Picking the Goodies When Sleuthing Online

Abstract

Online activities can serve as tools for criminal opportunities and arenas for victimhood, but they can also function as reality constructions embedded in social control. One example of the latter is online sleuthing, primarily focused on dramatizing and disentangling offline crimes. This article relies on data from an ethnographic project conducted on the Swedish platform Flashback and analyzes posters’ interview accounts of their practices when attempting to unravel offline crimes. The author argues that posters’ ways of accounting for their sifting process within their digital community contribute to making it attractive. The posters’ situated selections and distinctions allow them to reproduce a handy and relatively tasteful interpretation of the crimes that their digital community is engaged in portraying. Online sleuths not only try to bring order to the offline crime dramas at issue but also engage in internal and reflexive social control, intended to order the ordering itself. They bridge the online–offline divide by referring to and incorporating allegedly objective offline circumstances when they set out to edit or cleanse the online debate. Offline investigations, interactions, and information gatherings are drawn upon as a resource in this sifting process.

Introduction

Criminologists tend to treat the Internet and social networking as powerful tools for the expansion of criminal opportunities—see, for instance, studies on illicit marketplaces on the Darknet (Ferguson, 2017) and drug-dealing practices on Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram (Demant et al., 2019)—or as arenas for the diffusion of novel forms of victimhood, such as phishing scams, identity thefts and gambling fraud (David, 2023; Griffiths, 2010). As Ferrell et al. (2015, p. 170) have noted, cybercrime has become an established area of criminological attention, and most research focuses on either identifying and explaining online crimes or on developing ways to combat them. Less attention has been directed at digital activities in their own right, that is, the practical experience of the Internet, “how it functions in particular ways for particular purposes,” and how meaning-making processes related to crime converse with the culture at large (Ferrell et al., 2015, pp. 171, 180; Stuart, 2020). It seems to be more difficult for criminologists to look at digital activities as a processual and interactional space that is devoted to both representing and dramatizing crime, thereby contributing to its social construction.

Digital activities in general are today integrated into people's ways of being in an environment—a sort of telepresence—even with regard to crime (Ferrell et al., 2015, p. 172; Stuart, 2020). They allow us to simultaneously exist in two different environments, both the physical, in which our body is positioned, and the digital, in which we also interact. Imaginatively, we might even talk about a third environment—the digitally represented scene and its context—to which an online discussion can be devoted. An illuminating case is the field of online sleuthing, which focuses on representing, dramatizing, and disentangling offline criminal activities and thereby—in and through interactional processes—digitally immersing people into often quite intense detective work (Burcar Alm et al., 2023). Here, the Internet and its online communities do not function as settings for criminal projects or forms of victimization, but as settings of reality constructions tied to social control. These communities do not, however, necessarily involve mob justice or crowdsourcing, but rather more subtle variants of informal, symbolic, and scrutinizing control, such as being highly vigilant, selective, and critical in the context of platform interactions.

This article delves into a Swedish research project on online sleuthing—Citizens as Crime Investigators—from an ethnomethodological perspective. It is guided by a specific research question: How do people engaged in debating and investigating offline crimes online differentiate their digital interactions? With the help of ethnographic data on online sleuthing on Flashback, an open Swedish online community, the article analyzes empirical instances in which the practices of making digital selections and distinctions were made meaningful and legitimate in this setting. The project's qualitative interviews proved particularly comprehensive and fruitful in this regard, since they provided the interviewees with an offline arena in which they could elaborate on their online practices, including their ways of managing content that they did not appreciate. The article focuses on posters’ sifting practices as they are described in interviews, and on their significance for online sleuthing. I analyze the ways in which online sleuths make their differentiating practices accountable with regard to their investigative efforts and interests. The aim is to show how these accounting procedures are integrated into posters’ socially crafted motivations for entering into and sustaining digital relations within a crime-investigation community.

The study is set against the background of the hate speech, misogyny, and racism that figure prominently in many online interactions (Atton, 2006; Blomberg & Stier, 2019; Campbell, 2006; Daly & Nichols, 2023; Ekman, 2018; Kreis, 2017; Loveluck, 2020; Williams et al., 2020), which is also true in relation to online sleuthing. The investigative efforts conducted in digital communities aimed at solving a crime case or identifying a suspect (Myles et al., 2020) take place in heated threads in which posters often encounter repeated attacks on immigrants—Muslims in particular (Törnberg & Törnberg, 2016), but also on liberal and left-wing politicians—and where the prevalent tone is harsh and masculine. “Indeed,” write Ferrell et al. (2015, pp. 172–173), “the ‘a-spatial’” nature of online communities “lends itself to ‘emotion dumping’ and other outpourings of personal self-expression that would never be tolerated in physical space.”

Since the article aims to specify the ethno-methods by which online sleuths deal with their online interactions and construct their community membership, it contributes to existent research by showing that the so-called “noise,” “shit-posting,” and the wide range of posters’ “means of self-expression” (Daly & Nichols, 2023, pp. 4–5; Nhan et al., 2017, pp. 346–347; Wikhamn et al., 2019, p. 63)—that is, the topically irrelevant posts that must be waded through—are not socially meaningless. On the contrary, they constitute a substantive part of the online sleuths’ membership construction. Adopting an approach that is in part similar to that used by Daly and Nichols (2023), the article applies “a shit-posting and trolling lens” through which online activity can be analyzed as culturally productive and telling. However, the article tries to reframe the seemingly nonsensical, hateful, or random utterances found in digital communities—the “emotion dumping” and “other outpourings” (Ferrell et al., 2015, pp. 172–173)—from being analytically meaningless to emically meaningful.

My analysis bridges the online–offline divide in several respects. First, it shows how ethno-methods of distinctions play a vital role when people engage online in discussing and representing offline crimes. Sometimes these distinctions are grounded in offline investigations, information gatherings, and interactions, or in performances within popular culture. Second, my analysis shows that the online representation of offline crimes is not simply disturbed by “shit-posting” and off-topic comments, but is also nurtured by them. Offline crimes are represented in messy ways, making the task of clarifying and straightening things out even more challenging. When posters “purify” the debate, they routinely refer to offline circumstances or actions, which are defined as objective and factual. Thus the posters themselves continuously bridge the online–offline divide and embed these transitions in their online activity. Third, my analysis attends to how the posters’ sifting practices online are made accountable in offline interviews, which means that the primary data set employed in this article is situated at the lived online–offline border.

