Reproducibility, Replicability, and Revisiting the Insta-Dead and the Human Remains Trade

Abstract

The trade in human remains on social media happens in an ever-changing field of digital media technologies. We attempt to replicate our earlier study, exploring the differences in what we can observe now in the trade on Instagram versus our first foray in 2016 (published in Huffer and Graham 2017). While the previous study cannot be reproduced, it can be replicated, and we find that the trade is accelerating.

Buy One Get One: The Legal and Socio-Cultural Context of ‘Gifting’ Within the Australian Human Remains Trade

“…The dataset at hand suggests that there are three individuals within it who occupy the most 'between' positions and who are pushing the use of this sales tactic and, unlike a lot of the participants, they also respond to other peoples' posts. This is in keeping with patterns previously found in public buying and selling networks on platforms such as Instagram, where it's mostly a small group of high-profile individuals who control everything (Huffer & Graham 2017;Graham & Huffer 2020).…”

“…These persecution complex conversations, seen both here and in datasets from previous research on Instagram and elsewhere (Huffer & Graham 2017;Graham & Huffer 2020;Huffer & Graham 2023), often intersect with the 'IsThisLegal' discourse, and the 'BasicQuery' discourse. As Dundler (2021) has shown, antiquities dealers adopt one or more of four general 'dealer personas' in other domains.…”

“…Here I examine one such dynamic as it appears in the Australian context: the use of words to the effect of 'buy the photo and get the bones as a gift'. It is a sales tactic known and reported on for at least ten years (Begley 2019 (Huffer & Graham 2017), and roughly from 2019 to 2020 in the second (Graham and Huffer 2020) no posts surfaced that could be confidently said to be from Australia. It might be a function of some kind of geolocation happening in the background on Instagram -data collection was run from Ontario, Canada).…”

“…As is the case in research investigating a wide range of illicit trafficking, alt-right communities, Child Sexual Assault Material (CSAM) production and online trading, and the like, it is generally accepted that a researcher exposing their identity or attempting transparent contact would threaten the ability to conduct real-time research, and possibly risk the researcher's security or safety if doxed, resulting in their personal identifying information being publicly released (e.g., Calvey 2008). In previous articles, colleagues and I have also publicly described our approach to conducting online human remains trade research ethically, and in a way useful to both academics and law enforcement, especially given the 'duty to report' civilian researchers arguably face when especially egregious examples are encountered online (Graham & Huffer 2020;Huffer, Wood & Graham 2019). Richardson (2018) suggests that anyone engaged in studying illicit or illegal behaviour or activity online also has an ethical duty to consider the privacy of individuals, whether the data is obtained through manual screencapture or via automated trawling.…”

“…The human remains trade, conducted over social media and e-commerce websites (as well as via traditional 'bricks and mortar' storefronts), has been growing over the last decade (Graham & Huffer 2020;Huffer &Graham 2017, Huffer andGraham 2018), occasionally spilling into public consciousness when sometimes egregious cases come to light (Carney 2007;Patkin 2023;Paúl 2023;Schwartz, 2019). Recent academic research complements efforts by Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to document and expose how this market operates as a cross-platform phenomenon in order to raise public awareness, and by law enforcement and museums to remove remains from the market and safely curate them until repatriation can occur Halling & Seidemann 2016;Huffer et al 2022;Seidemann, Stojanowski & Rich 2009).…”