Picking the Goodies When Sleuthing Online

• Published date: 01 September 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10575677241230473
• Author: David Wästerfors
• Date: 01 September 2024
• Subject Matter: Original Articles

Picking the Goodies When

Sleuthing Online

David Wästerfors

1

Abstract

Online activities can serve as tools for criminal opportunities and arenas for victimhood, but they

can also function as reality constructions embedded in social control. One example of the latter is

online sleuthing, primarily focused on dramatizing and disentangling off‌line crimes. This article relies

on data from an ethnographic project conducted on the Swedish platform Flashback and analyzes

posters’interview accounts of their practices when attempting to unravel off‌line crimes. The author

argues that posters’ways of accounting for their sifting process within their digital community con-

tribute to making it attractive. The posters’situated selections and distinctions allow them to repro-

duce a handy and relatively tasteful interpretation of the crimes that their digital community is

engaged in portraying. Online sleuths not only try to bring order to the off‌line crime dramas at

issue but also engage in internal and ref‌lexive social control, intended to order the ordering itself.

They bridge the online–off‌line divide by referring to and incorporating allegedly objective off‌line cir-

cumstances when they set out to edit or cleanse the online debate. Off‌line investigations, interac-

tions, and information gatherings are drawn upon as a resource in this sifting process.

Keywords

online sleuthing, crime discussions, ethnomethodology, digital ethnography, cultural criminology

Introduction

Criminologists tend to treat the Internet and social networking as powerful tools for the expansion

of criminal opportunities—see, for instance, studies on illicit marketplaces on the Darknet (Ferguson,

2017) and drug-dealing practices on Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram (Demant et al., 2019)—or as

arenas for the diffusion of novel forms of victimhood, such as phishing scams, identity thefts and

gambling fraud (David, 2023; Griff‌iths, 2010). As Ferrell et al. (2015, p. 170) have noted, cybercrime

has become an established area of criminological attention, and most research focuses on either iden-

tifying and explaining online crimes or on developing ways to combat them. Less attention has been

directed at digital activities in their own right, that is, the practical experience of the Internet, “how it

functions in particular ways for particular purposes,”and how meaning-making processes related to

crime converse with the culture at large (Ferrell et al., 2015, pp. 171, 180; Stuart, 2020). It seems to

1

Department of Sociology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Corresponding Author:

David Wästerfors, Department of Sociology, Lund University, Box 114, Lund 22100, Sweden.

Email: david.wasterfors@soc.lu.se

Original Article

International Criminal Justice Review

2024, Vol. 34(3) 299-317

© 2024 Georgia State University

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/10575677241230473

journals.sagepub.com/home/icj

be more diff‌icult for criminologists to look at digital activities as a processual and interactional space

that is devoted to both representing and dramatizing crime, thereby contributing to its social

construction.

Digital activities in general are today integrated into people’s ways of being in an environment—a

sort of telepresence—even with regard to crime (Ferrell et al., 2015, p. 172; Stuart, 2020). They allow

us to simultaneously exist in two different environments, both the physical, in which our body is

positioned, and the digital, in which we also interact. Imaginatively, we might even talk about a

third environment—the digitally represented scene and its context—to which an online discussion

can be devoted. An illuminating case is the f‌ield of online sleuthing, which focuses on representing,

dramatizing, and disentangling off‌line criminal activities and thereby—in and through interactional

processes—digitally immersing people into often quite intense detective work (Burcar Alm et al.,

2023). Here, the Internet and its online communities do not function as settings for criminal projects

or forms of victimization, but as settings of reality constructions tied to social control. These com-

munities do not, however, necessarily involve mob justice or crowdsourcing, but rather more

subtle variants of informal, symbolic, and scrutinizing control, such as being highly vigilant, selec-

tive, and critical in the context of platform interactions.

This article delves into a Swedish research project on online sleuthing—Citizens as Crime

Investigators—from an ethnomethodological perspective. It is guided by a specif‌ic research question:

How do people engaged in debating and investigating off‌line crimes online differentiate their digital

interactions? With the help of ethnographic data on online sleuthing on Flashback, an open Swedish

online community, the article analyzes empirical instances in which the practices of making digital

selections and distinctions were made meaningful and legitimate in this setting. The project’s qual-

itative interviews proved particularly comprehensive and fruitful in this regard, since they provided

the interviewees with an off‌line arena in which they could elaborate on their online practices, includ-

ing their ways of managing content that they did not appreciate. The article focuses on posters’sifting

practices as they are described in interviews, and on their signif‌icance for online sleuthing. I analyze

the ways in which online sleuths make their differentiating practices accountable with regard to their

investigative efforts and interests. The aim is to show how these accounting procedures are integrated

into posters’socially crafted motivations for entering into and sustaining digital relations within a

crime-investigation community.

The study is set against the background of the hate speech, misogyny, and racism that f‌igure prom-

inently in many online interactions (Atton, 2006; Blomberg & Stier, 2019; Campbell, 2006; Daly &

Nichols, 2023; Ekman, 2018; Kreis, 2017; Loveluck, 2020; Williams et al., 2020), which is also true

in relation to online sleuthing. The investigative efforts conducted in digital communities aimed at

solving a crime case or identifying a suspect (Myles et al., 2020) take place in heated threads in

which posters often encounter repeated attacks on immigrants—Muslims in particular (Törnberg

& Törnberg, 2016), but also on liberal and left-wing politicians—and where the prevalent tone is

harsh and masculine. “Indeed,”write Ferrell et al. (2015, pp. 172–173), “the ‘a-spatial’” nature of

online communities “lends itself to ‘emotion dumping’and other outpourings of personal self-

expression that would never be tolerated in physical space.”

Since the article aims to specify the ethno-methods by which online sleuths deal with their online

interactions and construct their community membership, it contributes to existent research by

showing that the so-called “noise,”“shit-posting,”and the wide range of posters’“means of self-

expression”(Daly & Nichols, 2023, pp. 4–5; Nhan et al., 2017, pp. 346–347; Wikhamn et al.,

2019, p. 63)—that is, the topically irrelevant posts that must be waded through—are not socially

meaningless. On the contrary, they constitute a substantive part of the online sleuths’membership

construction. Adopting an approach that is in part similar to that used by Daly and Nichols

(2023), the article applies “a shit-posting and trolling lens”through which online activity can be ana-

lyzed as culturally productive and telling. However, the article tries to reframe the seemingly

300 International Criminal Justice Review 34(3)