New Perspectives on Digital Drift – Accounting for Technologies of Personalized Affordances

• In Event: Roundtable: Crime Refracted?: Online Deviance in the New Platform Ecosystem

Abstract

Social media experiences are tailored to the individual, greatly influencing user actions. These affordances shape illicit markets and activities hosted on the platforms - and by extension possibilities for digital drift. This paper focus on the technological aspects on individuals’ chance of drifting in and out of criminal networks on social media in a bit to enhance this perspective in the discussion of digital drift.

Through a six-month netnography I observe distances and overlap between grey and black markets on social media. Informed by these findings, a quasi-experiment was conducted into the recommendation algorithm of Snapchat. It measured when the platform would push drugs to users, who have only entered legal grey market networks into drug networks. Within four days over half (65%) of the research profiles (n=40) were pushed illegal drug content. After withdrawing the profiles from all networks 52.5% still had drugs in their recommendations.

Social media algorithms push criminal content onto at-risk users, increasing risk of digital drift. Additionally, removing contacts in grey and black markets did not ‘clear’ the criminogenic algorithm. I argue that algorithmically curated content can push users from grey to black markets creating personalized affordances increasing the risk of digital drift.

Author

• Kristoffer Aagesen, University of Copenhagen, Department of Sociology