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Not Your Personal Army! Investigating Vigilantism and Its Agency in a Reddit Collective of Websleuths
Journal: Information, Communication and Society Manuscript ID Draft
Manuscript Type: Original Article
Keywords: affordance, figure, Reddit, Social Media, vigilantism, websleuth
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Not Your Personal Army! Investigating Vigilantism and Its Agency in a Reddit Collective of Websleuths
Often referred as the front page of the Internet, Reddit is an online forum that was created in 2005 to foster communities of interests on a variety of topics that include politics, sports, comedy, cats, and so much more (Anderson, 2015). The platform gained popularity in 2008 when former President Barack Obama held an Ask Me Anything session which usually relies on the participation of a public personality who answers live questions from Reddit users called redditors (Duggan & Smith, 2013). The platform uses a traditional forum structure that takes the shape of a hierarchical tree of directories called subreddits. By 2017, it counted over 1 million subreddits (Redditmetrics, 2017), although it is difficult to determine how many are active. Despite its growing popularity – it is the 4th most visited website in the United States and the 7th most visited worldwide (Alexa, 2017) – researchers have pointed out that Reddit remains vastly understudied when compared to other social media platforms (Kilgo et al., 2016). Yet, Reddit represents a great opportunity to collect rich qualitative data in a natural setting (Nguyen et al., 2016, Ovadia, 2015) and to analyze how users “share information” and “engage in discourses” on an array of topics (Sanderson and Rigby, 2013, p. 518).
To participate in a subreddit, redditors can either post a text or a link (to an image, a video, or an external website) (Ovadia, 2015). Other members are then free to comment on the post and to rate it through Reddit’s upvote (+1)/downvote (-1) system. In turn, this scoring allows redditors to gain karma points (Reddit’s currency that establishes a member’s reputation) and contributes in configuring contents through Reddit’s filtering
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algorithms. In theory, the karma system was implemented to ensure that redditors contribute quality content and respect participatory rules (Sanderson & Rigby, 2013; Anderson, 2015). Yet, Reddit is known for its “dark corners” which host troublesome contents (Centivany & Glushko, 2016; Ovadia, 2015). Indeed, Reddit’s hands-off governance approach has been criticized over the years as being responsible for the emergence of racist, sexist, homophobic, and violent discourses (Topinka, 2017).
In the media, two controversies with strong sexist overtones relating to Reddit have made headlines in 2014: the Fappening and Gamergate. On the one hand, the Fappening refers to the major leak of personal photos belonging to (mainly) female celebrities (Massanari, 2017). These photos, which were obtained illegally and widely distributed on Reddit, depicted actresses and singers in the nude. The word later used to refer to the event is a portmanteau between the words fap (to masturbate) and happening. On the other hand, Gamergate refers to a convoluted controversy around video game developer Zoë Quinn (Chess & Shaw, 2015; Massanari, 2015). The latter has been criticized by communities of (mainly male) gamers on Reddit and 4chan for allegedly entertaining intimate relationships with journalists in exchange for favorable reviews. Quinn and other women who publicly came out in her support have subsequently been the victims of an online smear campaign that relies on intimidation and doxing (the posting of confidential information online). Massanari’s (2017) work is crucial to understand the sociomaterial processes at play in these controversies, as Reddit’s karma system is believed to foster unethical practices by implicitly promoting contents with greater choc value through its filtering algorithms.
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To that effect, Reddit’s history, or at least the narratives surrounding its history are intimately linked to online vigilantism and to the Boston attacks of 2013 in particular (Anderson, 2015; Buozis, 2017; Duggan & Smith, 2013; Ovadia, 2015). Following these attacks, Internet users went on social media platforms like 4Chan, Imgur, and Reddit to assemble and analyze an impressive body of pictures and videos that were taken during the event, an initiative which resulted in the erroneous identification of racialized persons. Subsequently, Reddit has been the object of numerous analyses from scholars (Lally, 2017; Myles, 2016; Nhan et al., 2017; Tapia et al., 2014) and journalists alike (Caspian Kang, 2013; Pickert & Sorensen, 2013) that question the platform’s role – the culture it promotes, as well as its algorithms – in the progression of this manhunt. These controversies have forced Reddit to adopt rules (like the “no personal information rule”) to discourage future vigilantism initiatives and doxing practices (Lally, 2017).
In the line of the Boston attacks, some redditors have decided to harness the power of Reddit to solve crimes, what we refer as websleuthing. This article further examines websleuthing practices on Reddit by engaging in an online ethnography of a subreddit called the Reddit Bureau of Investigation (RBI). With close to 50 000 members, the RBI was founded in January 2013. Overall, the its objective can be defined as “solving crimes/mysteries and helping people in the process”. The RBI, which receives on average between 1 and 5 posts a day, is used by redditors who seek help, either when they are (or someone they know is) the victim of a crime or when they have a problem to solve.
