Ep. 123 Gangs in the Digital Age with Michelle Storrod

Hi everyone, this is Jen and Jose with the criminology academy podcast. If you aren't already, make sure to follow us on X Instagram and Facebook at the Krim Academy. After listening, let us know what you think by leaving us a review. This podcast is sponsored by the advancing research and corrections lab in the school of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Nebraska. Hey, everyone. I'm Jose Sanchez. And I'm Jen Tosley, your listening to the criminology academy podcast where we're criminally academic. This is episode 123 and today we're exploring gangs in the use of social media. To help us explore this topic, we're super excited to have with us perfect and we're going to be able to do a great job of doing this. To help us explore this topic, we're super excited to have with us professor Michelle Little Stirred, whose work examines how gangs have adapted to and been shaped by the digital world. Michelle Lostert is an assistant professor of criminal justice at White Nare University and is an affiliate of the Safe Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD from Rutgers University, Camden. Michelle is the co-author of the largest violence prevention charity in Europe, her cross-national scholarly pursuit center on the intricate intersection of youth, social media and crime. Specifically, her research delves into how young people utilize social media platforms and mobile devices within the context of crime and victimization, including drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and serious youth violence. In today's episode, we're diving into a general discussion of Michelle's work on gangs, the internet, and how social media is reshaping crime criminal identities. With that being said, let's bring Michelle into the conversation. Michelle, thanks so much for being here with us today. We are excited to chat with you about your work. So to start, we'd like to step back and kind of look at your research from a bigger, broader perspective. When we're thinking about our students and our classes, a lot of them have grown up with social media, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, now TikTok, and also smartphones is like this normal part of their life. But for a lot of us, those platforms and technologies just didn't exist when we were younger, or they were just starting to come onto the scene. So how has the internet, social media, and smartphones changed the nature of crime and delinquency? So that's a great question. So thinking about how social media and phones and even smartphones have changed, DVNC is really interesting to think about, especially when we think about how public everything is and how accessible everything is. So if we think about when people used to commit crime, people have always commit crime. Crime and DVNC has always been something that people have been doing, and especially young people. We know that young people more than other people commit crime if we think about that kind of age crime curve or when crime occurs. But what happens now when you commit crime is you do have an audience. So you have either an audience via video or people talking about the crime that's been committed on comments or pasting or posting different videos or comments to videos. But then you also have an audience in your group chat too. So there's this different ideas of what a public is. So we can have a public space. Everybody on the internet can see it. Or there is just people in the group chat know exactly what I'm doing all the time. And when I send them stuff, it's like I send them pictures and videos that's automatically saving to their camera real. So they also then have digital evidence on their phones, which they probably weren't aware of and that they didn't choose to receive. So that has changed things. So everybody has evidence on their phone if they're connected to any kind of crimes that are going on, whether it's conversations, whether it's pictures, whether it's videos. And as before you even get to people being exposed on social media and those crimes being more public, the other thing that has happened is that crimes are somehow easier to commit. I think there's a broader range of crimes that we can commit using phones or social media, whether that is threatening people by a comment on social media, whether that is laundering money through PayPal, whether that is bullying someone, whether that is trying to blackmail someone or coerce someone to do something because you're holding a video over them, that over them that they don't want to be spread around social media. There's just so many more opportunities to commit crimes now because of smartphones and because of accessibility. So before we had smartphones, so when I first did my research on gangs and social media, the start of it was like looking at like gang members and people threatening each other over BBM, right? Blackberry Messenger, which I'm sure some people don't even know what that is, right? So we're talking like SMS text messages but a Blackberry service that was supposed to be encrypted but that you could do more group chats on. And that's how it was happening. There was still threatening people but it wasn't public like it was like on a comment on a YouTube video or something like that. So with the increase in access in crime, there's also technically there could be an increase in getting caught. There's definitely an increase in that kind of evidence that there is definitely more evidence available. Yeah, I was remembering that it was a trend on tech talk, I think, of people recording themselves stealing like toilets or seeing sort of the schools bathrooms and like walking out with them and just thinking like, what are we doing here? Like this is really not the kind of thing that you should be putting out in public. No, right, but like it gets attention, like even like stupid like acts of deviance or funny acts of deviance, right? Like they get attention, they get comments to get views. So it's all about, it's all about the audience now. Yeah, like and so you mentioned your work with gang. So we want to start moving into that a little bit. And so I think when we say like the word gang, most people think of a street gang and even academics will differentiate from street gangs and prison gangs, but like the keyword that I want folks on is street, right? Like street gang meaning they have like a territory of physical space, a neighborhood presence, like they're on the street. But now with smartphones and social media, it seems like gang life is extending into a new space. So if your view, how has gang culture evolved in this new digital landscape? So I think I should differentiate a little bit with my work, right? So my research that I've done is both in the UK and in the US. And it's important that we think about the word street gang because street gang can mean different