Ghosted by the drug trade: A digital ethnography of absence, ethics, and epistemic friction on Tinder

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused widespread disruptions in music industries globally, resulting in rapid cancellations of music festivals, concerts and club nights, and closure of international borders. The consequences of this pandemic have been especially dire for musicians, DJs and event promoters whose livelihoods and financial viability were tied largely to live performances. Within the independent music scenes in India, artists and event organizers rushed to social media and livestreaming platforms in their attempts to salvage brand visibility and explore monetization opportunities as drastic impositions of nationwide lockdowns came into effect. In a densely populated developing country rife with anxieties over exponential rates of COVID-19 infections, independent musicians in India have sought creative approaches to maintain visibility through digital platforms. Drawing on methods influenced by online ethnography, this article presents a discussion of how four professional Indian DJs explore and interrogate the affordances of various social media and livestreaming platforms in their efforts to remain artistically visible in the absence of state-initiated financial support and socially huddled dance-floors. The article offers insights into the triumphs, and trials and tribulations, experienced by independent musicians as they explore the material affordances of digital platforms at this critical moment in history.

This study examines the interplays between media organisations, platform affordances and governance logic on Douyin, one of the most popular short video platforms in China, and how these forces work together to construct the narratives of frontline care workers during the Xi’an lockdown. A digital ethnography was conducted on Douyin through the first two months in 2022. After sorting the videos based on their popularity, the first 100 ‘most liked’ videos were documented and coded thematically. The results show that official media accounts were the main providers of the ‘most liked’ videos during the lockdown. Frontline workers were seen in over half of the videos (n = 58). Nearly a quarter of the 100 ‘most liked’ videos (n = 22) featured frontline workers as the focus. The prevailing sentiments manifested by the videos when focusing on frontline workers include uplifting, endearing, touching, grateful and empathetic. Only four videos took on a critical tone. This study contributes a Chinese perspective to the current knowledge of Internet celebrity culture by expanding the discussions on the nexus between political and commercial forces during a pandemic lockdown and the implications on China’s celebrity culture.

Direct contacts with research participants in online ethnography are an important tool to better understand complex social dynamics in cyberspace. The current ethical approaches guiding academic research, however, can be problematic in this regard, creating unintended tensions leading to potential research biases as well as safety and wellbeing issues for researchers working on controversial and polarized topics. The onus, we argue, ends up being on academics to protect and separate the personal information available about them online from the professional, trying to overcome what seems to be an inevitable blurring of boundaries. In this research note, we present two case studies to highlight what we perceive as a loophole in current ethics guidelines.

Practice and Policy-Oriented Abstract Law enforcement bodies have largely responded to the increase in darknet activities through site shutdowns, which involve significant investment of policing resources. Despite these efforts, new darknet sites continue to show up after the site takedowns. We offer a new look at this issue by assessing the viability of selectively targeting large drug vendors operating on darknet sites. We find that the arrest of a major drug vendor reduced subsequent transaction levels by 39% and the number of remaining vendors by 56% on Silk Road 2.0. This deterrent effect also spilled over to drug vendors located in countries beyond the prosecutorial jurisdiction of the arrested vendor. We further find that small darknet drug vendors were most deterred by the arrest and vendors selling dangerous drugs were relatively more deterred. Our study findings hold policy-relevant implications to government agencies and law enforcement. Whereas site shutdowns can disrupt these markets momentarily, the selective targeting of large-scale drug vendors should be given serious consideration and used to a broader extent. The design of future enforcement strategies should also account for the finding that darknet markets are made up of both small-scale drug dealers new to the drug trade and large-scale drug syndicates.

Conducting research in the rapidly evolving fields constituting the digital social sciences raises challenging ethical and technical issues, especially when the subject matter includes activities of stigmatised populations. Our study of a dark-web drug-use community provides a case example of ‘how to’ conduct studies in digital environments where sensitive and illicit activities are discussed. In this paper we present the workflow from our digital ethnography and consider the consequences of particular choices of action upon knowledge production. Key considerations that our workflow responded to include adapting to volatile field-sites, researcher safety in digital environments, data security and encryption, and ethical-legal challenges. We anticipate that this workflow may assist other researchers to emulate, test and adapt our approach to the diverse range of illicit studies online. In this paper we argue that active engagement with stigmatised communities through multi-sited digital ethnography can complement and augment the findings of digital trace analyses.