As Reddit was founded as a para-journalistic platform, undertaking websleuthing practices constitutes somewhat of a transgressive departure on the platform whose main
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functions are to facilitate the circulation of information and to foster group discussions (Potts & Harrison, 2013; Ovadia, 2015; Lally, 2017). Hence, placed against a backdrop that clearly condemns online vigilantism, how do websleuths on the RBI perform their activities while respecting Reddit’s rules (also called reddiquette)? If we initially apprehended the RBI as a vigilante initiative that brings together citizens who wish to “take the law into their own hands”, we quickly noticed that traditional definitions of vigilantism were not sufficiently nuanced to understand the variety and complexity of practices observed within the subreddit. Yet, as it appeared to be frequently invoked discursively within the RBI, we argue that the notion of vigilantism remains relevant for analytical purposes, but as a rhetorical figure rather than as a definitional tool.
The Figure of Vigilantism
The development of the Internet has brought significant changes in the field of policing. Today, the extension of digital technology use among citizens and private security providers are believed to challenge the dominance that public policing institutions have maintained in the last century over matters of public safety production (Shearing and Marks, 2011; Zedner, 2006). In the same vein, websleuthing, which we define as the investigative practices undertaken by citizens who are not professional security providers through the use of digital technologies, constitutes an increasing trend. With few notable exceptions (Huey et al., 2013; Myles et al., 2016; Yardley et al., 2016; Nhan et al., 2017), researchers have so far conceptualized websleuthing in terms of vigilantism. Johnston (1996), whose work remains the most comprehensive on the matter, defines vigilantism as a set of policing activities undertaken by groups of private citizens
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who use or threaten to use force to establish social order and for whom these engagements are premeditated, voluntary, and related to citizenship performance. By far, the most widespread meaning of vigilantism is associated with “retributive justice” which refers to citizen initiatives whose objective is to publicly punish any normative or criminal transgression (Johnston, 2001). In the scientific literature, Badaracco & Useem (1997) were the first to use the concept of online vigilantism in their work which investigated the punitive acts undertaken by the shareholders of a telecommunication company that had filed for bankruptcy.
Since then, the notion of online or digital vigilantism (Trottier, 2016) has been mobilized by researchers and journalists alike to designate Internet users who decide to “take the law into their own hands” (Chua et Wareham, 2004, p. 35; Vander Ende, 2014, p. 1). Hence, online vigilantism is directly associated with punitive strategies such as public shaming (Wall & Williams, 2007) and vengeance (Sharp et al., 2008). Yet, as Johnston (1996, 2001) argues, there are multiple types of vigilante initiatives who do not necessarily rely on such punitive acts, but rather aim, for example, crime prevention, social order maintenance, community protection, etc. Moreover, in their analysis of
websleuthing practices against online child abuse, Huey et al. (2013) observed that their
participants, who collaborated with the police and did not engage in punitive acts, did not identify as vigilantes, which led them to hypothesize that this labelling could be the result of journalistic sensationalism rather than empirical analyses. Here, we do not to use vigilantism to label the activities undertaken on the RBI. In fact, the debate as to whether
websleuthing practices constitute vigilante initiatives goes well beyond the scope of this
article. Rather, in the line of controversies relating to vigilantism on Reddit, we wish to
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investigate how vigilantism is invoked discursively within the RBI and what invoking this figure performs. Also, we wish to understand how Reddit’s affordances participate in materializing these discourses.
A similar type of analysis was conducted by Bergstrom (2011) who conducted a case study on an alleged Reddit “troll”. Bergstrom’s (2011) analysis showed that trolling and its pejorative connotations were invoked as a rhetorical figure (our expression) in interaction. In turn, this invocation justified the stopping of debates and allowed punitive actions like doxing against a member of the Reddit community accused of transgressive behaviors. Here, rather than looking at trolling, we investigate how the figure of vigilantism – that is, how vigilantism is represented and invoked as a discursive entity –, as well as its staging against the figure of police professionalism1 in particular perform
certain things within the RBI, like defining roles and practices.
Studying Rhetorical Figures and Their Materialization Online
Our research draws from actor-network theory (Latour, 2005) which stipulates that organizing processes are performed through the distribution of agency between various actors who possess “heterogeneous ontologies” (Law, 1994). By agency, we mean the ability to make a significant difference within a communicational event (Cooren, 2013). As such, we define collectives as assemblages that are constituted through communication (Brummans et al., 2014) and composed of actors
1
By professionalism, we do not specifically refer to the skills and etiquette of professional workers (although such elements might be considered), but rather to any discursive element relating to the practicing of an activity that is usually exclusive to professional individuals or groups. Thus, the figure of
police professionalism refers to any discursive element relating specifically to the practicing of policing
activities that are usually exclusive to security professionals (like police officers, but also detectives, investigative journalists, intelligence or criminal analysts, etc.).