things to different people and within the UK and the US, there is a difference, right? We know there are comparative elements between gangs, right? So some gangs can look similar or we can think about the crypts being in in Europe and also being in America and that can be kind of mind blowing, right? Like how do we have crypts and bloods in like in the Netherlands and in LA? Like this seems a little bit insane. But that like understanding of what a gang is and how a gang acts and what they how they dress the words that they use, the music that they listen to, the kind of culture that they have, the habits, how they hang out with each other, who they respect, who they don't. A lot of that is transferred through media and we know that like from even pre-social media times. So we know that things like music and films that were about gangs or made by gang members or about them help to kind of like globalize this idea of what a street gang is and what the culture is. But what social media has done is allowed it to be localized so to kind of like take the broader gang elements of maybe how gangs dress or the types of crimes that they get involved in and make them very local and very specific to the town or even like the block that they are talking about on social media. So we can find similar elements of gangs and gang violence within social media posts that we can in films and that we can kind of like in different parts of the world. But how social media is really kind of changed gangs is that they now have access to broader types of crime. But they also have access to each other, a level that they didn't have before. So again talking about kind of the group chat but also like the gangs that I studied in the UK and some of the gangs that I've studied here in the US, they use other kind of like social media, not even social media like smartphone technology to check in on each other and to follow each other and some monetary to each other's movements. So kind of like find my location at life 360 I think it is here used to be at 360. Those kind of location sharing, those kind of location sharing technologies are being used to kind of track people to know where they are. Firstly because they're saying like it's a safety thing we want to make sure that everyone's okay, we want to make sure that like no one's being hurt but they're also trying to track people in terms of when they're telling them to go and commit a crime, they're then following them to make sure that they do that. In the early study that I did, we absolutely looked at whether rap videos were causing people to kind of kill each other. Things that were being said in rap videos were causing off-world, offline attacks and violence, right? So we looked at that and yes, we did see some evidence of that. We saw that some comments that were being made on social media or on YouTube videos were then responsible or were a catalyst for causing real-world violence and sometimes deaths and homicides. But also there's this underlying kind of other forms of digital harms that were also occurring all the time that we don't talk about. And some of that kind of cyber stalking through like GPS and location sharing is a part of this. So social media absolutely helps gangs to understand who they are as it connected to a broad agai culture. But then they also develop their own patterns of how to be a gang within their specific space through kind of social media. And then one of the tactics of those kind of like specific things that I found in particular in the UK is using GPS tracking to keep a tab on like who is going where, what are they doing? You can't go to a police station, you can't go to a hospital as someone is following your location, right? You can't seek help, you can't go to a rival. It's very limiting. It's a way of controlling people to kind of look through their GPS and see what they're doing all the time. So we have like two things happening here. So we have this kind of popularity of gangs and this idea that like if we commit in crime and we're talking about crime and we seem to be like the coolest people in the area, we're going to like watch our videos and comment on them and share them. That's great. It's going to get like popularity. But then we have all this other stuff. These other digital harms are also happening behind the scenes, behind the scenes of these videos, behind the scenes of the poster are getting like a thousand or a hundred thousand or a million likes or comments. There's also this other stuff that's happening that is around controlling people within the gangs and getting them to continue to do gang business. So I guess what I've told about there is two things, right? Which I know we're going to talk about. So I've talked about like expressive needs of social media that gangs have, right? Like they want to talk about who they are. They want to express themselves. They want to be part of the gang culture both within their local area, but also what is known as a global gang culture because it's cool, right? Like it's seen as cool. It gets you popularity. It gets you girls. Like it gets you money. It's entertaining. All of those things. But then there's also that gang business is also happening in a very instrumental way through smartphones. That's great. And that leads like directly into the next question. And I want to highlight. So you've talked, you've mentioned your previous work on this topic a couple of times now. And so I believe the paper you're referring to is the one you published in 2017 with James Denzley in the Journal of Youth Studies. So just if anyone wants to go and look it up, it's called going viral and going country. The expressive and instrumental activities of street gangs on social media. And so as you mentioned, one of the things you talk about in this, obviously based off of the title is these expressive versus instrumental behaviors in gangs. And you've talked a little bit now about what you've found on this. But how has this changed over the last almost decade now? GPS tracking has become more popular. But I don't think it was really around as much in 2017 or earlier. So how have we seen these kind of expressive and instrumental behaviors shift over time? So yeah. So the 2017 paper is based on research that I actually collected as part of my master's in 2015. So the data is actually 10 years old, which is kind of scary to say that. But it's 10 years old. And I just want to say like a little bit, like the reason I did that study was at the time I was working with a lot of gang members as a practitioner in London. And I was seeing like more and more like young people getting harmed or getting hurt as a result of like social media and in particular like YouTube videos, that kind of stuff. And there wasn't any research on it. It was a great study by Desmond Patton and colleagues called like internet banging, right? Like they were looking at like how threats online