What’s a threat on social media? How Black and Latino Chicago young men define and navigate threats online

Youth living in violent urban neighborhoods increasingly post messages online from urban street corners. The decline of the digital divide and the proliferation of social media platforms connect youth to peer communities who may share experiences with neighborhood stress and trauma. Social media can also be used for targeted retribution when threats and insults are directed at individuals or groups. Recent research suggests that gang-involved youth may use social media to brag, post fight videos, insult, and threaten—a phenomenon termed Internet banging. In this article, we leverage “code of the digital street” to understand how and in what ways social media facilitates urban-based youth violence. We utilize qualitative interviews from 33 Black and Latino young men who frequent violence prevention programs and live in violent neighborhoods in Chicago. Emerging themes describe how and why online threats are conceptualized on social media. Implications for violence prevention and criminal investigations are discussed

DEFENDING AGAINST SOCIAL MEDIA: HOW PUBLIC CRIMINAL DEFENSE HELPS US ADDRESS SOCIAL MEDIA GOVERNANCE

As justice-minded academics, we want to understand the role of social media in civil society with a vested interest in ensuring that social media serves a pluralistic society fairly and equitably. Gillespie (2018) has helped frame this task in terms of both governance of platforms and by platforms, but we also want to know what state governments do with social media (Gorwa, 2019). This paper focuses on how social media companies cooperate with state governments to hold users criminally liable, and the lessons this case bears for understanding and improving the fairness and equity of judicial governance. We draw on interviews with twenty public criminal defenders in NYC in which we asked: 1) where social media appears in their cases and the role it plays; 2) their access to user content and social media companies; and, 3) how they use social media as evidence and defend against it. We identified three problem areas around fair and equal access to the law. First, we heard concerns that the cooperation of social media companies was asymmetrical because companies worked almost exclusively with law enforcement. Second, public defenders were upset about overly broad search warrants that furnished the full contents of a suspect’s social media account. Third, public defenders complained about the use and admission of prejudicial evidence that played to negative, racial stereotypes of their clients. We suggest several reforms for judicial governance, including more nearly equitable cooperation practices, restrictions on search warrants, and admissibility protocols and disclaimers on admitted materials

Stop and Frisk Online: Theorizing Everyday Racism in Digital Policing in the Use of Social Media for Identification of Criminal Conduct and Associations

Police are increasingly monitoring social media to build evidence for criminal indictments. In 2014, 103 alleged gang members residing in public housing in Harlem, New York, were arrested in what has been called “the largest gang bust in history.” The arrests came after the New York Police Department (NYPD) spent 4 years monitoring the social media communication of these suspected gang members. In this article, we explore the implications of using social media for the identification of criminal activity. We describe everyday racism in digital policing as a burgeoning conceptual framework for understanding racialized social media surveillance by law enforcement. We discuss implications for law enforcement agencies utilizing social media data for intelligence and evidence in criminal cases

Understanding the correlates of face-to-face and cyberbullying victimization among U.S. adolescents: a social-ecological analysis

Using a national sample of 7,533 U.S. adolescents in grades 6-10, the present study compares the social-ecological correlates of face-to-face and cyberbullying victimization. Results indicate that younger age, male sex, hours spent on social media, family SES (individual context), parental monitoring (family context), positive feelings about school, and perceived peer support in school (school context) were negatively associated with both forms of victimization. European American race, Hispanic/Latino race (individual), and family satisfaction (family context) were all significantly associated with less face-to-face victimization only, and school pressure (school context) was significantly associated with more face-to-face bullying. Peer groups accepted by parents (family context) were related to less cyberbullying victimization, and calling/texting friends was related to more cyberbullying victimization. Research and practice implications are discussed