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(human/nonhuman, material/symbolic) who are apprehended in their propensity to decentralize agency (Latour, 1991). This does not mean that human agency is unimportant, but rather that its role in the organization of social life might have been overestimated to the detriment of other equally important entities of nonhuman nature (Latour, 2005; Cooren, 2006). In online settings, material actors may take the form of technological affordances, design features, and algorithms, while symbolic actors might be discourses, ideologies, rhetorical figures, and so forth. Thus, by looking at human and nonhuman agency, actor-network theory addresses directly the sociomaterial nature of organizing processes of all collectives (Orlikowski, 2007) by refuting the ontology of separateness between sociality and materiality (Barad, 2003; Suchman, 2007). Given our objectives to understand how the rhetorical figure of vigilantism contributes to organizing roles and practices within the RBI, as well as how Reddit’s platform contributes in materializing such discursive practices, this paper draws from two complementary theories: the ventriloquist approach to communication (Cooren, 2013) and affordance theory, especially from an organizing perspective (Vaast & Leonardi, 2016).
The ventriloquist approach to communication (Cooren, 2013) focuses on how actors invoke certain rhetorical figures – that is, any symbolic entity – in their everyday interactions and how these figures contribute in organizing interactions. In other words, it looks at how figures literally intervene in everyday interactions and do things, indeed positing the important part that nonhuman, symbolic entities play in organizing processes. By mobilizing the metaphor of ventriloquism, Cooren’s (2009) theory looks at the dislocation effects that the use of certain figures generates as they “contaminate” interactions, in the sense that they extirpate interactions outside their immediate spatial
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and temporal context (Cooren, 2009). This metaphor has a dual effect. On the one hand, it entails that human agents mobilize figures (ideals, standards, objects, feelings, texts, people, etc.) within communicational events. For example, someone might give weight to their own statement by performing a figurative association with a greater ideal or rule (or, as we will see in our case study, by figurative dissociation). From that standpoint, human agents are ventriloquist in the sense that they make these figures speak when they invoke them in interaction.
On the other hand, figures are also seen as ventriloquists in the sense that they
speak through us or, in other words, that human agents often speak “in their name”.
Therefore, invoking or mobilizing a figure refers to all “communicative practices through which organizational members make many different things and beings […] present as sources of authority”, a process that is called presentification (Benoit-Barné and Cooren, 2009, p. 3). Inversely, one could say that when speaking through us, figures, may they be symbols (such as vigilantism or police professionalism), norms (Reddit’s rules of engagement, for example), or even people (a police representative, a RBI moderator)
teleact (from teleaction, see Cooren, 2006), meaning that they deploy agency in
interaction by acting remotely. Therefore, analyzing collectives comes down to studying configurations, that is to say the relations, associations, or tensions that are developed, maintained, and disrupted between various figures that distribute agency.
In parallel, affordance theory can help us understand how such symbolic entities are materialized in online settings (Leonardi & Vaast, 2016). Emerging from ecological approaches in animal psychology (Gibson, [1979] 2014), affordance theory first refers to the actions that are sustained or constrained for actors in a given environment.
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Popularized in the field of computer science and design by Norman (1988), affordance theory is coherent with the program of actor-network theory as it draws from a relational ontology entailing that agency is not located in actors themselves (whether human or nonhuman), but rather distributed between actors (Faraj & Azad, 2012). For the field of Internet studies, this means that affordances are not located in a technology’s physical or digital materiality, but rather that affordances are enacted in practice and foster various possibilities/constraints for sociability (Wellman, 2001) and communication (Hutchby, 2001).
Today, inspired by Gaver’s (1996) work on technological affordances among others, an increasing number of studies investigates the role of social media affordances in the organizing processes of online interactions (Leonardi & Vaast, 2016; Scott & Orlikowski, 2012; Rice et al., 2017). As Helmond & Bucher (2017, p. 12) argue, most of these analyses oscillate on a continuum between low-level affordances (a platform’s functionalities, its “buttons”) and high-level affordances (the overall “dynamics and conditions enabled by technical devices, platforms and media”). Researchers examining
high-level affordances have offered various typologies of social media affordances (boyd,
2011; Treem & Leonardi, 2012). For example, one might look at how Reddit’s platform affords visibility and persistence, that is how online texts (as well as videos, links, etc.) are accessible to individuals and groups without necessitating physical co-presence (visibility), all the while keeping their “original display” over time (persistence) (Treem & Leonardi, 2012). Here, the objective is not to provide a “laundry list of the possible affordances in objects” (Jarzabkowski & Pinch, 2013, p. 583), but rather to examine how social media affordances are enacted in the social accomplishment of certain discursive
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practices (such as dislocation, presentification, and so forth). Alternatively, we also focus on how social media affordances materialize and sustain certain discourses online, as well as on the agentic role of these texts in defining roles and practices within the RBI.
