Photo: CC0 Public Domain
On the 27th and 28th of October, five Nordic early-career researchers met in Malmö to discuss their shared interest in studying crime and victimization in online communities. Approaching this rapidly changing technology from a social science perspective requires methodological creativity and rigour. Despite increasing interest and recognition, social media is still a relatively niche area in criminology. Sharing insights with researchers from similar social media cultures, societal contexts, and policing practices helps us learn from each other and push the research forward. In this summary, we gathered our main takeaways on the opportunities and risks of research activities focused on digital spaces.
Open sources and social media allow us to study surveillance-wary, hard-to-reach groups engaged in deviant behaviours, such as illegal drug dealing, hacking, or hate speech. In criminology, merging online recruitment with personal interviews enables a deeper understanding of these elusive populations and their experiences, especially with regards to marginalized, criminal, or extremist subcultures.
However, studying deviant online data can pose significant risks for researcher health and safety, such as exposure to distressing material, interactions with individuals engaged in harmful behaviour or harassment through their public university profile. Despite this, universities often lack clear procedures and support networks for dealing with online harassment. There is a substantial need for proactive and structured researcher support within departments, especially for those whose work on extremism exposes them to elevated personal, ethical and safety-related risks.
Yet formalized guidelines often fail to keep pace with digital cultures and technologies, leading to them lagging behind. This is particularly true for ethical frameworks for studying online communities, where no binding, unified code exists. This ongoing debate can be difficult for review boards to keep up with, leading to inconsistent evaluations. While some review boards have tended to consider social media a public space, others have insisted on full compliance with conventional ethical codes, such as signed consent forms. We urge review boards to stay informed about evolving ethical debates to ensure their evaluations of online community research remain current and consistent.
These challenges must be navigated both by researchers and broader academia, with thoughtful strategies and a commitment to participants’ rights. Ethical challenges include safeguarding anonymity and privacy, and practically ensuring informed consent. Methodologically, we need to address issues of trust, the safety of both researchers and participants, and being mindful of power dynamics and boundaries in online recruitment. There is a significant need for departments to offer comprehensive information and expertise on data storage, especially for researchers whose work involves groups that are technologically adept.
Identifying challenges is not enough to resolve these issues. Research collaboration is, however, an ideal first step in consolidating our shared knowledge in this swiftly growing field. In this working group meeting we launched the SMAC-network (Social Media and Crime), that will provide a platform supporting future collaborations among young researchers in the field. Hopefully this will in the long term be a vital forum that will encourage and enable methodological innovation and ethical rigour.
This blog post is based on discussions and shared reflections from the working group meeting. The text has been compiled and edited by the author, drawing on contributions from participants in the network meeting, including:
• Magdalena Celuch (Tampere University)
• Kristoffer Aagesen (Copenhagen University)
• Tove Gustafsson (Lund University)
• Jan Christoffer Andersen (Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies; formerly Oslo University)
About the author:
Oscar Waldner is a doctoral student in criminology at Malmö University, focusing on the role of social media in criminal activity, particularly within illegal markets. His research explores how features of digital platforms can be exploited for criminal purposes and how this may expose young people to risky behavior.