Literature Review

Myles et al. (2020, p. 318) define online sleuthing as investigative practices undertaken by individuals who are not professional security providers. It can be carried out on various platforms—Reddit, Facebook, 4chan, etc.—and its forms and manifestations are diverse (Yardley et al., 2018). Internet users gather information about particular crimes, provide photos and police reports, ventilate rumors and observations, develop analyses and theories, and they sometimes “take the law into their hands” by means of punitive digital activity (Loveluck, 2020).

The moral aspects and the moral drama of the crime often take center stage. Readers have used crime news as a means of discussing (or implicitly relating to) moral dilemmas and moral sensibilities for decades (cf. Katz, 1987), but today's interactive consumption has widened and diversified the landscape considerably (Seltzer, 2007; Wagner-Pacifici, 1986). A crime case today is easily transformed into a shared story that the online audience can modify, expand, prolong, and cultivate to an unlimited extent. Online sleuthing occurs in this environment of digital crime news.

Previous research shows that user-generated platforms have changed people's consumption of crime news, from a largely one-way communication to a multi-focused one. Media content is not only remediated (Yardley et al., 2018) but also questioned and debunked on a regular basis. Today's posters can produce their own representations of crimes—as a citizen co-production (Chang et al., 2018)—and they can digitally assume all the relevant roles, as reporters and witnesses, detectives and police officers, prosecutors and retaliators, even though the mainstream media still serve as the essential fuel (Hannerz et al., 2022, p. 15).

One controversial case involved the 2013 Boston attacks in the United States, when Reddit users assembled and analyzed a vast number of pictures and videos from the event, which resulted in an erroneous accusation against racialized individuals (Myles et al., 2017, p. 318; Nhan et al., 2017; Pantumsinchai, 2018). The risks associated with digital vigilantism have sparked considerable interest among scholars. Shaming procedures, or investigative efforts aimed at identifying and exposing, doxing, discrediting, or humiliating a wrongdoer—as well as “organized leaking” for similar purposes (Loveluck, 2020)—represent perhaps the most frightening pose adopted by today's Internet users: the position of the vigilante, or mob justice. Citizens may be collectively offended by other citizens’ crimes and may coordinate their retaliation on mobile devices and social platforms, for instance via a “naming and shaming” form of exposure (Trottier, 2017).

The crowdsourcing of surveillance practices on digital media, as well as concomitant changes in the nature of policing and visibility due to today's global platforms (Trottier, 2012, 2013), serve as both a background to and a resource for these processes, so that one thing can be hard to separate from the other. Digital vigilantism takes place in the context of ordinary online communication, “the sharing of personal details, photos and videos, adding commentary, discussion and calls for action” (Trottier, 2017, p. 61). It does not represent an aberration from other digital media practices, but is instead “located on a continuum of forms of user-led policing and citizenship” (Trottier, 2017, p. 68). Loveluck (2020, p. 236) has argued that internet users may find it tempting to engage in online vigilantism, “and thus attempt to bypass or compete with institutional channels for law enforcement, uncovering of facts and establishment of justice.” Online vigilantism represents an informal but potentially powerful and increasingly accessible mode of social control (Loveluck, 2020, p. 236).

However, as Myles et al. (2016) have shown in their analysis of the so-called Reddit Bureau of Investigation, sleuthing posters may also distance themselves from “digilantes,” and form their identity on the basis of not being engaged in unofficial penal practices. For many posters it can suffice to collect observations, to speculate and guess, to suggest evidence, and to discuss how to draw conclusions on the basis of contributions from both the media and posters. In fact, Reddit posters engaged in crime cases establish and enforce their own participatory guidelines “against an anti-vigilante backdrop” (Myles et al., 2016, p. 334), particularly following the Boston events. This means that an antagonistic configuration between the police authority and retributive vigilantism contributes to the community's daily organization. Myles et al. (2017) found that it can be vital to demarcate against vigilantism and to signal to fellow posters that the platform's activities serve other purposes, specifically because vigilantism is based on the same kind of digital policing that these posters routinely practice. Their study revealed posters’ support for the police (and consequently collaboration with the authorities), but also an ambivalence towards the police, since the limitations of the police institution were often used to justify the legitimacy of discussing the cases on Reddit in the first place (Myles et al., 2020, p. 331).

Distinctions of this kind in the crime threads might, strictly speaking, be classified as “noise” or “general comments” by researchers (Nhan et al., 2017, pp. 346–347; Wikhamn et al., 2019, p. 63), since they do not seem to “belong” to the case discussions, but rather to discussions of the discussions. Still, they may nonetheless be of criminological interest. Myles et al. (2016, 2020), for instance, would not have found the antagonistic configuration in the Reddit community without having studied posts (or parts of posts) that did not directly address the cases. Similarly, Daly and Nichols's (2023) study of “shit-posting” among incels reveals how reprehensible or vile speech in online forums and discussions can be deeply meaningful and even justified, as long as it is viewed from the perspective of the involved field members.

Thus, scholars’ focus on either crowdsourcing (information gathering) or digital vigilantism (witch hunts) misses a lot of what is going on in these settings. As community members on various platforms post comments on crime cases, other posters respond not only by commenting on leads and hypotheses, suggested evidence, or suspected perpetrators, but also by commenting on how or why other posters comment. To engage in a crime discussion is to dive into long chains of digital interaction, of which only a relatively small part deals with the cases in literal terms. When Nhan et al. (2017, pp. 346–347) noted that the vast majority of participants in the Boston Marathon bombing threads in 2013 “simply used the forums as a means of self-expression,” they did surprisingly little with this observation. Still, posters interested in advancing the case at issue have to deal with this “irrelevant” flood of posts (whether or not they are racists), even though researchers may treat them as redundant. From an emic perspective, it seems unlikely that posts containing off-topic comments, exclamations, and meta-commentaries would not matter.

This means that there are good reasons to strengthen and join a broader and more culturally oriented field of criminological research beyond the two more specific approaches to online sleuthing in previous research: (1) the critical studies of digital mob justice, in which the punitive dimensions of these settings are highlighted, and (2) the more enthusiastic studies of digital crowdsourcing, which highlight posters’ collaborative efforts to—at least potentially—support formal justice (cf. Loveluck, 2020; Myles et al., 2016; Nhan et al., 2017; Trottier, 2014; Wikhamn et al., 2019). Although both these approaches are important, the online discussion of crime cases is a meaning-making process in its own right, with a rhythm and dynamic that is site-specific (Gubrium & Marvasti, 2023).

