Picking the Goodies When Sleuthing Online

Abstract

Online activities can serve as tools for criminal opportunities and arenas for victimhood, but they can also function as reality constructions embedded in social control. One example of the latter is online sleuthing, primarily focused on dramatizing and disentangling offline crimes. This article relies on data from an ethnographic project conducted on the Swedish platform Flashback and analyzes posters’ interview accounts of their practices when attempting to unravel offline crimes. The author argues that posters’ ways of accounting for their sifting process within their digital community contribute to making it attractive. The posters’ situated selections and distinctions allow them to reproduce a handy and relatively tasteful interpretation of the crimes that their digital community is engaged in portraying. Online sleuths not only try to bring order to the offline crime dramas at issue but also engage in internal and reflexive social control, intended to order the ordering itself. They bridge the online–offline divide by referring to and incorporating allegedly objective offline circumstances when they set out to edit or cleanse the online debate. Offline investigations, interactions, and information gatherings are drawn upon as a resource in this sifting process.