An Online Ethnography Centred on Discourse
This research relies on a methodological approach inspired by online ethnography (Hine, 2015). In its most basic form, online ethnography combines observation techniques with discourse analysis, both often – but not always – conducted in online settings. As Hine contends (2000, p. 53-54), “discourse analytic approaches to Internet texts could usefully coexist with ethnography approaches to Internet interaction [and] help to maintain analytic ambivalence about what the phenomena being studied really are”. In the literature, the combination of ethnography and discourse analysis has generated debates as to the epistemological coherence between the two approaches (Androutsopoulos, 2008; Atkinson et al., 2011; Hammersley, 2005). As Spencer (1994, p. 267-268) argues, ethnography and discourse analysis are situated at two opposite poles in empirical research: while ethnography tends to focus on contextualizing social phenomena and favors the participants’ perspective as its main heuristic (by performing participant and immersive observation, as well as interviews with key informants), discourse analysis tends to favor the study of linguistic occurrences within natural settings. Yet, empirical studies that manage to combine both approaches, that is by analyzing discursive events within the context of their emergence while being informed by ethnographic insights, have the potential to produce richer analyses, insofar as the analysts’ understanding of context plays a significant role in their interpretation of
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organizing processes (Maynard, 2006). Indeed, ethnographic insight helps gain better
analytic control, that is the ability to understand which contextual information to include
when analyzing a discursive event (Maynard, 2006).
Hence, in line with online ethnography, we have manually collected a corpus of 121 posts (that resemble discussion threads) on the Reddit Bureau of Investigation. This continuous corpus, which was selected randomly over a period of three months between 2014 and 2015, was converted into PDF files to sustain qualitative discourse analysis. Our approach draws greatly from organizational discourse theory (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2014) that seeks to understand the propensity of discourse – and, by extension, of communication – to constitute and sustain collectives. Inspired by Cooren’s (2015) pragmatic approach to organizational discourse, we have developed our method by drawing from various perspectives such as speech act theory, conversation analysis, as well as semiotics. Overall, in accordance with actor-network theory (Latour, 2005), this methodological frame accounts for the distributed nature of agency by looking at both human/non-human and material/immaterial actors (like users, discourses, rhetorical figures and metaphors, affordances, digital materiality, etc.) through the lens of communication.
In an iterative logic, our corpus was the subject of numerous readings and horizontal analyses that were informed by multi-level ethnographic insights. At micro-level, we performed ongoing, non-participant observation within the RBI at a weekly, then monthly frequency between 2013 and 2016. The decision of opting for non-participant observation was made to avoid altering the users’ investigative practices, but also to prevent our involvement in illegal or unethical investigative activities.
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Furthermore, we did not procure consent from users, as the RBI is a publicly accessible platform and given that users should not have clear expectations of privacy. At meso-level, we learned about Reddit’s history, culture, and design features by conducting a literature review (in scientific databases, in the blogosphere, in newspapers, etc.) and by personally participating in a variety of unrelated subreddits from 2013 until today. We also searched the Internet to identify existing discourses surrounding the RBI among non-members. At macro-level, we conducted a review of the scientific literature on the contribution of amateurs in the digital era and within the field of policing in particular which, as we mentioned previously, has so far been mainly conceptualized as vigilantism.
The posts in our corpus were created by members of the RBI who claim to be the victim of a crime (or their representative) and generally offer a somewhat detailed account of the events that took place. Other members are then free to help (or not) each original poster (OP) by undertaking various tasks, such as locating an individual, analyzing an image, or simply offering advice. While it is difficult to assess what motivates RBI members to ask for support and help each other without the use of formal interviews, our observations indicate that motivation factors are diverse. Some members publicly claim that the police do not have the time nor the will to help them (particularly in common cases like petty theft). Some believe that the police might not possess the expertise to assist them (especially in cases requiring technological savviness), while others express the need to do some preliminary work themselves before going to the police. Furthermore, half of the cases were not criminal in nature, consisting of mysteries or requests that did not necessitate police assistance.
