Offensive communications: exploring the challenges involved in policing social media

ABSTRACT

The digital revolution has transformed the potential reach and impact of criminal behaviour. Not only has it changed how people commit crimes but it has also created opportunities for new types of crimes to occur. Policymakers and criminal justice institutions have struggled to keep pace with technological innovation and its impact on criminality. Criminal law and justice, as well as investigative and prosecution procedures, are often outdated and ill-suited to this type of criminality as a result. While technological solutions are being developed to detect and prevent digitally-enabled crimes, generic solutions are often unable to address the needs of criminal justice professionals and policymakers. Focussing specifically on social media, this article offers an exploratory investigation of the strengths and weaknesses of the current approach used to police offensive communications online. Drawing on twenty in-depth interviews with key criminal justice professionals in the United Kingdom, the authors discuss the substantial international challenges facing those seeking to police offensive social media content. They argue for greater cooperation between policymakers, social science and technology researchers to develop workable, innovative solutions to these challenges, and greater use of evidence to inform policy and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital policing
• social media
• offensiveness
• offensive content online
• technological policing interventions

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this article was carried out with funding provided by a postgraduate research scholarship from the Leverhulme Interdisciplinary Network on Cybersecurity and Society (Project code: R2179PAI) from September 2016–2019.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Leverhulme Interdisciplinary Network on Cybersecurity and Society [grant number R2179PAI].

Notes on contributors

Mark Williams

Mark Williams is a Leverhulme Interdisciplinary Network on Cybersecurity and Society (LINCS) postgraduate research student at the Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT) at Queen’s University Belfast (2016–2019). His research explores the interface between the social sciences and electronic engineering and computer science focussing primarily on the criminal use of social media. In his project, he is looking at ways of detecting and preventing inappropriate and criminal behaviour in social media, with particular emphasis on the definition, classification and mitigation of offensive online expressions.

Michelle Butler

Michelle Butler is a Lecturer in Criminology at Queen’s University Belfast. She graduated from the University of Kent with a Master’s Degree in Forensic Psychology and a PhD in Criminology from the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include criminological psychology, penology, and the management of crime. Twitter: @MichelleBQUB

Anna Jurek-Loughrey

Anna Jurek-Loughrey is a Lecturer in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Queen’s University Belfast. She graduated from the Technical University of Lodz in Poland with Masters Degrees in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science from Ulster University. Her work has spanned a diverse set of topics comprising: machine learning; sensor-based activity recognition within smart environments; social media analytics with application in security and public health; sentiment analysis; record linkage and entity resolution.

Sakir Sezer

Sakir Sezer is Professor of Secure Digital Systems at Queen’s University Belfast, where he leads the Networked System Security at the Centre for Secure Information Technology. He is an international expert in high-performance network processing and internet security technologies, spanning cybersecurity-related topics in malware, embedded systems, IoT, ICS and network security. His main research focus has been on the acceleration of network security-related functions by exploring novel hardware-based parallel processing architectures, System on Chip (SoC), NPU/NFP (Netronome) and programmable technologies, including MPSoC and FPGA.