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Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums
Selina Cho & Joss Wright
Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute
Darknet Markets
An online market that operates via networks as Tor or I2P
Sells illicit goods (e.g. drugs, arms, counterfeit goods, stolen credit card details etc)
Different ways to share and gain information in and outside the marketplace
Forums sections inside the market
Voat
Chat groups
Reddit: one of the largest collection of online community forums.
social news aggregation
web content rating
discussion
Users rely heavily on discussion boards for sharing information related to trading in darknet markets
Reddit (cont.)
In March 2018, some of the largest Reddit forums (>40) related to darknet markets (DNM) were banned overnight to the surprise of many users
A new platform named Dread (only accessed through Tor) rose to particular prominence after positive reviews were spread across
Q: How do darknet market users react to speech bans?
Relevant work
Reaction to Moderation of speech and contents
Backlash is esp. notable in Reddit communities focused on toxicity or taboo topics (e.g. r/CoonTown, r/FatPeopleHate (Chandrasekharan et al. 2017))
Social support
Self-disclosing attitudes under anonymity (Choudhury & De 2014), (Chancellor et al. 2016)
All taboo topics are respected and addressed with communal efforts
DNM community
Law enforcement crackdowns in DNMs had brought about community spirit and solidarity with one another, which enabled the users to survive and migrate enmasse to new platforms (Ladegaard 2017)
Communication boards are crucial for confidence and momentum for markets: feedback mechanisms and reputation create an informal institutional framework (Hardy & Norgaard 2016)
Questions
1. What are the users talking about in the new platform? Have the same discussions made it across to Dread?
2. What is the user perception in the new Dread community towards Reddit and its ban?
3. How has the proportion of user engagement changed in the new platform?
Methodology
Datasets
Reddit: archives from Google BigQuery
Dread: Scrapy & CAPTCHA solving to access the main onion link*
LDA Topic modelling (7 topics)
Sentiment analysis: used TextBlob to analyse the quality of the sentiments spanning across posts that mention “Reddit”
Polarity and Subjectivity
Manual retrieval of banned Reddit archives (just the front page)
Username matching over the two platforms
Both subreddits and subdreads were referred to as forums for sake of simplicity
*dreadditevelidot.onion
Results: Main discourse
Similar topic interests:
Verification of vendor quality by probing for prior experiences
Communication skills
Shipping methods (i.e. how ”stealth” is the shipping method?)
Reliability of the service
In search of high quality drugs (“shatter”, ”flake” >80% purity)
Value of the product (quality given the price)
Results: Sentiment analysis
More positive remarks than negative in the new platform
May be due to the excited praising of the still-new platform.
Positive: 21.9% 30.0%
Negative: 19.7% 17.7%
Neutral: 58.4% 52.3%
User A (anonymised), the heroic saviour
Key figure in enabling the online exodus
Results: User engagement
13 of the 20 Dread forums that we obtained information on showed an increase in per user engagement
Username retention: Across 14,523 unique usernames in Reddit and 5,136 in Dread, including those of identified moderators, there were only 236matching usernames
Country-specific forums - the posting activity rate had increased by a noticeable amount; an increase from 45.11% to 53.75% and from 20.37% to 44.6% in DarkNetMarketsNO and DNMUK, respectively.
Results: User engagement
´ 13 of the 20 Dread forums that we obtained information on showed an increase in per user engagement
´ Username retention: Across 14,523 unique usernames in Reddit and 5,136 in Dread, including those of identified moderators, there were only 236matching usernames
´ Country-specific forums - the posting activity rate had increased by a noticeable amount; an increase from 45.11% to 53.75% and from 20.37% to 44.6% in DarkNetMarketsNO and DNMUK, respectively.
Implications
Discussion boards are crucial meeting place for the buyers to gather and share information about trade e.g. vendor profiles, quality, price, security practices etc
Much more than a transactional relationship: Reddit’s design of information sharing platform (which encourages self-disclosure) enables greater social support
Social media platforms as a way to bring about a collective motion & solidarity
There is usually a handful of prominent figures who help the community stay intact
More intimacy and trust - Dread’s new environment may thus promote more intimacy and tacit trust amongst users who had been initially unhappy about Reddit’s change of policy
Migration to new platforms: Users in fact feel more secure in the newer platform
Use of topic modelling to discover discourse themes in drugs
Future work
Further analysis of public social media that cover darknet communities
Telegram
Discord
Analysis of online lexicon variation in polarised communities
Deeper investigation of profiles of lead figures of social mobility and community migration
Further Resources
Chancellor, S., Pater, J.A., Clear, T., Gilbert, E., De Choudhury, M.: #thygh-gapp: Instagram content moderation and lexical variation in pro-eating disor-der communities. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. pp. 1201–1213. CSCW ’16, ACM, New York, NY, USA (2016). https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819963, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2818048.2819963
Chandrasekharan, E., Pavalanathan, U., Srinivasan, A., Glynn, A., Eisenstein, J., Gilbert, E.: You can’t stay here: The efficacy of reddit’s 2015 ban examined through hate speech. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 1(CSCW), 31:1–31:22 (Dec 2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/3134666, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3134666
Choudhury, M.D., De, S.: Mental health discourse on reddit: Self-disclosure, social support, and anonymity (2014), https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ ICWSM14/paper/view/8075
Paper: S. Y. Cho and J. Wright (forthcoming), “Into the Dark: A Case Study of Banned Darknet Drug Forums,” in 11th International Conference on Social Informatics, Springer International Publishing, 2019.