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In a sense, the case of the RBI is mobilized for its propensity to examine the types of discourses developed by citizens who are excluded from a professional area of expertise. During our iterative process, it became clear that the figure of vigilantism was central in the collective’s organizing processes, especially when it was opposed to police professionalism. As such, given their emergent – but by no means exclusive – importance, we propose to examine the agency of discourses surrounding vigilantism and police professionalism within the RBI in more depth, as well as the role of Reddit’s affordances in materializing such discourses. As it would be impossible to conduct an exhaustive analysis of our corpus in this article, we have decided to focus on the RBI’s home page and on the discursive practices that appeared to be central and ongoing (like establishing and reinforcing rules, as well as asking for help).
Defining Rules Through Figurative Dis/Association
Our observations first show that RBI administrators invoke police professionalism to define the subreddit’s identity, arguably in a highly humoristic way. As depicted in Figure 1, the RBI’s logo, as well as the name of the subreddit itself refers to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), one the most recognizable policing institution in the world. Specifically, the FBI logo was appropriated by replacing its original coat of arms with Snoo, Reddit’s alien cartoon mascot. We define this discursive strategy as a “figurative association” to police professionalism that participates in “framing” (Goffman, 1974) what the RBI is and what it does, to the extent that the use of a logo is generally understood as a way for collectives to visually circumscribe elements with which they associate.
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Clearly, the use of a single logo cannot entirely define the identity of a collective. For the figure of police professionalism to effectively do things, its legitimacy must be acknowledged and validated by current or potential members who enter the subreddit (it is, indeed, the RBI’s logo that greets newcomers and not actual human members). Since each RBI member might very well interpret this logo in different ways, participatory rules must therefore be explicitly or implicitly established elsewhere, what we will address shortly. Nevertheless, this underlines how some of Reddit’s affordances, like visibility and persistence, are enacted as the administrators create and showcase a symbol that discursively associates the RBI to police professionalism. In turn, this figure comes with certain connotations and expectations that are flexible, yet not unlimited. This process of figurative association might appear trivial, yet it constitutes a strategy with which other civilian groups might disagree. For example, the collective Anonymous would arguably reject a similar strategy (even such a humoristic one), opting instead for emblems like the V for Vendetta mask and the Men without a head image that connote an inherent will to challenge social order, a subtext that the RBI logo does not explicitly entail. Thus, the RBI logo constitutes an initial discursive strategy that is used to instinctively orient – without completely determining – how members are expected to use “the power of Reddit to solve crimes” without requiring the active presence of human actors.
[Insert Figure 2]
Our initial observations also show that RBI members promulgate participatory rules through “figurative disassociation” from vigilantism. As shown in Figure 2, the RBI’s home page showcases either the most popular, newest, or best posts to the left of
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the screen (depending on the user’s preference), while the right side showcases a permanent, vertical sidebar. In the RBI, this sidebar is used by the administrators to discourage “witch-hunts” and the “posting of personal information” of potential suspects. As depicted in Figure 2, the motto “Not your personal army” is invoked. This catchphrase consists of an Internet meme that was first popularized on social media platforms in 2007 to address issues relating to online vigilantism (knowyourmeme, 2012). Here, the act of dissociating oneself to vigilantism and to what it represents (doxing, vengeance, retaliation, personal gain, etc.) is one of the main strategies used by administrators to exemplify what not do to within the subreddit. The invocation of vigilantism through the use of an Internet meme constitutes somewhat of an ingenious discursive strategy. Indeed, the administrators tap into the shared connotations of vigilantism (which, again, can be interpreted in diverse, but not unlimited ways) to provide guidelines in a succinct and powerful way that enacts some of Reddit’s affordances like visibility and persistence. Other discursive strategies like providing a (potentially long) list of directives could be less effective, as users might not take the time to read it or simply because such a list might not fit into the sidebar’s format that calls for concise information.
Hence, our initial observations underline the figurative staging of police professionalism and vigilantism in an antagonistic way. This antagonistic staging is performed by RBI administrators themselves as they associate the subreddit to police professionalism (and to its multiple, yet limited connotations) all the while dissociating it from vigilantism (and, arguably, from its related connotations to vengeance, retaliation, and personal gain). Although we still need to address their effectiveness, we contend that the figures of police professionalism and vigilantism are invoked by administrators who
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speak in their name to offer a definition of what the RBI is about. Inversely, these figures are also (tele)acting, or acting by proxy, as they intervene in this communicational event and dislocate it from its immediate temporal and spatial setting by tapping into the users' shared conceptions (although the exact nature of such conceptions remains to be assessed, for example with formal interviews). Here, equating that police professionalism is “good” and that vigilantism is “bad” might appear overly simplistic. Yet, we would argue that it is precisely the dual simplicity of this antagonistic configuration that explains its effectiveness, as it allows members to define their group’s rules and identity in few words or images that nevertheless possess great organizing power.