cause real world violence. And so I wanted to kind of like understand what was going on and like help and support young people who were involved in gangs who were going through something at the time on social media that like no professionals or practitioners or researchers could like explain or talk about and that for the young people themselves like they couldn't even explain it. So saying like GPS tracking wasn't even around them like that's where I found it, right? Like that's where we know that it was happening is within that that research like like most other researchers, right? We tend to focus on like the most extreme crime sometimes. So we were thinking about murders and like serious woundings and stabings and shootings and all of those kind of things. But it was this other stuff that was happening. So finding out that people were being cybersdaught by GPS tracking and knowing that that was happening then when yeah, it wasn't that available. So well, how it was happening then was through like find my iPhone. Because now there's like 20 different apps that you can use to track people and you can track more people like they could only at that point only track like one person or something like that or like they they had to kind of like manage it and do it strategically because there was a limit to how many people you could track at the same time whereas now you don't. So the capabilities of the technology have changed so you can track more people and you can more extensively cyber stalk people by doing that. And nor is as well that I'm saying cyber stalk. That's not the words that I was using then because we didn't have words for being tracked by gang members on GPS in like 2015. I was not like sitting with some of the gang members I know and be like, Hey, how's that cyber stalking going? Because it didn't exist, right? We weren't talking about cyber stalking. Like they wouldn't be like, Oh, Michelle, I need to let you know I think I'm being cyber stalked by my elder like, no, like that was not something that was happening. So for them to be able to explain this process of like, Oh, yeah, like they gave me this phone and I was really excited because this is the best phone I've ever had, right? And it was probably like an iPhone two or something. I don't know. Did they even have numbers like that? Like I don't even know. I don't know. But they were like so excited about this because it was also like when the smartphone like smartphones were becoming more and more available. So like this was like a big deal to be given a smartphone like this. But then to like be like, Oh, and it's really cool because they're like making sure I'm safe and stuff because they're watching where I'm going and being like, Oh, okay, they're watching where you're going. This sounds like a good thing. And they're like, Yeah, it's really cool. Like I always know where they are. They know where I am. And like I was like, Oh, you know, what does that mean for like how you can like, how you can move around and what you can do? And they're like, Oh, well, you know, I can never let my phone die because then I'd be in trouble because if they can't see where I am, then they're going to think I'm snitching on them and I'm never going to snitch on them. So I have to have my phone on all the time. And also I have to be able to answer my phone even if it's like three o'clock in the morning. I was like, Oh, this doesn't sound very good. So you don't get any rest like no, because like the gang is the most important thing in the world. So if they call me, it doesn't matter what time it is. Like if they messaged me, I have to be there and I have to be ready. So this is like a level of like control and like phone bondage to people that we had never seen before. Like any of the practitioners, like any of the kind of like older gang members, they were like, we just never thought about doing this. This wouldn't be an I kind of excuse me. Yeah, they would never have thought about doing that, like tracking someone to that level. But now with the gang, so recently I have been more in contact again with some of the people that were involved in that in that study. And then like, yeah, the levels of this kind of tracking now are so elevated that it's like expected that you would be tracked. And if you are not tracked, if you say no, that would raise suspicions. So it's not even though I can't let my phone die. It's literally like, I want you to go in like sound drugs at this place 200 miles away and I'm going to watch you as you do it. And even at the time they were doing things like early kind of video calling and stuff, like FaceTime kind of show me where you are, like show me what you're doing, show me you've still got drugs, show me you've still got money. But now again, like this is elevated to the point where like often they are taking with them like laptops, excuse me, it's coffee. So yeah, so now if they're being sent out on a job, this is not just FaceTimeing to show people like where you are and what you're doing. It's also like having someone there that has a laptop who is tracking not only you, but like 20 other people, they're also being sent to commit crimes. Also tracking, doing spreadsheets of money that's coming in and out, like this is very business or interior. People are booking train tickets for people. People are booking ubers for people. there. Here is like an IT guy now. Like they ganks have IT guys now. Like, and again, like we don't think about this when we're thinking about street ganks, 'cause we're thinking about people that are like on the streets dealing drugs and hurting people. We're not thinking that there is a strategy behind this, which has been enabled through digital access and digital control and other cyber crimes. So their ability to be able to like function as a business is extended. But I will say there is a caveat to that in that we're not talking about every gang that is doing this. And we are talking about younger gangs actually. Like young people have kind of expertise in this to be able to do it. Older kind of generations kind of don't necessarily involve themselves too much in this because I think partly it's an understanding issue. Partly it's a trust issue. Like if you are like keeping spreadsheets of the money that's coming in and out, you're also keeping evidence, right? So there's a concern about evidence. If you're laundering money through PayPal, at some point someone's gonna find that money. So the evidence trail is also changed in that way. It's not just about being pictured with a gang member or being in a video with a gang member, it's also about what else electronically are you leaving behind. You're like digital footprints or digital fingerprints. So not every gang is this kind of like strategic with the kind of technology use. And there is a big difference between UK gangs and US gangs in terms of technology use. Because within the US, the