When Twitter Fingers Turn to Trigger Fingers: a Qualitative Study of Social Media-Related Gang Violence

Abstract

Mounting evidence suggests that social media can exacerbate tensions among gangs that ultimately lead to violence, but serious questions remain about precisely how conflict online translates to conflict offline. The purpose of this study is to examine the ways in which gang violence can be mediated by the Internet. We conducted a sociolinguistic study with 17 Black males between the ages of 14-24 who self-identified at the time of the study as having current or former gang involvement to determine how online provocations may generate offline violence. We examine the sociolinguistic patterns of two prominent gangs on Chicago's South Side and use qualitative interviews and a vignette methodology to gather in-depth information into the nature of Internetmediated gang violence from multiple perspectives. We identified three forms of social media communication that were interpreted as threating by participants: dissing, calling, and direct threats. We developed a framework for understanding participant responses to tweets and the potential for violence that is a consequence of such posts. Lastly, we highlight racial decoding and importance of context when interpreting the social media communication of Black and Latino youth. This study has important implications for the prevention of gang violence that is amplified by social media communication. Findings can be used to initiate conversations between researchers and practitioners regarding the role of social media for prevention and the ethical use of such tools, particularly for marginalized populations.

Social Media and the Variable Impact of Violence Reduction Interventions: Re-Examining Focused Deterrence in Philadelphia

“…Stuart (2020), drawing on ethnographic research in Chicago, argues that social media are used to openly challenge the strength and masculinity of rival gangs, an action that may engender violent retaliation in a certain subset of instances but not generally. Patton et al (2019) highlighted the interactive way gangs use Twitter and find that certain types of messages (e.g., disses, call-outs, and threats) have a high potential to engineer a violent response. The mechanisms by which social media may or may not directly facilitate gang violence generally are not well specified nor measured.…”

“…Law enforcement has, with increasing frequency, sought to leverage these public communications to prevent and prosecute criminal activity (Brayne 2017). At the same time, it is difficult for law enforcement and social service providers to proactively monitor the street for signs of impending violence when those high-risk individuals are not out in the street (Patton et al 2016), and without input from "domain experts" (i.e., people fluent in gang content) such as ex-gang members, the cultural terms or coded language hidden in memes and emojis that may provoke violence could go undetected (Frey et al 2020;Patton et al 2019).…”

“…The current study seeks to explore one group of factors that may be associated with the differential responses to focused deterrence observed in Philadelphia, USA: the influence of social media. Social media are increasingly recognized as potentially playing a role in exacerbating gang violence (Patton et al 2019), and there are unexplored theoretical reasons to believe its use may impact the efficacy of an intervention liked focused deterrence. To examine this relationship, we uniquely link real-world data on gang-specific shooting rates to the nature and intensity of social media usage by those same gangs.…”

Loops, ladders and links: the recursivity of social and machine learning

“…9 Far from being antithetical to competitive relations on social media, redistributive practices in a gift-giving mode often complement them (Mauss 1990 ). Social media cooperation can also be explicitly anti-social, even violent (e.g., Patton et al 2019 ). In these and other ways, digitized sociality is often at once competitive and cooperative, connective and divisive (Zukin and Papadantonakis 2017 ).…”

Avoiding fights on social media: Strategies youth leverage to navigate conflict in a digital era

“…Increasing evidence suggests that social media plays a role specifically in the transmission of community violence. In a burgeoning area of research that examines the role of social media in youth violence, researchers now contend that neighborhood violence is no longer limited to face‐to‐face arguments that may occur on the street (Densley, 2013; Patton et al, 2013; Patton, Pyrooz, Decker, Frey, & Leonard, 2019). For example, Pyrooz et al (2015) found that individuals who self‐identify as gang‐involved actively use social media, are more likely to be involved in online crime and deviance than nongang counterparts and that social media is commonly used to promote the symbolic needs of a gang.…”