[Insert Figure 3]
To that effect, our observations show that the antagonistic configuration between police professionalism and vigilantism extends throughout interactions among users. Figure 3 constitutes a telling example. Here, user PersonPersonPerson2 is unsatisfied with the reason given by the OP as to why he needs the help of the RBI to solve a crime of which he claims to be the victim. The user’s sketchiness is quickly associated with online vigilantism, as PersonPersonPerson declares: “This is an issue for police not mob justice […]. Report them. Do not attempt to bully her through other people who do not know the situation”. Here, the divide between the figures of vigilantism and police professionalism is invoked as PersonPersonPerson asserts with authority that this self-proclaimed “victim” does not deserve the RBI’s help. In this case, authority is achieved through the presentification of the specific norms that have been established on the RBI’s home page. It also suggests that police professionalism is indeed an important figure, as
PersonPersonPerson not only stipulates that he will not “bully” the suspect (which would
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constitute a vigilante act), but also invites the alleged victim to follow legal avenues, therefore granting legitimacy to police authority. Given the asynchronous nature of communication practices on the RBI, we argue that it is not PersonPersonPerson who enforces participatory rules per se. Rather, it is the antagonistic staging of police professionalism and vigilantism (which are discursively invoked in interaction and materialized through Reddit’s affordances) that contributes to this normative enforcement through figurative dis/association. That being said, the fact that a user invokes figures to assert his or her authority in interaction does not mean that it is automatically recognized by users who stumble upon them, as the effectiveness and the relevance of figures are highly situated and interactional.
As such, authority must not only be performed by an actor, but also accepted by others, a concept defined as recursive validity (Cooren, 2013). In Figure 3, recursive validity is performed in two ways. First, we notice a form of qualitative (or textual) recursive validity in user chase!’s post when he or she says: “This. Please contact the police.” Furthermore, Reddit’s platform also affords a quantitative way of performing recursive validity, as each post can be scored by other users (here with upvotes or downvotes). Hence, the original post is not only recursively validated via the comment’s content in a qualitative way, but also by its score of 39 points. In turn, this provides karma points to users, reinforcing even more the appeal of following the subreddit’s directives. Not shown in Figure 3, Reddit’s platform offers a third way of enforcing recursive validity by rearranging the order of comments appearance by the number of points each has received within a post. To do so, the user must select the “best” comment viewing tab as opposed to the chronological tabs. This is what we refer as algorithmic
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recursive validity. As such, one could hypothesize that posts that are shown at the top of
the thread are the ones who have received the highest level of recursive validity. This underlines how complex the distribution of agency on the RBI (and on Reddit in general) is and how it mobilizes various actors that are human (RBI members), material (Reddit’s affordances and algorithms), and immaterial (rhetorical figures such as vigilantism and police professionalism).
The Performativity of Figures
As we mentioned previously, the antagonistic staging of vigilantism and police professionalism appears to be central in organizing processes in the RBI. This last section aims to look at the performativity of these figures as they intervene/are invoked in interaction and contribute to the emergence of shared narratives. As Cooren (2013, p. 25) argues, to “take into account the figures that are evoked by the ventriloquists that we are allows to identify values, principles, premises, norms, and ways of speaking that are typically held and perpetuated by a certain speech community”. Our analysis underlined several collective uses of language within the RBI. Here, we will specifically address the discursive practice of “calling for help” of which Figure 4 is a typical and particularly telling example.
[Insert Figure 4]
The “call for help” narrative refers to the moment when OPs must fill out the title and information sections of their post to describe their problem and ask for assistance. As depicted in Figure 4, this narrative allows RBI member t-reader to tell his story which involves an allegedly fraudulent construction worker who has used the death of his
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mother-in-law to stop his ongoing work after having received payment. This type of narrative can be observed throughout the RBI3, in part due to Reddit’s posting feature that
promotes a specific type of adjacency pairing. Here, adjacency pairs refer to structural sequences embedded in a platform’s materiality that inform conversational patterns, like question/answer, request/acceptance, demand/response, etc. (Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001, p. 85). In the RBI, Reddit’s posting feature is most often appropriated by users to request instrumental support, which differs from Reddit’s para-journalistic objective to promote information circulation and topic discussion (Suran & Kilgo, 2017).
In this case, the “call for help” narrative appears to perform two acts. First, it is employed by OPs to make their case as attractive as possible in the hope of receiving help from other members. By “attractive”, we mean that a case must contain several significant information to be considered. Indeed, our observations show that a case’s attractiveness is not linked to its criminal nature, but rather to the potential for investigative work it entails. In other words, RBI members are more likely to help if the OP clearly states what other members can do and provide information that other members can use. As argued by user WheatyMM in a sticky4 (see Figure 5 below), posts that
simply share a link to a newspaper article relating to a serious crime (like a kidnapping or a murder) are far less likely to gain popularity than posts that describe a more common
3
101 out of 121 posts were created by a user seeking help. In fact, the word “help” appeared in 48 post titles in our corpus.