How are civil society organizations responding to COVID-19’s impacts on informal settlements? In Latin America, civil society organizations have developed a repertoire of collective action, seeking to provide immediate and medium-term responses to the emergency. This paper aims to map these initiatives and identify strategic approaches to tackle the issues, given the strengths of those undertaking the initiative, and the scope, purpose and sphere of intervention. Using direct contact, a survey, and a virtual ethnography with social organizations has allowed us to identify and characterize the initiatives. The repertoire focuses on emergency measures around food security, and pedagogies for prevention, sanitation and income relief at the neighbourhood and district levels. We argue that the civil society response repertoire is diverse in form and resources but limited in scope; meanwhile the urgency of the situation and the mismatch with state action mean that crucial spheres of informality, vital to cultivating grounds for a healthy recovery phase, are being neglected.

This chapter reflects on methodological and ethical issues arising in a digital ethnography project conducted in domestic environments. The participatory aims of the methodological approach required participants to produce a series of videos exploring domestic digital environments. The videos were then uploaded using an ethnographic software application. Early in the project it became evident that researchers had limited control over important aspects of the technology, and that the technology itself was having disruptive effects in households. Further, although the study was designed to be engaging and playful for participants, the tasks of producing the videos was perceived by some participants as requiring onerous levels of creativity and digital media literacy. The chapter discusses these methodological and ethical issues, and how they were largely resolved.

Teacher education programs have the task of preparing teacher candidates for classrooms that are increasingly heterogeneous in terms of the ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, and linguistic diversity of the learners. These programs are required by their accreditation agencies, at both the state and national level, to equip teacher candidates with the competencies to meet the academic needs of said learners. This chapter examines how one preparation course is implementing an analytical project to better prepare teacher candidates to transform both their thinking and comfort level in talking about the construct of race. It begins with a discussion of how racialization occurs for teacher candidates, and then it discusses the meanings that such racialization has for the process of teaching and learning. A Digital Ethnography project is then presented as a useful technique to help these candidates work through their views about the phenomenon of racialization.

Digital ethnography is an approach to presenting real-world cultures using the features of digital environments and techniques of narrative. Digital ethnography projects exploit the computational and expressive power of new media to allow audiences to not only learn about, but to also experience something of the culture as well. This approach employs the distinctive features of digital environments such as immersion and interactivity to create new ways to tell cultural stories and enact the research process. This paper presents experiences from a collaborative work where multidisciplinary scholars are involved in creating a cultural website called PeruDigital that presents the culture and history of Peru festivals and related folklore forms for K-12 grade students and individuals interested in Hispanic culture. In addition, this research reflects how digital ethnographers, HCI researchers, and digital media producers are work together in order to create an effective interactive cultural media model.Keywordsethnographycultural mediafolkloreparticipatory design

This paper examines the effects of digitalization on the three-tier structure of Tanzania film industry. Explicitly, the paper focuses on the period between 1990 and 2020. It follows on the presumptions that omnipresent and pervasive digital video and Internet-based technologies promoted under the theme of digitalization and underpinned by the digital revolution theory are impacting on film industries across nations. The specific drivers of the digitalization that the paper advances are digital video cameras and computer-based nonlinear editing systems applied in the production of films, Digital Versatile Discs (DVD), Online movie streaming and Video on Demand (VOD) platforms as used in distributing films and digital cinema formats and projectors in exhibition of films. Key informant interview method was used to collect qualitative data from twenty six (26) respondents. The respondents included media experts, filmmakers, camera operators, video editors and various film industry stakeholders. Other data collection methods employed included direct observation and online ethnography. The paper reveals that digitalization elicits and enhances specific changes on the three-tier structure of the Tanzania film industry. Due to the effects of digitalization the Tanzania film industry has morphed into a functional film industry. The paper concludes that in spite of the differences in its effectiveness and purposes that are grounded on issues of contexts, digitalization is more important than other determining factors such as capital formation in impacting on the transformation of the three-tier structure of the country’s film industry.