connectivity is not the same. So the UK is a much smaller country and the connectivity, like you are very rarely out of range. Right? So it's a very small country. The housing policies also dictate that like everywhere there should be high level internet connectivity. Data is cheap, phone contracts are cheap. Right? This is not the same as the US, where you have big expanses of space, where you can be out of range, where it's like you pick your phone carrier depending on what state you're in sometimes. Like this is not the same in the UK. So the ability for gangs here to be as kind of on it in their kind of cyber stalking in their like cyber business plan if you like for their gang is not the same. Because they don't have the same connectivity. They also don't have, so within the UK, the rules are much tighter in terms of like what you can, what the law or what police can like look at, whereas in the US like law and police can look at anything, like things can be brought into court in a different way. So the ability to use digital evidence is different. So again within the US, a lot of the gangs aren't as digitally advanced because one connectivity and accessibility, and two, because of how much evidence is used now in court that is digital, even kind of pictures trying to prove gang association. So yeah, so those kind of things that have changed. So I would say the biggest thing for me that has changed is like obviously there's more accessibility, there are more apps, a lot of the behaviors are still the same, and a lot of the digital harms are still the same but we don't talk about them. So we don't talk about cyber stalking. We don't talk about cyber harassment. We don't talk about the technology facility. It's sexual violence that is going on in gangs. It is very much dependent on social media. So those things have always happened but still we're not kind of talking about them. - Yeah, and I would say that I feel like most people don't believe gang members have like the technological savvy to carry that out. And so that definitely probably ties in what you're talking about as far as we're not talking about it. It's just assumed. Even though like yeah, gang membership tends to be a younger phenomenon, and these are people that have grown up with social media now. - Yeah. - Integrating that into the conversation, especially moving forward. I feel like it's going to be really important. - Yeah, definitely. Like there's definitely this assumption like they're not clever enough or like they don't even go to school. Like how would they know how to do this? Like these ideas, these very stereotypical ideas of like who gang members are or like they just aren't real. Like they, I have met many a gang member who is much smarter than me, right? Like and you have to be smart to be able to get away with some of the crimes they're committing but also to survive this life, right? Like it's a very tough traumatic life. Like this is difficult. This is really hard to manage a group of teenagers to make money is difficult for anyone, right? Like learn if you're doing it illegally. So yeah, like there is definitely an assumption that they're not clever enough or they can't do it. Or an also poverty, right? We think about gangs, we think about poverty. So some people think like not only can they not do it, they can't afford the technology or like they don't even have computers, they don't even have Wi-Fi. But this is just like nonsense at this point, right? Like this is not based on any facts. This isn't based on any research. This is just based on people's prejudice ideas about who gang members are and what they are doing. And it's doing them a disservice, but and it's also preventing us from understanding what gang culture really is. - Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, everyone is so dependent on their phone now. It's like, what do you mean? How would you think that they won't have? - Yes. - Yes. - And then the international differences, the country differences you mentioned are interesting, say. And you know, geographical size that definitely wouldn't matter, sure. - Yeah. And so it's interesting when we think about like where these stereotypes come from as well. If we think about gang members that we have in the media, like that would have smartphones. If you think about like all American or like on my block, like the gang members in those TV shows, it's really interesting that the gang members are still focused on like hiding guns or like being sharp and stuff, right? But they barely ever use smartphones. Like you barely ever see them getting like videoed or them like having something exposed online. So even when all the other characters are having like videos of them like kissing someone who they did and they didn't notice being recorded and it gets like leaked online, the gang members are like, let me text my friend. I'm like, come on. Like gang members don't have video phones. Like there's no part of the plot here where we can include a smartphone within like someone getting shot or like gang business. Like it's like two different worlds and it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. - Okay, so one you've mentioned this a couple of times already but one of the platforms that stands out is something like YouTube, right? And there's been other places that have done video like World Star, but they never quite had the same power that YouTube has. And even I myself for like my gang's class that I teach, I use YouTube to look up gang related documentaries, interviews with gang members, but we've even had students look up music videos by gang members. Do you think that gangs are starting to become media brands in their own right? And like what are some of the risks or rewards that they might gain from doing something like this? - So yeah, I think there are a few that are kind of media brands. And I think that good examples of this are like some gangs who have like clothing sponsorships. And this happens a lot with like gangs in the UK when they start to get like popular from like YouTube videos, they'll suddenly start wearing like hoodies and like that are all branded. And then there's like marketing and like adverts on the YouTube channel. And then it's getting supported by someone else like, so other people are starting to invest in them because they are noticing that they're getting like a lot of views, right? Which is good in one way. It's good because this is a legitimate way for people to make money. Like we know that like gang members are often some of the most marginalized people within society, right? Within our communities. And they are also very stigmatized by where they live or what they've been involved in. So for them to be able to get a legitimate job can be really, really difficult for them. Even if they were involved years ago, even if they didn't get involved in any serious crime, but they're associated with them. So