4
To help potential victims, certain rules were listed on the RBI’s home page in a sticky entitled “Please help us help you! Read this post before starting your own!” (though this sticky was archived since our last observations). A sticky could be defined as a Post-it thread that administrators permanently stick on the subreddit’s home page so that it automatically becomes the first post that users encounter. In this sticky, rules were offered to ensure that RBI members have “access to better data”. While certain rules focused on the importance of providing images and videos of high quality, others invited users to “provide as much context as possible” as well as to “put the complete location [of the incident] in the title” of the post.
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crime (like a petty theft) with actionable information, an observation also made by Buozis (2017).
[Insert Figure 5]
Second, the “call for help” narrative works as a way for OPs to remotely prove their good faith which has been identified as an important discursive practice on Reddit (Bergstrom, 2011). Indeed, in the context of asynchronous online communication, OPs must explicitly demonstrate that they do not possess any vigilante inclination nor have any secret agenda when soliciting the help of the RBI. By dissociating themselves from the figure of vigilantism, they validate the legitimacy of their case and, consequently, can claim and eventually obtain the status of victim, as well as receive the help that they request. This points to the performativity of certain figures and to their organizing property over roles and practices. In Figure 4, rendering one’s case attractive and proving one’s good faith was achieved simultaneously through social surveillance, meaning through the collection of information regarding individuals on social media platforms (Marwick, 2012). User t-reader invokes the results of his surveillance work as a rhetorical strategy to “prove” that the alleged culprit’s mother-in-law is in fact alive and well. He also details the surveillance work that he has conducted to locate the alleged fraudster. Consequently, as this “call for help” provides proof and actionable information, it should logically grant the OP a victim status.
Yet, the use of surveillance and the disclosure of actionable information in the “call for help” narrative does not inherently grant positive effects, as it is also mediated by the figure of vigilantism. As shown in the last paragraph, t-reader edited his “call for help” to respect the RBI’s (and Reddit’s) rule that forbids users from openly sharing
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personal information of suspects to prevent suspicions of doxing. This issue first points to the difficulties associated with undertaking investigative practices on Reddit. Again, Reddit is a para-journalistic platform that affords publicity and visibility, while limiting possibilities for the configuration of intimate spaces that investigative practices usually require. Indeed, Reddit’s platform politics (Gillespie, 2010), meaning how it distributes agency in differentiated ways and affords certain actions over others, make it that much harder to undertake problem-solving practices that require secrecy. In this case, t-reader uses a second platform (a private gallery on the photo-sharing platform Imgur) to get around this problem, limiting the circulation of sensitive information on Reddit.
But this issue also underlines how sharing the results of online surveillance work is too mediated by the figure of vigilantism. On the one hand, surveillance is used to illustrate one’s story in an attractive manner and to show one’s good faith to acquire the status of victim. On the other hand, surveillance can also be seen as pervasive when used in a way that is associated with vigilantism, for example when it is coupled with the (perceived) objective of publicly shaming or defaming someone. This demonstrates the importance of apprehending figures in the context of their intervention. In the specific context of the RBI, the way in which surveillance is invoked discursively and the performativity of such invocation cannot be understood outside of their relation to vigilantism. As such, in line with actor-network theory (Latour, 2005), discursive practices are embedded in dynamic networks of actors that interact and give meaning to each other and that cannot be analyzed individually, but with significant ethnographic insights. 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58
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Conclusive Remarks
This article’s first objective was to investigate the agency of vigilantism within a collective of websleuths, the Reddit Bureau of Investigation (RBI), mainly as it is staged against the figure of police professionalism. It also aimed to understand the role of Reddit’s affordances, like visibility and persistence, in materializing such figures and sustaining their performativity. Hence, rather than being used as a definitional tool to apprehend websleuthing practices, we have argued that vigilantism could also be conceived as a rhetorical a figure. When this figure intervenes in interaction or, depending on where one situates agency, when it is invoked by actors themselves, it performs certain things, like defining what the RBI is (or is not) and what it does (or does not do).