Challenging conventional wisdom on illicit economies and rural development in Latin America

Digital drug trading ecologies in context: Technological, geographic, and linguistic variation across darknet platforms.

This paper analyzes what makes young adults feel insecure when they use social media in everyday life as a means to socialize and connect with peers. The analysis is based on a two-year online ethnography (Hine, 2015) conducted on Jodel, an anonymous location based social media app popular among young adults across Europe. The paper focuses on Jodel users’ anonymous disclosures about their social media related insecurities – shedding light on discourses related to social media practices that are often hidden or neglected in interview studies. The analysis finds that it is often the affordances of the social media platforms (Bucher & Helmond, 2018) or changes in the design of apps such as Snapchat, Instagram or Tinder that lead to feelings of insecurity or uncertainty in relational maintenance or in the forming of new relationships. Thus, the codes of everyday actions become unclear and different expectations as to the affordances of social media platforms result in diffuse interaction orders (Goffman, 1983) in various situations. Put in other words: Because of the platforms, young adults sometimes find it difficult to know why peers behave like they do online resulting in unfounded worries and feelings of insecurity.

Purpose Trading illicit drugs on cryptomarkets differs in many ways from material retail markets. This paper aims to contribute to existing studies on pricing by studying the relationship between price changes in relation to changes in nominal value of the cryptocurrency. To this, the authors qualitatively study product descriptions and images to expand the knowledge on price formation. Design/methodology/approach The authors analysed 15 samples based on visual and textual scrapes from two major drug markets – for Dream Market between January 2014 and July 2015 and for Tochka between January 2015 and July 2015. This longitudinal study relates changes in process to variations in the Bitcoin exchange rate and selling strategies. The analysis of the marketing of drugs online also addressed the development of the vendor profile and product offers. Findings Product prices change in relation to variations in the Bitcoin exchange rate. This points to the application of mechanisms for automatic price adaptations on the market level. Real prices of the drug offers constantly increase. The authors assert that there is a bidirectional relationship. Vendors structure price and discounts to encourage feedback. And feedback in combination with signals of commitment and authenticity inform pricing. Product descriptions are an important feature in the successful marketization of goods, whereas product images are predominantly used as an aspect of recognisability and feature of the vendor’s identity. Research limitations/implications Findings suggest that there is great potential for further qualitative research into the relationship between the online and offline identity of drug vendors, as well as price setting when entering the market and subsequent changes for offered products. Practical implications Findings also suggest that further investigation into the constitution and management of vendor’s identity on the cryptomarkets would allow a better understanding of vendors and their interactions on cryptomarkets. Social implications A better understanding of drug trading on cryptomarkets helps to more effectively address potentials for harm in the online drug trade. Also targetting crime would benefit from a better understanding of vendor idenities and pricing. Originality/value The findings represent a valuable contribution to existing knowledge on drug trading on cryptomarkets, particularly in view of pricing and vending strategies.

Introduction The Dark Web is a subsection of the Internet only accessible through specific search engines, making it impossible to trace users. Due to extensive anonymity, the drug trade on the Dark Web makes regulation complicated. We sought to uncover the scope of the online drug trade on the Dark Web and the impact it may have on the dynamics of global drug trafficking. Methods We conducted a literature review to elucidate the availability and distribution of drugs on the Dark Web based on data reported in existing literature ( n = 14) between September 2012 and June 2019. We simultaneously collected data about substances and listings from Dark Web cryptomarkets ( n = 13) active between August 2022 and January 2023. Data from the literature review and the Dark Web scrape were combined to draw trends in the chronological availability and distribution of drugs between 2012 and 2023. Results The data collected from 13 cryptomarkets between late 2022 and early 2023 showed a relative change in substance distribution compared to 2012–2019, with a decrease in prescription drugs (from >20% to <5%) and a doubling of opioid listings (from 5.5% to 9.25%), while no major changes were observed on average during 2012–2019 according to literature. Conclusions The Dark Web warrants more attention in the analysis of the global drug trade. Understanding Dark Web drug markets can inform targeted interventions and strategies to reduce drug-related harms, while ongoing research is necessary to anticipate and respond to future changes in the landscape of the illicit drug trade.