A digital setting for online sleuthing cannot be separated from social interactions, since interactivity forms the basis of the local concerns and interests. Local knowledge about the cases, for instance, is not a product of single posts but is accomplished in and through interactions, as is evidence and the local authority of posters in the threads (Wästerfors et al., 2023). Posters and lurkers assemble around collectively articulated mysteries or uncertainties that are supposed to be solved or clarified in interaction (Hannerz et al., 2022). They compete with one another to advance the discussion, but they also celebrate or simply recognize each other's posts—as silly or clever, pointless or significant, repetitions or breakthroughs, etc. (Wästerfors et al. 2023). A post in a Flashback thread rarely stands unopposed, but it is contextualized by responsive rhetoric, so that truth claims and other expressions can interchangeably be taken seriously or ridiculed (Blomberg & Stier, 2019).

Posters’ ways of making selections and distinctions belong to this social dynamic. They do not necessarily contribute to punitive frenzy, nor to information crowdsourcing; rather they serve as handy practices to deal with an abundance of posts within what cultural criminologists call “the experience of the Internet” (Ferrell et al., 2015, p. 171). Simultaneously these practices reproduce membership in the category “competent online sleuths,” with a morally “sound” distance to posters placed in other categories. As Trottier (2017, p. 67) has noted, lateral surveillance, through which posters monitor and control one another, is coupled to an identity as media savvy, so that posters continually filter out posts of allegedly low quality—and mainstream media reports of similarly low quality—in order to distill or sift out what is considered to be the most accurate or productive online image of the offline crime at issue.

As I will show in the analysis, offline experiences can be drawn upon in this setting, so that the online community is (to some extent) disciplined by members’ transitions between the online and offline worlds. Internet users’ telepresence, as Ferrell et al. (2015, p. 172) put it, functions as a resource in this respect.

Analytic Frame

The analytic frame of this article is ethnomethodological. This involves studying the taken-for-granted methods that “members” of a given social context routinely use to gain an understanding of their context (Rennstam & Wästerfors, 2018, p. 48). Ethnomethodology is the study of the ordinary methods through which people “conduct their practical affairs” (Lynch, 1993, p. 5), including the accountability of these affairs (Lynch, 1993, p. 14). This means that I have been guided by an approach that directs a special focus on online ethno-methods in the data and how they are accounted for, that is, how they are made observable-and-reportable (Lynch, 1993, p. 14) in interview discourse.

Within this frame, Baker's (1983) “second look” approach to qualitative interviews has proved fruitful. Baker argues that attending to how interviewees talk, including how the interaction unfolds between interviewer and interviewee, may complement and help to refine a more traditional content analysis. If research interviews are viewed as sites for the presentation of membership of the category around which the conversation revolves, we may advance our description of what can be said to occur in interviews “beyond the extraction of information, views, and so on” (Baker, 1983, p. 517; Baker, 2002).

Such an approach to interviews is equivalent to an ethnomethodological analysis (Rennstam & Wästerfors, 2018, pp. 48–49). Membership is “done,” cultural resources are mobilized, and various site-specific practices are accounted for. The interview can be interpreted as an arena for such reality-reproducing activities, thus helping to describe the “life” from which social renderings originate (Lynch, 1993, p. 38). Baker (2002, p. 777) writes that ethnomethodologists are concerned with studying the resources and methods with which members of settings “go about making sense of the settings” (Baker, 2002, p. 778; see also Garfinkel, 1967/1999; Liberman, 2013). This entails treating interview data as accounts rather than reports and looking for membership categorization work rather than mere descriptions of people.

Ethnomethodological analyses of interviews have been advocated by Silverman (1989) as a way of avoiding the romantic impulse in our “interview society,” where interview excerpts are often treated as direct and raw experiences (Silverman, 2007). By attending to sequence, moral work, and accountability, analysts can better grasp what is going on in an interview conversation and understand it in a more well-substantiated way. This approach is close to Holstein and Gubrium's notion of active interviewing (1997, p. 127), in which respondents’ utterances “are considered for the ways that they construct aspects of reality in collaboration with the interviewer.” “The more active vision of the interview process,” Holstein (2023, p. 224) notes, “lets us imagine the interview subject (as well as the interviewer) in terms of far greater narrative agency and scope.”

This means that I aim to not only sort out the content of the interviewed Flashback users’ utterances, but to analyze how they account for this content and, in doing so, how they categorize themselves as competent members of an online community. In the data collected for the article, this was mainly done offline, since the interview conversations did not take place openly on the Flashback platform. Even though some of the interviews were conducted via the Flashback messaging system, the talk was not performed “on stage,” with other posters as a reviewing audience. When posters make online practices accountable outside the community's threads (in the interviews), they set in motion locally shared and taken-for-granted notions about “appropriate” practices within these threads.

In this respect, the interviewees’ conversations bridge the online–offline divide. Their competence is articulated offline, but is intended to be practiced online. It is in and through the interviews that they underline the importance of being observant, selective, and picky, as well as the value of being locally experienced and cognizant.

Material and Methods

Qualitative interviews constitute the main empirical material for this article. In total, we have interviewed 34 people, all closely related to Flashback: posters and moderators, lurkers (i.e., those who do not contribute explicitly, but only read), and a few podcasters and crime reporters. The inclusion criteria were that the interviewees should be willing to describe and exemplify their engagement in and attitudes to the Flashback subforum on criminal cases. The interviewees were of different ages, comprised both women and men, and they reported different political orientations, occupations, and educational backgrounds. We came into contact with them during our fieldwork in the online community. Often they alter between the lurker and poster identities, even though some described themselves as lurkers only. All interviews were conducted in Swedish (and only the excerpts used in this article have been translated into English).

The purpose of the interviews was to capture how Flashbackers tell stories about their cases and online engagement, thereby complementing our observations of digital interactions. By contacting and interviewing online sleuths in this context, we aimed to understand what motivated their commitment and how they understood and explained the setting. Practices, networks, resources, and routines were at the center of the interviews. The interview guide began with questions about their personal background and what brought them to the forum, and included themes such as the advantages and disadvantages of Flashback, the goals of online sleuthing, different positions and roles within the setting, local rules, and the significance of anonymity. We also inquired about their views on the police and the legal system, as well as traditional media, and asked them to provide examples and show us specific threads in which they had participated extensively. The interviews were loosely structured, allowing the interviewees to bring up other topics, as well as to digress and elaborate on what they found interesting.

The qualitative interviewing was integrated into our digital ethnography and tailored in light of our initial findings. Let me briefly elaborate on Flashback as a digital setting to more precisely situate the interview part of the project.

