Criminal Law Policy in Counteracting the Use of Networking Platforms for Criminal Activity

The transition to the digital economy is often primarily associated with the transfer of economic activities to online platforms. Researchers often call such a transition platformization. The use of global and national platforms gives rise to a completely new type of relationships. Platforms are often created with the use of AI and distributed register technologies. In the economic sphere, the transition to platforms requires the national governments to develop an effective criminal law policy because the emerging relationships in the use of networking platforms need criminal law protection. A special cause for concern is the creation of platforms used for criminal activities. A platform for criminal activities is a special form of organizing computer information specifically structured to enhance the effectiveness of interactions between different groups of people involved in committing crimes. This publicly dangerous action is not reflected in Russian criminal legislation as an independent crime. Research methodology includes the analysis of criminalizing the creation and operation of networking platforms that are used for criminal activities from the standpoint of grounds for criminalization in the doctrine of criminal law. Three groups of factors act as grounds for criminalization: legal-criminological, socio-economic and socio-psychological. The presented work mainly focuses on the analysis of legal-psychological grounds, such as the degree of public danger, relative prevalence of such actions and their typicality, dynamics of actions in terms of the causes and conditions giving rise to them, the possibility of using criminal law measures to influence these actions, the potential of the system of criminal justice. The conducted analysis showed that the criminalization of the creation of support of networking platforms used for criminal activity corresponds to legal-criminological, socio-economic and socio-psychological criteria.