having a legitimate means to actually make money through clothing deals, through making money, through hits on YouTube, through getting record contracts if we can even call them that now, like getting signed by someone, getting like deals like modeling deals, some gang members have modeling deals, like that kind of stuff. This is all good, right? Like these are productive ways to make money when nobody is getting harmed or hurt. We could argue that the companies that are doing this are potentially exploiting this kind of like gang culture in that like they recognize that is cool for young people and so they're like, where am I hoodie? And I'll pay you money, right? But are they gonna support them if they get trouble, get in trouble with the court? Probably not. Are they still gonna be able to like wear that hoodie? If they get charged with something they did five years ago, probably not, right? So I think it only goes so far. So there is a level of exploitation here and we have to be a bit careful about it as well because a lot of these, a lot of these people are young people, like very young people, people, a lot of them are miners. So yeah, they're going to take a deal that sounds amazing to like wear a hoodie or like record a few songs because this sounds great. But like, what are they being courage to talk about? Like, how are they being supported? Like, what happens when that fame goes away? So some of the young people I knew in London, for example, like 10 years ago, they were like getting signed and they were being flown over here to do award shows and like all that kind of stuff and that's all disappeared and now they're trying to kind of get their credibility back in the kind of gang scene and it's not working. They're like, no, you sold out. Like, no. There's also a risk there, right? So there's a level of like potential risk for the young people themselves being exploited. There's also a risk that it goes so far that they feel so detached from like where they came from and what they're doing that when they go back, they can't like fit in to their own communities anymore or they're rejected by their community. So that can be really difficult for them too. And obviously there is also this like target, right? Like, there's a target on their back. Like, the bigger they get, the more people are going to try and take them down. And we know this like, there have been like many reports on like a rapper has died like every year, like a main rapper who's sold and I think they did it like on how many like was it like over a million views or something. I don't remember the one I'm sorry, but like every year since 2017, like someone who has a level of fame from rap, who was associated to gangs dies or is killed, right? So there's a risk there, but we could argue that that risk has always been there for people that have been involved in gangs. So it's not necessarily associated to kind of like fame and branding and like who they have become, it could be related to like who they've always been in relation to gangs. So good and bad, right? Legitimate way to make money. Great. This is what we want. Opportunity to explore other worlds, get other skills. Great. What happens when the popularity dies? That's a difficult one, right? Like, where do they go after they're not popular anymore? Where do they go when the fame disappears? Where do they go like, you know, how are they going to be supported when crimes catch up to them? That's a concern for me. Okay, so we've talked about social media, posting videos, music, promoting the gang. The area that we want to talk to you about is around recruitment and how gangs use online platforms to attract new members. So can you tell us a little bit more about how or what digital recruitment actually looks like for gangs? So I think there is there's a difficulty with like an understanding of what recruitment looks like online, right? So we think that we have a good understanding of how recruitment works like in person. So through gifts and through giving someone an iPhone through like offering protection, like I'll look after you, someone bothering you at school, like I'm going to come and sort them out, you know, offering people like, oh, you don't have anywhere to stay, come stay with me, like giving people friends, you want to come to this party with me, I'll get you into this club, like, you know, making people feel like they belong to something. And also like this grooming process like once they belong, like, oh, can you carry this bag or like, don't worry about what you saw in the club, we're not going to tell anyone, but you're now witness to a crime, so you can't go anywhere and you have to do everything I tell you to, right? So there's this kind of like this grooming process in, there's also online a grooming process in where some gangs that I've worked with are strategic at like looking at the fans that they have online. So looking at like where their videos are being played. And again, this is much easier to do in the UK, right? So if you're in the UK, you can like look at like, how many views am I getting in Birmingham, which is like two hours away from London? This isn't a big country, right? So it is reasonable to be like, okay, we can start talking to someone that's two hours away and see how they could be helpful to us. This isn't necessarily going to work if like someone is like 20 hours away in the car. Like this is a very different thing. So keeping track of the fans that they have online, like where the video is being played the most, who, like, what the demographics are of the people that are playing the video. So again, like I was saying before, like, gangs have IT guys. Like, this is part of it when they post a video, how many plays is it again? Who's commenting on it? Who's threatening me? Who's like saying stuff about me in the comments, but also like, who is our audience? Like, how often is it getting played? Are they male? Are they female? Like, how old are they? Like, there's a strategy behind this that then can lead to gang recruitment. So in that early study, like what it demonstrated that actually most of the fans of gangs online are girls. It's girls that are consuming the videos and it's girls who are commenting and who are sharing. Yes, boys are also commenting and they are more likely to be threatening or something like that. But the girls are more likely to be DMing people. They're more likely to be encouraging other girls to look at the videos. There was also some girls that I knew that used to actually show up to like wherever, like the most, like, famous or most popular YouTube video was happening at the time. Like, they would literally go there on a Saturday afternoon and try and find the boys in the video. Like, so this isn't recruitment. The boys in the video aren't like, oh, I want to get some girls to get on a train and come see me. The girls are getting on the train to go and see them