Flashback is one of Sweden's largest online forums, with 1.175 million members who—in a similar way to Reddit members—discuss not only crimes but any topic under the sun (Blomberg & Stier, 2019, p. 3). One advantage of our project is the fact that the order of the posts is retained, which means that Flashback displays long chains of utterances in the order in which they first appeared (even though moderators sometimes make minor changes), so posts do not move around based on the likes of others. Posters quote one another in order to add things, make specific comments, criticize and express scorn, celebrate and praise, etc., but since this is done “within” the new post at issue, it does not affect the order within the threads.

This means that we were able to follow threads and study them in detail to get a closer look at the interaction. We started to expose the interactional origin of investigative practices (Author et al., 2023) and how the appeal of participating is constituted (Hannerz et al., 2022), and we found an ethnographic approach fruitful, an approach that can help us discern the situated use of categories. Rather than saying “this is a real breakthrough” in the discussion of a given crime case, or “this is just a distraction,” we followed the interactions to see the direction in which they took the posters and thus avoided imposing exogenous meanings (Emerson et al., 1995). We then started to interview posters, either via email or messenger systems (Flashback has its own) or by phone, video-links, or face-to-face, and could initiate and encourage quite detailed discussions thanks to our observations. A former master's student of criminology was recruited to the project, Johanna Oellig, who was able to develop many contacts and conduct interviews.

As our work progressed, and as the interview transcripts were analyzed, it became clear that interviewees labeled and described their online practices as if they were aiming at some form of sophistication or refinement. They often accounted for their interests in Flashback in terms of wanting to “know more”—more than the mainstream media reported about the crimes—and moving closer to this goal entailed a search for quite distinctive information. In parallel, Flashback Forever, a Swedish podcast produced by the journalists and comedians Emma Knyckare, Ina Lundström, and Mia Gruffman-Cruse, started to become both popular and widely cited in the Swedish media; eventually, the trio also arranged live stage shows. Flashback Forever is centered around a selection of threads from Flashback (although the whole forum, not merely the subgroup on crime cases), so that particular threads are discussed and quoted in detail in a joking and sarcastic manner. A striking component of the style of this podcast involves making selections and distinctions. In the ocean of utterances, the journalists and comedians try to find the most entertaining or funny posts, and their internal connections, and then “serve” a selection of this selection to an audience who share their lighthearted attitude towards Flashback but who do not necessarily have the patience to scroll through flashback posts for days or even weeks.

Over the course of our project, Flashback became even more popularized as a cultural object in Sweden, and the meanings ascribed to and practices employed within the community were exposed and stylized for entertainment purposes. This strengthened the use of our approach to further investigate how distinctions are made accountable by users of this platform.

There are, of course, many other things that occur on Flashback (cf. Hammarlin et al., 2023). The focus in this article only highlights one specific aspect. However, in trying to approximate an ethnographic ideal, all three of the project's researchers have become relatively immersed in the setting and have taken part in the same activities as the lurkers and posters, which made it easier to “develop a sense of what participants do, how this feels, and what its consequences might be for the social formations that result” (Hine, 2019, p. 183).

Although ethnographers’ perspectives are partial, “constrained by the particular paths” they choose, as Hine (2019, p. 183) points out, it seems wise to acknowledge that digital ethnography deals with phenomena dispersed across different media and different settings. Flashback Forever is a different arena than Flashback as such, and posters sometimes refer to offline investigations, comparisons, and “reality checks” as they, too, carve out (or post) partial perspectives on the crime narratives at issue. This article represents only one way of exploring this continuous and multilayered eclecticism.

In what follows, I will structure the analysis around a set of ethnomethodological terms: practices (or ethno-methods), accounts, accountability, setting, and categorized membership (Garfinkel, 1967/1999; Liberman, 2013; Lynch, 1993).

Accounting for a Sifting Practice

On Making Distinctions Among the Posts

A striking feature of the interview conversations was that making distinctions among the Flashback posts is treated as a tiresome but necessary and rewarding practice. This online setting was not portrayed as designed or “produced” but as anarchic and disordered. People may enter and write whatever they feel for, so the threads are full of “whatever.” “There's an extreme amount of racism,” said one interviewee, and “also a great deal of hate against women.” Rape cases are often commented on in terms of victim-blaming, and immigrants and especially Muslims are quickly accused of many of the crimes under discussion. “That kind of extreme stuff,” to quote the same interviewee, and “this is destroying the whole Flashback thread, really.”

Another poster talked about “a lot of right-wing shouting,” and another about “racist nonsense.” One interviewee said: “I don’t like the way every fucking thread sideslips into immigration politics; that's the most tiresome thing about Flashback.” Another referred to Flashback as “a drain of racism,” and many sighed over trolls who post inflammatory and off-topic messages in order to provoke and manipulate.

This means that the interviewees continually provided a background and rationale for the need to pick “good pieces” in an ocean full of “shit” or mostly shit—or at least an ocean of irrelevant stuff—to borrow the interviewees’ words. Their online sleuthing was constructed as requiring sensitivity or taste for the useful posts that advanced the case and that made a particular thread—the one the poster was attending to—substantively different from what they see on other sites, such as mainstream media. “You want to come further than the tabloids have,” as one interviewed poster put it. Posts that did not indicate any substantial bridge to the offline world where the crime is situated were dismissed and complained about.

Let me present a longer excerpt in which one interviewee, here called Emil, who was interviewed face-to-face, elaborated on the need to “sift” (in Swedish: sålla) on Flashback. I will comment on successive segments of the quote in order to show in detail how Emil made his practice accountable.

Emil: You know, people are such idiots too; you know you get angry sometimes and people write stuff and theories that like, how can you write like that [interviewer: uhum], how can you believe that this is correct.

First, Emil portrayed many other posters as “idiots” and provocatively stupid, since they post “stuff and theories” with no offline bearing and that no sensible person could believe. The interviewer provided support. Second, Emil elaborated further on these posters’ “fabrications” and dramatized the backing they receive in the threads:

You know, it's just fabrications and so on. Somebody writes a fabrication about something, like: “It must be this kind of person (who committed the crime) since it occurred like this.” And then another one, who responds: “Yeah it sounds, it sounds, sounds completely, I think you’re on the right track” [interviewer: uhum].

Emil's depiction of social acclamation online suggests some kind of pressure cooker for fabrications, sustained by “idiots.” Another idiot shows up and agrees, making it worse and worse. When Emil continued, it made sense that he portrayed himself as being left to watch the process, irritated and fed up. This was not what the originator of the thread wanted, he argued: You get so angry “cause people contaminate these threads [interviewer: uhum].”

