Virtual Communities and Crime: An Analysis of Online Responses to Major Criminal Events

• In Event: New Media and Crime

Abstract

The nexus between criminal justice and online communities is relatively underresearched, despite the ubiquity of virtual discourse and its potentially wide-reaching impact on real world events. This project seeks to examine the dynamics of online information-gathering and dissemination through a criminological lens, particularly relating to the ways in which information about criminal events is propagated within and between platforms and how it can spill over into offline discourse. The data for this pilot project consists of user-generated posts and discussion threads relating to three recent high-profile crime incidents collected from online social media and crowdsourced news platforms and supplemented with related data from official sources. This data is then studied through analysis of content accuracy and information transfer with the goal of illuminating some of the ways in which online information is generated and circulated after a criminal event and identifying the potential benefits and drawbacks of these activities in the offline context. Ethics and policy implications relating to potential impacts on criminal investigations are also discussed.

Author

• Jacqueline Scott, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York