Jakob Demant

While some of the hate that is posted on social media aligns with extremist ideologies, the sharing of hateful memes often defies rational explanation, prompting new inquiries into online deviant behaviour. Traditional neutralization theory assumes a temporary suspension of moral values, but sharers of hateful memes may not always perceive their actions as wrongful. When transgression is unacknowledged, there is no moral drift to justify. These findings question neutralization’s relevance within digital criminology and suggest a need to rethink its relationship with drift. This paper argues that sharing hate within group-based social media can be understood as an aesthetic of cruelty, which temporarily unites posters within a refracted, tribalistic community that is upheld through the symbolic humour of memes.

The re-organization of work via digital labor platforms has introduced fully flexible work schedules in courier services such as food delivery. However, little is known about how working activity on such platforms may vary over time. This study examines the working time patterns of a full population of food delivery workers (N = 17,641) at the Danish food delivery platform Wolt over 6 years (2017-2022). It identifies three worker segments: Dabblers (few hours and short part-time over a few months), Temporaries(part-time for around 6 months), and Regulars (long part-time and full-time for 1-2 years). The results show that despite being a numerically smaller segment, Regulars increasingly perform the largest share of working hours. The article discusses implications of diversified working time patterns and uneven workloads across the three segments.

Objectives: This study examines how social media algorithms on platforms such as Snapchat contribute to the digital drift from legal to illegal content.Methods: A novel experiment was conducted using 40 covert profiles engaging with grey markets on Snapchat. These profiles engaged with legal content related to nicotine products or digital sex work. The study involved monitoring whether Snapchat’s friend recommendation algorithm would suggest connections to illegal drug dealers.Results: Within four days, 65% of the profiles were directed to drug dealers through Snapchat’s recommendations despite no prior engagement with illegal content. This shows that the algorithm can push users from legal to illegal activities directly in the app.Conclusions: The findings highlight the role of social media algorithms in enabling digital drift into crime, transforming these platforms from offender convergence spaces to facilitators of illegal activities. Further research should explore algorithmic biases and their implications for digital criminology.

In the realm of cybercrime, technologies that facilitate illicit activities also produce uncertainties based on the hybridity between digital communication and offline presence. Social media platforms have blurred the lines between types of drug sellers, bringing the recreational and the commercial into the same marketplace. In the Nordic data used in this paper, 52 text-based qualitative interviews with recreational and commercial sellers are analyzed via process and variance analysis to identify the relationship between cognitive strategies and seller positions. We ask how sellers’ decision-making processes differ and intersect. Theoretically, we use cognitive sociology to enrich understanding of culture, trust, and rational decision-making in this context. Our findings reveal that recreational sellers often adopt a low-risk, low-gain strategy rooted in cognitive biases, reflecting the recreational nature of their engagement. In contrast, commercially competent sellers employ more complex cognitive strategies, including gut feelings, thus adjusting their decisions with less reliance on initial assessments, leading to a more calculated approach with higher risk tolerance. We conclude with a discussion of intervention strategies; here, we argue for the need for a dual strategy that targets and capitalizes on the differences in cognitive biases in an effective way that poses less harm to recreational sellers.

The nature of online social behaviour is largely changing, from communications taking place on open platforms to interactions occurring in hidden, group-based spaces or closed fora. Boccia Artieri (2017) has called this the new geography of unsearchable small conversations. This transformation challenges our current understanding and application of research ethics in qualitative digital sociology because, on one hand, we can no longer lean upon the approaches used by social data science to handle big and open data and, on the other, we cannot exclusively rely on established practices in qualitative sociology. Academic inquiry into these closed messaging threads and fora, however, remains of great societal importance, not least because of the rise of hate and extreme content in such spaces. With researchers now facing increased barriers when accessing social media (such as having to register an account, the inability to enter a group or chat without being invited, and so on), a rethinking of some of the long-standing cornerstones of ethical research is required for the digital age. The paper makes a methodological contribution to this field by delivering an assessment tool based on the methodology of the project Online Hateful Youth Sociality, which explores the use of memes to share hate on social media. The tool bridges the perspectives of digital sociology, criminology, and digital humanities with ethnographic real-world research to address the ethical issues of disclosure and intrusiveness, harm, the public or private nature of online spaces, and informed consent in the context of researching behaviour in small and hard-to-reach online groups. The assessment tool is presented in the form of an ethical decision flowchart that advocates for an approach that is not only situated but also structured. Ethical considerations are thus applied to the relevant issues depending on specific contexts but with clear, “step-by-step” assessment guidance.

Alcohol control strategies vary between countries and reflect differences in drinking cultures. This study explored how perceived effectiveness of alcohol control strategies varies according to individual characteristics and country of residence. A cross-sectional online survey was completed by 1910 university students in Denmark, England, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland. It assessed the perceived effectiveness of 11 alcohol control strategies. Correlates included sensation-seeking, alcohol outcome expectancies, drink refusal self-efficacy, and Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) scores. Bivariate analysis using mixed-measures MANOVA and Pearson correlations were followed by linear regression to identify multivariate correlates. These analyses revealed that educational strategies (e.g. teaching people skills to resist peer pressure) were considered more effective than restrictive strategies (e.g. raising the legal drinking age). Perceived effectiveness was greater among women and lighter drinkers. Country of residence also explained unique variance. The findings highlight the need to consider the potential impact of drinking culture in alcohol-related harm-reduction strategies.