You know like—you understand that somebody has started it (the thread) and actually wants to know something and then you’ll have perhaps two or three posts like “yeah, really exciting, I remember this, this” and then it takes three seconds and it freaks out into something like this, a completely irrelevant long comment about something completely different, often immigration, and then these threads are like drawn out. Because people don’t put up with watching this shit. I just get mad when I think about it. When you could use it (the Flashback thread) to do so many good things, like [interviewer: okay]. You need to sift a lot.

Thus, when Emil and the interviewer established their conclusion—the necessity to “sift a lot” on Flashback—it is carefully prepared by and embedded in a detailed image of the digital context: “idiots” mutually supporting one another, and a range of fabrications resulting in prolonged discursive contamination. A crowdsourcing ideal is indicated as an unfulfilled contrast (“You could use it to do so many good things…”) and the thread originator's well-meaning purpose is similarly defined as cognitive, not emotional or speculative (“…actually wants to know something…”). Emil dramatized the two-or-three initial responses in a thread as sensible—before the thread freaks out—by signifying consideration and contemplation (“I remember this, this”), as a contrast to subsequent irrelevancies.

Interestingly, when Emil described the rapid corruption of a thread (“three seconds…” and “often immigration”) he distinguished between two categories of “people” (i.e., posters): (I) those who contaminate the threads, and (II) those who don’t put up with “watching this shit.” This subtle insertion of complexity—there are members of the community who dislike the interaction, just as Emil does, thus belonging to category II—saves the accountability of Emil's membership. Without it, Emil would have a hard time justifying his online presence. Moreover, the very word “sift” implies, obviously, that there must be something valuable, at least somewhere. Words like “fabrication,” “theories,” and the like implicitly define the valuable posts as those with an offline grounding.

When the interview continued, Emil had a chance to indicate his competence in relation to the abundance of idiotic fabrications:

Interviewer: How easy is it to decide these, as you say, more idiotic (posts), that don’t—

Emil:—It's hard [interviewer: yeah]. It's hard. But you get—well how do you decide? You get, if you think that there is one interesting sentence within that bullshit then I guess you’ll have to check it up as far as you can, like. It's just so time consuming [interviewer: uhum]. Eh, but that's what you have to do then. Ehm, it's also a bit difficult of course since even if you, if you perceive somebody as idiotic in their way of writing about things, they might be right somewhere [interviewer: uhum]. That's what makes it so troublesome being a police officer, I guess, that you get a lot of lunatics on your hands, so that you have to sort out the lunatics from those who have something to say like [interviewer: uhum]. And then the lunatics might be the ones who have something to say. Yeah, it's hard.

“One interesting sentence within that bullshit…” and “It's hard”—Emil's concluding allegory about a police officer in a similar predicament (surrounded by lunatics) emphasizes that the position is very demanding. Remaining in this online community would not be accountable if it were not for that “one sentence,” or the single lunatic who surprisingly does have something substantial to say. Since these things do exist, as Emil described them, his membership can still be accounted for, as long as he is prepared to put a lot of time and effort into it.

Besides the type of distinction described by Emil, other versions were also accounted for in our data. Interviewees might for instance identify particular posters as irrelevant, and consequently pass over their posts systematically, thereby reducing the relevant thread in one blow and making it more digestible. Anna, a very engaged lurker, had identified a poster who was particularly anti-Muslim by clicking on his nickname and checking up on all his previous posts: “The only thing he does is … talk about how much he hates Muslims.” By checking a poster's posting history, “you learn what to consider as serious and what not,” as Erik, another interviewee, put it.

Others identified a cluster of posters in the same way, or a team supporting one another in a given thread, and similarly learned to skip their posts. Yet another practice involved learning to identify the distracting strands in a thread; to understand where the discussion is diverging, define certain topical directions as pointless, and then just browse over long passages. To get at the interesting stuff one sometimes has to “skip like a thousand pages,” said one interviewee, and try to identify where the case starts to move, “and then you start reading [more thoroughly] from there.” This is the practice that Emil also related to, although he was more occupied with its opening stages, his emotions, and his accounting procedure.

An inverted practice was also described by the interviewees: pinpointing posters who repeatedly make a substantial contribution to the thread by clearly pointing out something happening offline, and then structuring one's reading and participation almost exclusively around them. Some interviewees linked this practice to the messenger system on Flashback, and accounted for it in terms of getting to know one another a bit better through private messages, which then simplified one's navigation of the threads. When you “talk” privately—not offline but off-platform—with some members “you can find a trust” in them, said one interviewee.

Some interviewees also indicated that grammar or style may expose certain posters as unserious and uninformed, which made it easier to immediately dismiss their utterances. As Juan said: “I don’t perceive these (posters) to have a particularly high education … considering how they write.” Another group of posters who could rightly be dismissed were those who were new to and ignorant of the context, entering a thread “after like 400 pages” and asking “ah, does anyone have an idea of who they think it is (who had committed the crime),” to quote My, who spoke with sarcastic animation. Posters might also reveal their ignorance through the way they wrote (for instance, asking dumb questions), making it clear that they had not taken the trouble to process the thread's substantive content as a whole. Posters who behave lazily do not attract readers or commentators.

A related practice involved watching others doing the sorting. One interviewee spoke about a self-cleaning process on Flashback, that activates recurrent disciplinary replies in the threads: “Now you don’t bring any new information…” and “Do you know anything or…” He implied the use of a “wait and see” approach: after a while, something substantial would probably emerge from a wild and distracting discussion. “Many (posters and lurkers) are there to get information, after all.” “Information,” “to know,” and “to bring”—expressions like these were members’ terms for offline facts.

My point is that all these practices are made accountable in the interviews in both moral and investigative terms, and in this way, the online conversations are defined as (at least partly) immoral and impractical, although—paradoxically and simultaneously—as a site for exclusive findings, as long as you identify ways to digest these. The digital situation is described as requiring a trained gaze and highly selective treatment. The accounts provided vary between inspections of the scene, its actors, their acts, and presumed intentions, so identifying a common denominator is not the precise focus; this is instead rather the act of inspecting itself. According to the interviewees, it would be naïve to enter Flashback and start discussing a crime without employing distinguishing practices.