To conclude, we wish to underline that our analysis constitutes one of the many ways to interpret the distribution of agency within the RBI. As such, our research points to the importance of engaging in ethical reflections regarding agency attribution. As Brummans (2006, p. 199) argues, “the act of conceptualizing, attributing, and appropriating agency […] implicates the practice of ethics, because such an act affects who or what is given the agency to produce consequences”. As such, this article has so far omitted the most important agency of all: our own. Indeed, what entity possesses greater agency than the one that narrates its distribution? Readers should therefore keep in mind the subjective and interpretive nature of the approach that we have mobilized. Consequently, the way we have chosen to describe – and, in a sense, “frame” – the distribution of agency within a collective of websleuths should be the object of alternative analyses. 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57
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Although this article focused on vigilantism and police professionalism, we believe that the ventriloquist approach to communication paired with affordance theory shows great potential for the discursive analysis of online platforms, as it constitutes one way of overriding the divide traditionally set between materiality and sociality. For example, such theoretical coupling could be beneficial to address encompassing issues relating to the divide traditionally set between “amateurs” and “professionals” in the emerging economy of online contribution (Burgess & Green, 2009; Leadbeater & Miller, 2004). Rather than being understood as definitional tools for analysts to classify social groups, the performativity of such labels could be apprehended as they are invoked discursively in interaction and materialized within a variety of online platforms (a blog for citizen journalism, a health forum for the sick, a wine tasting online group, etc.). Hence, this conceptual shift is not inconsequential, as it opens new lines of research at the intersection of organizational theory and of Internet studies.
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Title: Not Your Personal Army! Investigating Vigilantism and Its Agency in a Reddit Collective of Websleuths
Date: October 14, 2017 Word count: 7948
Abstract : The history of Reddit, an online forum that fosters numerous communities of interests, is intimately linked to online vigilantism, notably because of the Gamergate controversy and the manhunt that occurred after the 2013 Boston attacks. As the “front page of the Internet”, Reddit is a para-journalistic platform that offers visibility and space for deliberative processes. Thus, vigilante initiatives undertaken on Reddit somewhat constitute social and technical transgressions. In its most widespread meaning, vigilantism refers to citizens who try to “take the law into their own hands” by conducting punitive acts such has doxing, public shaming, and retaliation. With the development of digital technologies, the concept of online vigilantism might not be sufficiently nuanced to encompass the variety and complexity of emerging websleuthing practices. By websleuthing, we mean investigative practices undertaken by citizens who are not professional security providers through the use of digital technologies. This article, however, investigates how vigilantism remains analytically relevant when apprehended as a rhetorical figure that is invoked discursively by websleuths in interaction. To do so, and drawing from a ventriloquist approach to communication and from affordance theory, we engage in an online ethnography of a Reddit collective of
websleuths, the Reddit Bureau of Investigation. Our analysis, which relies on online
observation and organizational discourse analysis, points to the agentic power of the figure of vigilantism in defining websleuthing roles and practices, especially in the way that it is staged antagonistically against the figure of police professionalism.
Keywords: affordance, figure, Reddit, social media, vigilantism, websleuths.
First author: David Myles
- Affiliation: PhD Candidate, Département de communication, Université de Montréal - Telephone: 1 514 419 1745
- Email: david.myles@umontreal.ca - Fax: 1 514 400 2578
- Institutional address: Université de Montréal, Pavillon Marie-Victorin, FAS Case postale 6128, succ. Centre-ville, Montréal (Québec), H3C 3J7, Canada
- Biographical note: David Myles is a PhD Candidate in communication at Université de Montréal and Lecturer in communication at Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. His research interests include social media use among citizens with an emphasis on death, crime, and surveillance.
Second author: Chantal Benoit-Barné
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- Affiliation: Associate Professor, Département de communication, Université de Montréal
- Telephone: 1 514 343 6111 #5029
- Email: chantal.benoit-barne@umontreal.ca - Fax: 1 514 400 2578
- Institutional address: Université de Montréal, Pavillon Marie-Victorin, FAS Case postale 6128, succ. Centre-ville, Montréal (Québec), H3C 3J7, Canada
- Biographical note: Chantal Benoit-Barné is Associate Professor in communication at Université de Montréal, Canada. Her research documents the situated rhetorical practices by which political and organizational players influence the interactions in which they take part.
Thirs author: Florence Millerand
- Affiliation: Professor, Département de communication sociale et publique, Université du Québec à Montréal
- Telephone: 1 514 987 3000 #3593 - Email: millerand.florence@uqam.ca - Fax: 1 514 987 6186
- Institutional address: Département de communication sociale et publique, Université du Québec à Montréal, Case postale 8888, succursale Centre-ville, Montréal (Québec) H3C 3P8 Canada
- Biographical note: Florence Millerand is Professor in communication at Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. Her research interests are information and communication technologies (ICTs), sociotechnical aspects of technology design, and technology appropriation and use.
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Figure 1 - The RBI logo
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Figure 2 - The RBI's home page
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Figure 3 - Presentification in an RBI interaction
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Figure 4 - The call for help narrative
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Figure 5 - The importance of actionable information
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