Harms of digital capital: social harm analysis of online public resistance and information pollution

Abstract

Criminological studies of social harms extensively document intersections of power and the production of harm, revealing how the actions of the powerful in the public and private sectors expose (typically) less powerful groups to harm, often with impunity. While this scholarship provides much needed insight into the often minimised or dismissed harms of the powerful, attention must also be paid to the agency of the victimised and the outcomes of their active efforts to resist such harms, especially in a digital context where concepts such as ‘power’ and ‘capital’ might take a different meaning. To this end, this paper expands existing criminological scholarship on social harms by providing new insights on how the dynamics of resistance by ordinary citizens, that is, people not generally considered part of the powerful capitalist elite, can nevertheless produce secondary social harms. The paper uses the example of online resistance to the COVID-19 digital tracing ‘track and trace’ app in England and Wales to unravel how ordinary citizens utilise their agency to resist the perceived harms of powerful actors while, at the same time, producing the secondary social harm of information pollution.