Split the herd. Bot-based situational intervention pilot in illicit nicotine online markets

• In Event: Online drug markets and their evolving dynamics

Abstract

National legislation in Denmark has banned the sale of flavored vapes, resulting in a thriving illicit nicotine market on open social media platforms. These nicotine markets mimic the structure of illicit drug markets and are easily accessible on the most common social media platforms. Online ethnography into these markets shows that sellers are displaced to platforms where affordances help rather than hinder sales and where perceptions of risks are tolerable.
This paper presents an intervention pilot study that works with both affordances and sellers' risk tolerance with the aim of strategically deterring and displacing actors. The pilot utilizes a novel approach, creating covert bots to engage with and change affordances and inter-market trust. Twenty bot profiles are used in the prolific illicit nicotine market on Snapchat: fifteen crawler profiles mimicking vape customers and five honeypot profiles mimicking sellers. The honeypot profiles will react to customers contacting them with an intervention message, while the crawlers will automatically search for and add sellers in correspondence with market naming conventions. When the sellers add them back, the crawlers will deliver a brief intervention message.
Theoretically, the paper aims to understand how market opportunity structures can be manipulated through affordances. The theoretical expectation is that the bots’ presence in the market will lower buyers’ and sellers’ sensations of anonymity and raise their perception of risk, while making the market less efficient for conducting business. We expect a low deterrence effect but an effective displacement of market actors from open to more shielded digital spaces.

Authors

• Kristoffer Aagesen, University of Copenhagen

• Jakob Demant, University of Copenhagen