Offline investigations posted online were often defined as appreciated reports. The interviewees gladly lingered on posts that describe somebody's observations on a crime scene, various explorations of the surroundings, interactions with neighbors or witnesses, or when a photo or document is attached—in short whenever somebody brings allegedly offline evidence to a crime thread. Posters described, for instance, how they had walked a certain distance to figure out how long it takes, or how they had talked with a house owner to check whether a missing person had been passing by, or simply what the crime scene at issue looked like at the moment. One interviewee said that she seeks posters who know “local conditions,” like “no, on that pavement, there is no street lighting” or “I just cycled past an hour ago and it was entrance 4B that was sealed off by the police.”

Even though the quality of such information may be questioned in subsequent online interactions (Author et al., 2023), the practice of inspecting posts very much involves evaluating their offline base. The community's capacity to produce telepresence (Ferrell et al., 2015, p. 172)—that is, to figuratively move the members to the crime site—was celebrated. Posters who make an effort to examine things offline—neighborhoods or persons related to the crimes, distances, traffic situations, shops, restaurants, pubs, etc.—were distinguished as highly esteemed members. The practice of looking for and zooming in on their posts was easily made accountable by the interviewees.

Exactly how a sensible post should be differentiated from a senseless and irrelevant one could, however, also be accounted for almost wordlessly, in terms of a quick glance, as if “one just knows” more or less immediately. These instances in our data can be seen as the interviewees’ ways of indicating that their membership is relatively well-established, but that verbalizing this is another matter. Sometimes our interviews proved to be sites for the Flashback members to succinctly show and reproduce (rather than explicate) implicit practices in this respect. You recognize the substance and “analytic ability” when you see it, as the interviewee My argued:

Interviewer: What is it that makes a post interesting for you?

My: Ehm but I think you can see quite quickly after all, which ones have, you know which writers have sort of a little more of an analytic ability [Interviewer: uhum] and which are just (irrelevant) pundits and thinkers, like [Interviewer: uhum]. I think you can tell that quite quickly, though.

On Making Distinctions in the Overall Media Landscape

Thus, being able to select, skim through, and process a lot of data, and cultivate a keen sense of which posts are substantially linked to the offline world and consequently worth spending time on, were skills and sensibilities that were underlined by the interviewees when they accounted for their Flashback practices.

Overlapping these accounts, there were also accounts that distinguished Flashback in relation to other sites. Accounts of this type were typically centered on the control practices associated with Flashbacks versus the coarse-grained pictures of the offline world produced by mainstream media. They are dependent on the accounts exemplified above—since without using a selective approach one cannot enjoy the threads—but the point of departure for these accounts is rather to cast doubt on or discredit the alternatives.

First, the mainstream media were defined as superficial in their crime reporting. The interviewees argued that Flashback often provides a unique depth and penetration in the cases at issue. Second, the mainstream media were defined as politically correct and morally blocked, whereas Flashback serves as a means of getting at “what cannot be said or written in other contexts,” as one interviewee put it. People write “in a human way,” said another interviewee, “there are no formalities in it.” Third, the mainstream media might be depicted as emotionally empty, whereas Flashback offers something else: engagement, a sense of urgency, real-time processes, and an explicit sympathy for the crime victims. Still, the mainstream media functioned as an important source and mirror for the Flashback users, so their engagement, in one way or another, acknowledged or recognized these media.

Let me quote W, a female poster in her 60s who was interviewed via the Flashback messaging system, in her response to the interviewer's questions about how she related to other platforms, including mainstream media. I will once again comment separately on successive segments of the account in order to tease out the components in W's account of Flashback as relatively outstanding.

W began by pointing out that even though Flashback is the central source she uses in relation to the crime cases that interest her, other posters on Flashback often “inform about what is reported (by the media) in precisely their parts of the country.” She referred to local media reports not normally reaching her:

W: In that way you can (perhaps) get a more multifaceted picture of the topic—to partake of newspaper articles/TV-segments that others knew about but that I didn’t myself, is an important part of my engagement in Flashback, I think.

This media intake, though, is processed in and through Flashback, W emphasized, since the posters who referred to local media reports also engaged in commenting on them in their posts, as W also does.

It is of course good if you can get an abundance of information via the established channels (newspaper articles, tv-segments, etc.) that you can talk over in a discussion forum such as Flashback: you can discuss how the tv-segments were perceived, you can clarify for instance legal aspects and the authorities’ possibilities/limitations when it comes to informing the curious public.

Here, W started to list critical points regarding the news reports, and she indicated her and her fellow Flashback users’ ability to see through these and pinpoint what is hidden or being avoided. The posters’ control efforts were deemed as stronger and more precise than the media. At the time of the interview, W's engagement was focused on a murder case in Bjärred in the south of Sweden in 2018, where a whole family had been found dead in their house. The two children and the mother had been murdered, and the father had committed suicide. So what W was implying in the excerpts I have quoted was not necessarily about trusting local media, but about being able to scrutinize and decipher their reports. Statements from the police and the social services on this case were criticized intensely in the thread at issue—being regarded as overly brief, uninformative, euphemistic, etc.

W continued:

Then a forum like Flashback also relies on gossip and sensationalism. There is always a hope that some private person with more insight into a recent case will disclose some of the things that were not included in the newspaper articles and TV segments—something that would help us get an answer to the question: “What actually happened???”

Words like “gossip” and “sensationalism” mark a distance to Flashback, as if W is looking upon the forum from the outside, but the question at the end of the quote restores Flashback's reputation, and W is back inside. Her expression “…some of the things that were not included…” presumes that the mainstream media coverage is problematically incomplete, and her question presumes that the media are not able to fully explain the crime. As we get further and further into her account in the interview, Flashback is given a more informative and analytic profile. The “insight” she is expecting is clearly about local and informal reports from the offline world of crime.

W: You might well say that Flashback's ambition is to “get a bit further” in the spread of information than what newspapers, TV and radio do: to create a greater understanding, to illuminate what is not included in the established and formal reports.

W's account, then, lands in an urge to investigate oneself, and to do so on Flashback. The mainstream media serves as a point of departure, but as an enigmatic one, full of unanswered questions. W returned to the case in Bjärred in 2018 and the fact that the children who had been killed, two daughters diagnosed with an unusual illness who were no longer attending school, were surrounded by mysterious brevity in the media:

A very tight media commentary like “both girls (in Bjärred) had long been getting their education at home because of illness” raises an infinite number of questions among some of us: what does the law say about pupils’ possibilities of getting education at home? Who is responsible for granting and organizing it? On what grounds is it granted? Are both the student health services and the treating doctor involved in a collaboration? For how long a period is home teaching granted each time? How often is it followed up (…)? Do the children themselves participate in the follow-ups? How is home teaching done in practice? How much does a home teaching teacher understand about a home-taught child's total life situation (…) and so on, and so on.