because they're popular and they're in the video. So this cuts out this idea of like, who can I find that would be helpful within kind of gang business? Like, who can I find that would be loyal? Who can I find that would be helpful? Because people are presenting themselves, because they think that they haven't understanding of who the people are in the videos. Because also some of those people in the videos or people pretending to be the people in the videos are having conversations with them in the DMs, right? They are talking to them. They are again, this kind of grooming process where they're promising them the world and saying like, oh, you're the only girl I'm talking to. Like, no, that's not what's happening, right? Like, you're 14, but you understand me so well, even though I'm 25, right? Like, these kind of like typical grooming strategies that we would have online of like, when we're talking about like sexual exploitation grooming strategies that are happening that gangs are employing, but also those kind of grooming relationships that are happening in person as well. Obviously, when there's, when it's a dynamic between a girl and a boy or a girl and an older boy or a man, right? Like, this can get very different. But it's interesting to think about it in terms of recruitment because those girls aren't being recruited into the gang, they're not actively being recruited. They're presenting themselves forward to be associated. They don't necessarily understand fully what they are trying to associate with, especially when they're not from the same area as the boys, right? And often they are blamed then for what happens to them, right? So sometimes girls are sexually exploited by gang members. Is this happening more because of social media? No, we can't say that, right? We can't say that sexual exploitation of girls and boys within gangs happens more because of social media. Do we have a better record of it because of social media? Absolutely. Again, this chain of evidence, this understanding of how the process actually works, when it started off in a DM and now it's in a trap house somewhere, we can understand that line, we can understand that process a lot more because of social media. But gangs have an audience that is attracted to them before they've been spoken to them in person. And that's the difference, right? That's the difference with the recruitment. But they don't have to strategically recruit anymore. There were always kids that wanted to join a gang, right? Like even before social media because they were the most popular people or they seem to have money or whatever it was. Now, that those amount of people who want to join or be part of it is even bigger because the audience is a bigger, the attention is bigger, right? Like it is just, it's just blown up in a way that we don't necessarily have a good grasp of and is blown up in a way that the gangs don't have to do as much recruitment. They can wait for people to come to them and they can come to them because of what they're showing on social media. So interesting. I mean, if, right, because the gang isn't going to just want to take anyone in, at least I would assume that it's still working. So if people are coming to them, is there still some kind of, I don't know, signaling process or something that goes on where the gang is looking at them and seeing if they're loyal, if they can be trusted and then bringing in only a select few? So I think it's like working out like who's going to be good for what job? Like, so again, if you think about this as a business or we think about we have a pool of candidates here, like how can we look at their skills and say see how they would be helpful? So it's not necessarily saying like, okay, yep, you're in, you can just do anything. It's about like, okay, well this person lives here, they're associated with this person, they seem to have a car, they seem to have some money, they don't seem to go to school, like they're using their profiles. And we found this a lot with the girls, right? Like they're using their profiles to build a picture of who they are, to then see whether they're helpful or not, to then vet them and see whether they would be useful. So they can see from their profiles, like, are they trying to like, are they talking about other rival gangs? Are they friends with other rival gangs? Like they're checking their friends lists, they're checking who they're posting, they're checking what comments they're making about people. So this is also how they're vetting people. It's also how they're building relationships. So with the girls, they would be like, oh, they seem to know everything about me, they would talk about my birthday, they would talk about like where I went with my friends, they would talk about my outfit like six months ago. Like it's amazing how much they know me, and they would use, again, use these kind of things they found on their profiles to have these very intimate conversations where the girls really thought like, oh, they're so interested in me, they're so like, they know everything about me, they really take an interest, like, but really what's happening is the IT guy is literally looking at like, okay, what's going to be helpful here? This girl is this age, like, this is what they're into, this is what the hobbies are. Oh, they've had an argument with their dad, let's see if we can like jump in on that, like to build trust, like, it's a business, like, is it all this sophisticated? No, probably not, right? Each gang is going to be different, but the capabilities for the gangs to build models around this, which is what a lot of them have done, they're there, right? And this is what has helped them to be so kind of successful. If we can say that, like, successful in what they were doing and like, sustain themselves and they, even in 2015, when I was collecting the data for these research, for this research, it was very evident that they were so ahead of anyone else. They were teaching us, they were training us on like, how to do a business model on social media. They were doing things we weren't even thinking about. Like, they just had a knowledge and an awareness and like, I guess like a sense of adventure in a way, like, they were just trying to work out like, how many different ways can we use social media to our advantage, to make money, to recruit people, to like, make us more famous? And they did it. And everyone just sat there and watched and then was like, oh, what's happening? So you've mentioned kind of this relationship, especially between young girls and younger women, and potentially some of the older male gang members in the gang. And so how do gangs use, or potentially use digital collateral or things like black male, shaming coercion to either discipline or manipulate their members, especially these potentially female members of the gang or associates? So I think that was one of the biggest findings