Doxing or deliberative democracy? Evidence and digital affordances in the Serial subReddit

Abstract

This study examines how a specific digital space—the Reddit message board dedicated to a discussion of the murder case featured on the podcast Serial—affords its users the ability to transcend the spatiotemporal limitations of traditional journalistic and criminal justice practices in the collection, validation, and deliberation of evidence. The digital discourse on the Serial subReddit can be understood, using concepts derived from network society theory (Castells, 2005) as a form of deliberative digital democracy (Dahlberg, 2011) in which crowdsourced evidence bears the weight of establishing the “rational” nature of a constructive, public discourse about practices employed by democratic institutions. However, the same evidence serves to reveal the limits of this form of digital deliberation when it is used in the practice of “doxing”—the online, public posting of private information about private individuals (Davison, 2012). This tension reveals the complicated relationship between democracy, privacy, and emerging technologies.