The fact that Flashback allows for an “infinite number of questions” and a range of investigative entries—symbolized by W's list of precise questions above—is contrasted with “a very tight media commentary.” In W's account, posters walk in and out of mainstream media reports, but they never settle for them. Rather, the media's “tight” formats beg more detailed questions and further inspection—they fuel the debate. Compared to the distinctions made between posts (described in the previous section of this article), the posters are now described as being oriented towards other arenas rather than other posters, and other arenas beyond Flashback are defined as inferior. Flashback needs them but nonetheless outcompetes them. W's phrase “among some of us” is also significant—it seemed to be a way for her to indicate that not all viewers or readers of mainstream media respond like Flashbackers. Some are content with what they get. W, though, did not belong to these. She categorized herself as belonging to the more curious and more critical members of society. This is similar to what Trottier (2017, p. 67) has termed lateral surveillance, which is used by online members to control one another, here coupled with the identity of being media savvy.

Other accounts in our data emphasized related Flashback qualities. The forum's anonymity was often mentioned in the interviews, since it was defined as unlocking posters’ private knowledge and observations offline, and thereby as giving the threads a fresh telepresence far greater than that journalists succeed in producing. The private content of many posts was appreciated, at least as long as it could be substantively linked to the offline locations and circumstances under discussion, as was the threads’ almost limitless volume. A Flashback thread does not have to end; there is no editor-in-chief supervising how much space is devoted to the case, and there is no other news that may interrupt. The posters can remain “within” a single case for as long as they want. My (another poster, quoted above) spoke about “nerding out” in the cases she liked, and she celebrated Flashback for giving her this opportunity. Others in her off-line surroundings knew about her interest, she said, and they might find it “a bit creepy,” but nobody complained online. It was the details of the crimes that fascinated her, she said, and after a while, she was “personally touched.”

My: And those cases (…) then it almost gets like you cannot drop it and hardly go to bed at night cause you like “I have to see what people post,” and that you get into a murder (case) and that “we (the posters) like have to solve this” [interviewer: uhum].

Invoking and animating this nerdy frenzy serves as a valuable account in this setting. It unites a range of qualities that the lurkers and posters identified as being distinctive of Flashback's up-side: the never-ending threads, the obsessive interest, the collective-getting-to-the-bottom-of-things-atmosphere, not obstructed by mainstream media etiquette or other considerations.

On Recognizing the Gratifying and Delectable

Finally, a distinguishing practice was also made accountable by the interviewees when they talked about special findings in the crime discussions on Flashback, findings they saw as particularly enjoyable or gratifying, even delectable. When we attend to such instances in the interview data, we seem to have come full circle in relation to racism, misogyny, and other off-topic elements, since the interviewees now portrayed this setting as being quite refined and pertinent.

Interviewees could attach strong approval and endorsement to certain threads, posts, and posters, and in doing so they accounted for their online membership in and through this type of recommendation. There are “goodies” to be enjoyed on Flashback, the interviewees argued, and these were defined as unique and exclusive, different from the information on other sites, and emotionally satisfying for crime nerds. These were the pieces that made people shiver or laugh, or kept them awake all night searching for more. The talk about these aspects was embedded in the characteristics recounted above: a selective search for discursive pearls in an ocean full of “shit,” and a strong conviction that Flashback, after all, provides something that is unattainable elsewhere. One interviewee used the verb “panning” to describe his practice in the Flashback crime discussions (in Swedish: vaska), as if he was engaged in separating particles of gold from other particles—mud and dirt.

Lory, a middle-aged poster interviewed via the messaging system, was among those interested in “the psychology” underlying the crimes, which often meant the personal background and relationships of the perpetrator. But she embedded this interest in a range of other interests and, in a way, contextualized her goodies by referring to other entries that she indeed defined as interesting, but perhaps not “the thing”:

Interviewer: What is it that decides whether a case is interesting enough for you to engage?

Lory: The latter is an incredibly difficult question. I actually don’t know WHAT makes you engage. It can be a mixture. There are people in the thread who live close to a victim who can tell a little. Some of that can make the case interesting. The mystique perhaps. In the Tova case (a murder in 2017)—a young girl, a young boy. She was found in a barrow in the water. The media's interest makes some of it; there you get things that can lead you to root out some parts. The police information that tickles your fancy a bit. When you have “got to know” the suspect then you can either feel sympathy for him/her or dislike them.

This “mixture” that Lory reflected upon undoubtedly serves as an account of her engagement, but her tone was somewhat lukewarm and analytical, as if she was presenting the generally accountable motives of this online setting—witnesses’ observations, “the mystique,” media, emotional attachments, etc.—rather than her personal ones. But then Lory made use of a blank line in the message conversation, and added:

Lory: It can happen that a youth kills the mother. Then the thought immediately appears: what has the mother done to him/her during their upbringing? And THAT I want to know—and there comes the interest for THAT particular case.

By separating this paragraph in the message conversation, and by using capital letters as emphasis, Lory seemed to be identifying what she liked above all—her own particularly desirable “pearls,” so to speak, in the Flashback threads. She exemplified and reconnected to the idea of “the underlying psychology” that she referred to in other places during the interview. She portrayed the Flashback threads as exclusive in this respect, since they can assemble information about “THAT”—from witnesses, relatives, neighbors, classmates, or other actors offline. Lory thus indicated a category for herself that is more specific than the general one in this setting. She was not merely a competent Flashback poster, but a “psychologically” oriented one, where psychology stands for what allegedly lies “behind” the crime: the essential and ultimate cause out there, offline.

Zed, another poster, recounted his involvement in a thread discussing an animal abuser, where a letter from the unknown and hunted perpetrator was being carefully interpreted. During our interview, he talked about how Lex, another poster, guided him to understand the details of the letter. Later, it was revealed that Lex was, in fact, the author and perpetrator himself. Zed conducted offline investigations in the area where this perpetrator committed his crimes: “I walked around … to get a feeling of the place” and to “see how much one could go unnoticed.” He was even instructed by Lex to enter a house since, as Lex claimed, “there was blood to photograph” (though he never entered the house). The most intriguing aspect of Zed's account, however, lay in the online interaction with Lex and the growing suspicions among fellow posters that he might be the actual offender. Posters began exchanging private messages to verify their thoughts and eventually exposed Lex. The practices surrounding this case were regarded as a gem of an example of online sleuthing.