from this study as well, was around like the digital collateral and thinking about like, how somebody could be filmed talking to a rival or filmed talking to the police or filmed being somewhere where they weren't supposed to be in a rival territory, or someone was filmed in your own territory, right? And you have to respond as a gang member to this. And those videos started to be used as a way to control young people. And what also happens in some cases is that videos of sexual violence or videos of sexual assaults or rapes or even what looks like consensual sex. I'm using quotation marks here, right? Because we know that often within gangs, the pure presence of how many people are there when girls are asked to or forced to do sexual acts, right? The ability for them to consent in that situation is absolute, right? Like it's a very difficult complex incident that happens and we must categorize it as sexual violence, right? Rather than girls willingly having sex with multiple boys at the same time. So these videos would be used to kind of coerce young people into committing further crimes. So videos of people being raped or sexually assaulted go and do this crime, go and stab this person, go and honey trap this other boy, or I'm going to put this video of you being raped out on social media. Or I'm going to put this video of you having sex again, quotation marks on YouTube or social media. And this was happening to the boys as well, not just the girls. And on YouTube videos, so some of the YouTube videos that are used like under one of the videos, so this YouTube video had like 400,000 views at the time. And underneath in the comments you can see a conversation about one of the boys in the video who was stripped by his own gang member. So this is a punishment that was used. Even before social media, this is something that the gangs in that area would do. So if someone in that gang did something wrong, they would strip him and they would like send him to walk through either a rival area or their own area to humiliate him and shame him. But now this has gone digital, right? So what they did is they stripped him. He's 15 years old. He's filmed from like five different, five different people are filming him. And he is being forced to do sexual things to himself, right? So this is what we're talking about here is like sexual abuse videos of a child. And underneath this YouTube video that he's in, which is a rap video, people are talking about this. Oh, that's the young person that got stripped. Where's the video? And then you've got like links to the video, like eight, nine, ten links to the video. Every time the video goes taken off, someone has put it on. Oh, wait, the video is still on Twitter. Oh, wait, no, I just found it on Insta. Oh, wait, no, I just found it here. And so then we've just got multiple forms of this video under this video. That's also getting a lot of views. So the young boy that was involved in that was coerced to stab someone as a result of this video where he was stripped, right? So they knew he knew that they had this video and they had it for like eight months before they released it. And within that time frame, they were coercing him to do it or the crack. And so he stabbed someone, he did a couple of other things, eventually what it came out that like they had this video. And then it was just released everywhere. So it's a way to kind of like humiliate people to a level that like your trauma, you're being like repeat victimized by this video being released on social media. It's bad enough that you have suffered this trauma and you're trying to deal with that knowing that this video is there, right? And dealing with what happened to you and all of those things to then have to commit further crimes, to then know like having to check all the time every day. So the young people will talk about every day checking their social media feeds to make sure that these videos haven't gone out. Like this is very stressful. This is a lot of anxiety. And then finally when it goes out, you have no control. Even when the platforms are taking it down, other people are putting up exists in multiple group chats. Like there's no way for you to get that video back. And this was not your choice. None of this was your choice. So that is, you know, this is extreme, but this is what's happening. And this is, it's not just happening in gangs like it happens like in other groups and other criminal organizations as well, but just using these kind of videos to blackmail people or coerce people to do further crimes through, you know, like using their victimization to blackmail them is really quite horrific. It is. And even though this young man still went ahead and did these additional crimes in the video was still released. So not only coercion, but then, yeah, repeat victimization over and over and over. Yeah. And just like spiraling, right? Like going from your own trauma to other people's trauma and like there's just no end to it. Yeah. Okay. We want to shift perspectives a little bit. And, you know, we've talked about the gangs and gang members, using social media, posting videos and messages. And but one of the things that you mentioned earlier was law enforcement and how law enforcement is now using particularly in the United States. And you mentioned the differences between American law enforcement and UK law enforcement and what they can and can can use. From your perspective, how do you have any thoughts on how the police and prosecutors should engage with this kind of content? I know there's been a lot of debates, at least here in the in the States about what should be allowed in. There's a big debate over whether rap lyrics is sufficient evidence to convict someone about crimes that were allegedly committed based on the lyrics. Like do you think it's fair game to use these social media posts to prosecute someone? So I think that so this is a really difficult question and I changed my mind about this quite a lot. But I think like the most important thing I think to think about this is that You have to take everything within context and the problem is that when we're taking these things out of context like one line out of a rap song and we're using that to as evidence There's no context to that whatsoever, right? And it shouldn't be specific to rap music, right? There are plenty of people who are threatening people in country music, but they're not going to court. So we're decontextualizing what is happening within the threats that are being made within kind of like rap music to convict people because it fits a narrative, right? It fits a narrative of gang culture. It helps to build a picture, but what you're not actually building a picture then you need to build a picture. If a crime has occurred, if a serious crime has occurred and we think that social media was a part of that crime, a motivation for that crime, then we need to put all of those