Home The Dark Figure Of Social Media: What Can Twitter Teach Criminologists?

The Dark Figure Of Social Media: What Can Twitter Teach Criminologists?

The “Dark Figure of Crime” is not, as one would imagine, a London-fog-bedecked, cloak-and-dagger figure slinking down a shadowy alleyway. It sounds very Hollywood, but “The Dark Figure” is simply a term used by statisticians to describe a crime that goes unreported.

Serious and even violent crimes go unreported for a myriad of social, political and personal reasons. What does this have to do with Twitter? Criminologists have for years grappled with that dark figure, and while police science research on social media is in its infancy, the ability to compare official and real-time crowdsourced data could change how we research crime.

Guest author Laura Madison is the co-founder of the Canadian Association of Police on Social Media. She will be publishing the results of a survey regarding Twitter use by North American and U.K. in the coming weeks. She tweets @org9 and @canadianpolice.

Crime that has been reported by victims – a burglary for example – is only a percentage of what is actually occurring in our communities. How do we know? We use what are called social surveys. Some of the survey questions could be: “Have you been the victim of a burglary in the past five years?” and “Did you report it to police?” We then look at the official reported crimes involving burglary and compare that with social survey results.

All of this is very interesting but what does this have to do with social media, annotation, metadata and Twitter’s Promoted Tweets? For me as a social scientist on Twitter, there’s an exciting potential for everyone from governments to nonprofits to utilize the power of real-time to hypothesize, design, conduct and finally utilize analytics.

If good research design is defined as “the analysis of data in a manner that aims to combine relevance to the research purpose with economy in procedure,” then Twitter’s new promotional platform not only adheres to this principle but advances the potential for rapid-paced and geographically salient research results on just about any topic.

Possibilities For Policing Agencies

As a criminologist I think a lot about how social media can be utilized in my field and in the field of police sciences. We can study attitudes about crime, fear of crime, urban myths, moral panics, laws, legislation, police services, victim impact, sentencing reform, prison reform and restorative justice. We can look at social media studies and compare them to official crime rates and government social surveys, reports and peer-published research and analysis.

We can do research around issues such as the Facebook panic button and other social media applications directed at sex offender detection, and importantly we can elicit responses from those who currently use social media.

Policing agencies, for example, could use their annual communications budgets to purchase a number of Promotional Tweets to, for instance, alert the public about a wanted person or request information from targeted geographic population. They could use polls to gauge performance, community perceptions, satisfaction and reform. Then they can use the associated data for back-end analytics and to illustrate what I call user-to-user “resonance chains” that show where their tweets went and who retweeted them, and lay out this info for further proactive planning.

For a good example of this in action check out @vpdcanada, @trafficservices and @deputysloly; a further good source for police information on social media is @cops2point0.

What Must Happen Next

With all of the positive out of the way, let’s look at some issues that may need to be addressed before some of what I outlined can come to fruition. I will also introduce some of my ideas for application development.

First comes privacy wherein an application that we could build would gather relevant data such as age, location, education level, etc., but would hide identifying information by assigning a code number for those wishing to contribute to social science research.

Second, ethically acceptable research policy beings with the establishment of a clear and fair agreement between the investigator/agency and research participant that clarifies the responsibility of both. Professional researchers and agencies may request a release before research is conducted. We could make an application for all sorts of legal and research releases for use on social media, could we not?

Third, random sampling is a requirement for many experimental designs. How can we do this on Twitter? Perhaps this can be achieved by the creation of an application that can do random samples or shuffling of willing participants.

Fourth, not everyone who may want to purchase promoted Tweets knows how to design an effective 140-character promotion, so how can we assist? Again, create an application or an easy editor/style guide that enriches what Twitter might already have.

A Final Note

As Twitter rolls out its platform for Promoted Tweets, I encourage my peers and social media scholars to get to know what they look like and begin to imagine new ways this could be harnessed for social change as well as for promotional value. I invite further discussion about these are ideas, and I’m hoping that together through innovation we can make Twitter a socially and scientifically accepted tool with which people can do valid and welcomed research.

Photo by georgie_c.

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