TY - GEN
T1 - Communicative Constitution of Illicit Online Trade Collectives
T2 - 11th International Conference on Social Media and Society: Diverse Voices - Promises and Perils of Social Media for Diversity, SMSociety 2020
AU - Hazel Kwon, K.
AU - Shao, Chun
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was sponsored by the Army Research Office and was accomplished under Grant Number W911NF-19-1-0066. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Army Research Office or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation herein.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 ACM.
PY - 2020/7/22
Y1 - 2020/7/22
N2 - This study aims to understand communicative activities of an illicit cyber-trade community on an anonymous social platform, Reddit. Based on the communication-as-constitutive of organization (CCO) perspective, the study identifies participants with different levels of engagement, and examines how their discursive engagement collectively reflects the ways in which illicit market users co-orient themselves to respond to a crisis event (i.e., market shutdown). The empirical case for this study is a subreddit channel dedicated to what was once the largest dark web market: r/AlphabayMarket. We examine two month period's posting activities until market was permanently shut down in July 2017. Our analysis comprises three parts. First, a social network analysis was conducted to identify key and non-key players in the community. Second, a structural topic modeling was computed to inductively infer topic clusters. Third, posts were manually reviewed to articulate the process of co-orientation manifest in the results of topic modeling.
AB - This study aims to understand communicative activities of an illicit cyber-trade community on an anonymous social platform, Reddit. Based on the communication-as-constitutive of organization (CCO) perspective, the study identifies participants with different levels of engagement, and examines how their discursive engagement collectively reflects the ways in which illicit market users co-orient themselves to respond to a crisis event (i.e., market shutdown). The empirical case for this study is a subreddit channel dedicated to what was once the largest dark web market: r/AlphabayMarket. We examine two month period's posting activities until market was permanently shut down in July 2017. Our analysis comprises three parts. First, a social network analysis was conducted to identify key and non-key players in the community. Second, a structural topic modeling was computed to inductively infer topic clusters. Third, posts were manually reviewed to articulate the process of co-orientation manifest in the results of topic modeling.
KW - Dark web
KW - Reddit
KW - communicative constitution of organization
KW - cryptomarket
KW - cyber markets
KW - cybercrime
KW - illicit online communities
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85088128119&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85088128119&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3400806.3400815
DO - 10.1145/3400806.3400815
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85088128119
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
SP - 65
EP - 72
BT - 11th International Conference on Social Media and Society
A2 - Gruzd, Anatoliy
A2 - Mai, Philip
A2 - Recuero, Raquel
A2 - Hernandez-Garcia, Angel
A2 - Sian Lee, Chei
A2 - Cook, James
A2 - Hodson, Jaigris
A2 - McEwan, Bree
A2 - Hopke, Jill
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 22 July 2020 through 24 July 2020
ER -