Communicative Constitution of Illicit Online Trade Collectives: An Exploration of Darkweb Market Subreddits
K. Hazel Kwon, Chun Shao · 2020
This study aims to understand communicative activities of an illicit cyber-trade community on an anonymous social platform, Reddit. Based on the communication-as-constitutive of organization (CCO) perspective, the study identifies participants with different levels of engagement, and examines how their discursive engagement collectively reflects the ways in which illicit market users co-orient themselves to respond to a crisis event (i.e., market shutdown). The empirical case for this study is a subreddit channel dedicated to what was once the largest dark web market: r/AlphabayMarket. We examine two month period's posting activities until market was permanently shut down in July 2017. Our analysis comprises three parts. First, a social network analysis was conducted to identify key and non-key players in the community. Second, a structural topic modeling was computed to inductively infer topic clusters. Third, posts were manually reviewed to articulate the process of co-orientation manifest in the results of topic modeling.