When the interviewer asked Anna, quoted above, if there was a thread that “really got you extra interested,” she started talking about the Wilma case from 2019, about a 17-year-old girl who had disappeared and was later found to have been murdered by her ex-boyfriend in their apartment (he had hidden the body). Anna said that she had become “very well informed” about the Wilma case because of the Flashback thread about the case, since even though the police investigation had stopped for a while, the thread did not. Anna had a little “girl gang” offline—together with two other Flashback-followers—and they had met several times to discuss the Wilma case.

Anna: It has turned out to be a real conversational topic between me and these two girls that I meet; we have sat and just “ah, but! (so terrible) and then moved on “how can you do this, if this is correct how can you,” like that.

Later in the interview, Anna spoke about the advantages of Flashback in terms of the way the “newspapers … hide away a lot of what's important for me.” Wilma, again, served as an example for Anna, and the fact that when her head had been found, the papers first reported that “a body part” was found, concealing this specific—and very telling—piece of information:

They (the newspapers) write like sometimes that they—Wilma has been found, a body part, “she is dead” [interviewer: okay]. What body part? How can they know she's dead? How do you know, have they found a finger? What is it? So you get completely just “but my God,” whereas Flashback knows which body part it is [interviewer: uhum]. (…) If you’re interested in things like that, it's like—you get a lot from Flashback.

The fact that Flashback identified what had been obscured by the papers served as Anna's example of the platform's supremacy. This piece of information was defined as highly attractive and irresistible. As Anna spoke about it (and portrayed herself), she could not abstain from trying to get this information. The way in which Anna spoke about her “girl gang,” which was occupied with Flashback posts and met offline, signaled that they had great fun together and that they helped one another to find the best practice online, uncovering the best pieces. Sometimes her friends “are quicker than I am”:

Anna: They [this girl gang] are also “in” very often [on Flashback] and sometimes it can be like even that they have read before me, “cause they have found stuff” and then they can say “God, you need to go in and read about this.”

“They have found stuff …”—this gourmet attitude, I would suggest, comes very close to Flashback Forever, the popular pod and show in Sweden that I mentioned in the introduction, in which each reporter chooses one thread on Flashback or a theme on the platform from which they extract the most strange or funny parts to quote and joke about. Flashback Forever uses the same logic as Anna was referring to: somebody reads a lot and then picks out and quotes the absolute highlights. The difference is that Flashback Forever covers not only crime cases but all topics on Flashback, and the emotions on display when it comes to Flashback users such as Anna and Lory are, of course, not only joyful.

Conclusion

In this article, I have analyzed how a set of recurring distinctions are promoted, exemplified, differentiated, and defended in a particular context: research interviews with online sleuths in the subgroup devoted to crime cases on the Swedish platform Flashback. Under the umbrella term “making distinctions” we may place a range of practices that Flashbackers routinely account for, such as identifying particular posters as contributing, avoiding whole strands of a thread, looking for grammar and style to identify the meaningful posts, trying to reveal other posters’ ignorance, watching and learning from how others do the sorting and being receptive to others’ recommendations, as well as doubting and discrediting traditional media and portraying them as incomplete, emotionally empty and politically correct.

I argue that researchers need to take seriously people's online participation in crime-related issues, depict their practices ethnographically, and analyze them carefully, for instance as ethno-methods for making crimes comprehensible and their crucial facts intersubjectively “true.” It is through accountable sifting (and similar distinguishing practices) that community members consider themselves capable of achieving the community's celebrated goal for online investigative practices: a restructured online report of a crime that occurred offline, a report defined as being far more specific, vivid, accurate and genuine than others, and superior to those found in the mainstream media.

Without making distinctions among the posts, one can easily drown in irrelevant and morally appalling content, and without making distinctions in the media landscape overall, one would not learn to appreciate or legitimize what a setting like Flashback has to offer. Distinguishing particularly well-appreciated parts of the online discussions—the “goodies” or the exclusively and delicately consumed “pearls”—is intimately linked to one's active presence and engagement in the discussion threads. This allows online sleuths to reproduce a relatively handy and tasteful interpretation of their practices and membership of Flashback, despite the platform's rich display of seemingly nonsensical expressions as well as racism, misogyny, hate, and attacks on immigrants (cf. Atton, 2006; Blomberg & Stier, 2019; Campbell, 2006; Daly & Nichols, 2023; Ekman, 2018; Kreis, 2017; Loveluck, 2020; Törnberg & Törnberg, 2016; Williams et al., 2020).

The interviews can be analyzed as offline arenas in which online practices are made observable-and-reportable, in other words as demonstrations of their accountability (Baker, 1983, 2002; Garfinkel, 1967/1999; Lynch, 1993, p. 14). Whereas previous research has tended to either find penalizing or information-gathering practices in a given online sleuthing context (cf. Loveluck, 2020; Myles et al., 2016; Nhan et al., 2017; Trottier, 2014; Wikhamn et al., 2019), my approach reveals more mundane and fundamental processes. A variety of distinguishing practices are part and parcel of such a context, and when they are made accountable, the context and its membership categorizations are reproduced. The accounting procedures can be seen as constitutive features of the settings they are addressing (Garfinkel, 1967/1999, p. 9).

Offline investigations, interactions, and information gatherings—in combination with taken-for-granted notions about how to behave in and relate to this online setting—serve as highly esteemed resources for online sleuths. To cross the online-offline border and embed a broad variety of allegedly empirical reports into the discussion online is not only counted as impressive and informative, but it also energizes and simplifies the sifting processes. The whole online community is disciplined by members’ reports of this kind—along with the unfinalized evaluations of them—thereby integrating their telepresence into the very heart of their practical affairs. Much of the discussion would fade away without observations from the crime scene, photos, and documents, geographical details and distances, excerpts from local news media, or various rumors and gossip from the locals. When interviewed posters talked about specific findings that came to clarify offline circumstances online, there was often a notable elation or ecstasy in the interviews. Individuals are not attracted to this online community without a wish to exercise telepresence and to immerse themselves not only in the digital discussion as such but also, symbolically, in the offline world of crimes.

Thus, online–offline transitions are very much alive in this setting, implicitly or explicitly. Offline inspections and circumstances play a vital role in helping posters find their “pearls” and consequently in improving their control efforts, both in relation to the offline crime at issue and in relation to other posters. Those who never show any insight whatsoever—personal and “direct,” or quoted and deduced—into the criminal world “out there” can easily be discredited and dismissed. At the same time, the redundant platform “noise” is still deeply meaningful to the community members and their identity, since the “shit” somehow makes the work demanding, tangible, and eventually worthwhile—to be present here digitally, to dig and sift and try to find the goodies.