things together. But just pulling out one sentence is not enough, I don't believe. And also just picturing someone like, oh, here is a demonstration of gang association, a picture of someone with another gang member. Again, it's not enough. Like no, that's just a picture of someone that lives on their street. Like this is, we need to build a bigger picture and we need to have an understanding of what that is. And it needs to be relevant to the crime. I think for me, like, if is this motivated by a social media, did this happen as a result of social media or YouTube or whatever it is, does it have a digital element? If it has a digital element, I think that's different, but also if it has a digital element, are you also talking about cyber crimes within that and digital harms because they never talk about that. Because if there is a digital element here, what you're going to find is a whole bunch of other evidence about other digital crimes that gang members are never, ever, like included in this type of crime, right? We don't talk about kind of cyber crime and gangs, ever, even though yes, they are committing them, right? We don't talk about them because we just focus on murder all the time, which I again, like find difficult because there's lots of other things that are happening around this. And we can't just focus on murder all the time. We have to focus on like other times where we can intervene and other times where we can like heal trauma and like support people rather than just waiting for people to get killed and then trying to deal with it. So I think just to clarify, it's a difficult question. Things should not be taken out of context and things should be treated fairly. People's art as people's art. If that art is connected to a crime that is committed, then build a picture of that, but don't just take like an isolated picture or one line to demonstrate gang association or affiliation or motivation within that has to be much broader than that. And if it is going to be broader, then you're going to have to include the cyber crimes you're going to find because you'll find them, but the gangrems are never convicted based on cyber crime, ever. And what about the platforms themselves? This might also be a difficult question, but YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, do you think these platforms are enabling the kind of gang related activity and what, if any responsibility, do they have to intervene or kind of moderate this content? So I think like all of those platforms are enabling, they're enabling all of us to commit more crimes. Right? So are they enabling gang members to commit more crimes? Yes, but they're also enabling everybody else to commit more crimes as well. So again, it's about contextualizing like what we're talking about. Like are people who commit crimes committing more crimes because of social media? Yes. It's just an extension of like if you are committing crimes offline, you are committing crimes online. And there really isn't an offline online world, right? Like this is just an extension of you are. So if you are involved in criminal activities in one space, you're going to be involved in criminal activities in another space, right? Is it enabling? Yes, if we take it away, is it going to start? No. So did they have a responsibility? Yeah, of course they do. Like we all have a responsibility, but it's not just the platforms that have that responsibility. It's also the viewers that have the responsibility. If there was no audience for these things, if there was no audience for crimes or live livestream murders, people wouldn't do them, right? Like if there's no audience, if we're not getting popularity, if we're not getting clothing deals by how many views we have on YouTube talking about murder, then no one's going to do it. Right. So I think that there's it's responsibility of the platforms. Yes, of course they should moderate the content. They should be careful what they put out. But also we should moderate what we're willing to look at and comment and share and be a part of. So we're all enabling it ultimately. Yeah, I think that's all I'm going to say about that. Well, thank you, Michelle. Those are all the questions that we had for you today. We really appreciate you taking time out of your day to talk to us about, you know, gangs and internet, something that is a bit of a bridging area research, but I think something that most people still don't really think about for many of the reasons that we talked about. But before we let you go, work and listeners find more of your work or connect with you. So you can find more of my work. I have a TED talk so you can look at my TED talk, which is about gangs and digital harms. You can also find more of my work in the article that we mentioned going viral and going country. I think I got that the wrong way round. And then I've also written another paper based on the same data that's called it started with the nude, which is about the technology facilitates sexual violence within gangs. And I've written another couple of pieces as well as well about the ethics of doing digital research on sensitive content and also on gangs specifically. And because I think at the start of gang research, we were able, we just looked to everything and didn't really think about it. And now I think that we should be a lot more careful and we should be a lot more inclusive of people who are involved. And think about, again, the audience of social media posts. Gang members aren't posting on social media for researchers to go and take out a tweet or take out a video and then write stuff about it. And we have to contextualize what we're doing. So I think that's really important. Yeah. Thank you so much. I have a few. My cat has just arrived. I have three. So. Yes, thank you so much. It was great chatting with you and learning more about your work. Yeah, thank you. So I do also do other work. My work has now moved towards thinking about girls. So girls have always been really important within my work. But I also now do work around girls who in the juvenile justice system and phones and social media and looking at the role of like women in community violence intervention. And again, with like a social media slant on that to kind of like see how much women are really doing. So that's why I'm looking at now. And if people want to contact me, I am a professor at widen the university. You can also find me on blue sky and linked him. Well, thank you again. I really appreciate it. All right. Thank you very much. Hey, thanks for listening. Don't forget to leave us a review on Apple podcasts or iTunes or let us know what you think of the episode by leaving us a comment on our website. The criminology academy. You can also follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook at the crime academy. That's T H E C R I M A C A D E M Y. Or email us at the crime academy at gmail.com. See you next time.