of Web 2.0 is founded on the largely unregulated generation of content by a mass of users. As a result, the internet is full of ‘garbage’, as technology journalist Sarah Jeong (2015) memorably put it: junk content ranging from abuse and threats to spam and viruses. A key question is: ‘Who puts the garbage out?’ That is, on a platform that generates profit by commodifying user-generated content, whose job is it to manage the risk of abusive content and minimise its harms? It is clear that certain types of ‘garbage’ trigger a prompt response from social media platforms. Having learnt from the fate of Myspace, social media platforms are highly responsive to concerns about child safety. So too are the police, to the point where a significant proportion of arrests for internet-facilitated sexual crimes against minors involve entrapment by a police officer posing online as a child (Mitchell et al., 2010). In contrast, women complaining of the non-consensual circulation of intimate images and threats of death and sexual violence on social media report little or no response from social media safety teams, while police are often disinterested or uncertain of how to respond (Salter and Crofts, 2015). With the ‘staggering’ number of reports of abuse on social media, US law enforcement representatives claim they are forced to triage only the most extreme cases, specifically those involving immediate risk of physical harm or threats to children (Hess, 2014). When it comes to the abuse of adults, the cooperation of social media sites with police investigations has been patchy at best, with sites keen to maintain the anonymity and confidentiality of their users. This position has become increasingly untenable as public attention focuses on the capacity of social media to host racist, neo-Nazi, Islamophobic, homophobic and misogynist groups and networks, and enable the coordination of campaigns of violence and intimidation. Understanding how social media facilitates and shapes abuse and prejudice is crucial to developing an adequate response.

Understanding the role of technology in online abuse

Implicit in debates over the potential harms and abuses of social media are a set of competing assumptions about the relationship between technology and society. This section outlines three general theoretical frameworks for understanding online abuse and critically evaluates their implications: utopian accounts of social media, dystopian accounts of social media, and instrumental accounts of social media. The utopian and dystopian approaches can be understood as substantive or determinist theories of technology, since they postulate that the architecture of the internet and social media necessarily generates specific kinds of identities, practices, relationships and societies. This has been a prominent strand of internet theorising. Since the internet was popularised in the mid-1990s, it was greeted as the architecture of a new form of human civilisation: an ‘information society’, ‘communication society’, ‘network society’, ‘knowledge economy’ or ‘second modernity’ characterised by increasingly sophisticated technological capabilities and networks. The utopian account celebrates this ‘new’ society or order as fundamentally positive, whereas the dystopian account suggests that the internet is pathological or anomic. This split reflects opposing portrayals of computer technology within the cultural imaginary as a medium for personal freedom and collective liberation on one hand, and an oppressive extension of government and corporate control on the other (Yar, 2014). This clash of values has been evident since the early days of computing and it persists in debates over online interaction and sociality. In contrast, the third approach, the instrumental account, posits that the internet is a neutral tool of human action. This approach generally focuses on human motivations for particular kinds of technological practice, while the material possibilities and histories of technologies are treated as secondary considerations if they are acknowledged at all.

Hand and Sandywell (2002) offer a useful distinction between ‘strong’ theoretical models that attribute intrinsic positive or negative properties to technologies, and ‘weak’ theoretical models in which technology is characterised as largely neutral, although likely to lend itself to particular ends. To a certain extent, utopian, dystopian and instrumental accounts of technology can be positioned on this spectrum, with ‘strong’ utopian and dystopian models at the far end, ‘weaker’ utopian and dystopian models in the middle, and instrumental accounts towards the ‘weak’ pole. In their descriptions of the effects of technology, these three accounts tend to assume some ‘essence’ to technology that is inherent to it or manifests in its application, lending themselves to specific responses and solutions. This section reflects on the underlying assumptions that inform debates on online abuse and proposed responses to it.

Utopian accounts of social media

Technological utopianism, the belief that technological progress is an inherently beneficial force, has been an important influence in debates over the internet and social media. It was a particularly prominent sentiment as social media was popularised in the mid-noughties. Theorists such as Jenkins (2006: 4) have embraced what he calls ‘convergence culture’, in which social media transforms consumers into media producers who are challenging media power structures. Bruns (2008: 2) identified social media users as newly empowered ‘produsers’; that is, media consumers who had been transformed into producers and distributors, generating new models of participatory culture and politics. Other commentators propose that social media inaugurates an interlinked economic–political–social system, ‘a new economic democracy…in which we all have a lead role’ (Tapscott and Williams, 2008: 15). Shirky (2008: 172) has argued that social media literally creates ‘freedom’: social media ‘creates what economics would call a positive supply-side shock to the amount of freedom in the world’.

The utopian perspective has articulated a range of potentials for personal and social benefit symbolised by social media. However, it has tended to blur the role of the social media user with capitalist consumer and democratic citizen, suggesting in effect that the more closely these roles merge, the more ‘empowered’ the individual and the more robust the economic and political system. A particularly strong version of the utopian argument emerged in analyses of the ‘Arab Spring’ (a series of political uprisings in the Arab world beginning in 2011) and recent social movements that have been attributed in some quarters to the democratising power of social media. Castells (2012) made the argument that the Arab Spring ‘emerged from calls from the Internet and wireless communication networks’ (p. 106) and that the Occupy movement, a disparate social movement against transnational ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1. Towards a critical theory of online abuse
• 2. Gamergate and the subpolitics of abuse in online publics
• 3. Becoming Facebook famous: Commodification and exploitation on social media
• 4. Attention whores and gym selfies: Sex and nudity in the online visual economy
• 5. Dick pics, sexting and revenge porn: Weaponising gendered power online
• 6. From #OpGabon to #OpDeathEaters: Transnational justice flows on social media
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• References
• Index