Accomplishing Reality Media: The Affective Lure of Online Crime Discussions

Abstract

Drawing from interviews with posters and an analysis of a dozen discussion threads on the Swedish online discussion forum Flashback, this article sets out to investigate the dramatization of crime news from the point of view of the participants themselves. Analyzing both the online discussions and the articulated motivations and activities of the posters, this article focuses on how participants in these crime discussion threads come together around an epistemic quest for the truth, but also how discussions are ritualized so as to give rise to a collective effervescence and unity when the epistemic drama is perceived to have been resolved, and the truth is revealed to the wider public. Accordingly, this article seeks to remedy a gap in the previous research on online crime discussions by focusing less on the investigative aspects of such work – for example, how participants collaborate to solve crimes – and more on the symbolic and affective aspects of the dramatization of these discussions of crime. What is at the forefront is thus how participants make sense of their engagement and experience of these online discussions, rather than the actual criminal case. To refer to this as an epistemic drama is to highlight how activities, ideals and identities are ordered and sequenced through a ritualization of collective online participation, but also how it involves the establishment of (1) a particular predicament, (2) a collective objective, and (3) ultimately some sort of perceived emotional climax related to solving this predicament through the collective objective.

Introduction

In her analysis of the dramatization of the idea of the spy in Cold-War-era Sweden, Marie Cronqvist (2004: 116) describes how, in the 1950s, the metaphor of ‘the public detective’ (detektiven allmänheten) came to represent a last frontier against the perceived threat of untrustworthy citizens. Drawing on popular detective novels, where protagonists were often ordinary citizens with an eye for the odd or suspicious, the idea of the public detective, as it came to be repeated in media articles, pamphlets, and speeches, was that the good citizen is always watchful and ready to report anything of interest to the authorities. What there was to suspect was rather vague, and Cronqvist (2004: 120) describes how the idea of the public detective became conspiratorial to the point of paranoia. The public was to be conscious about, and report, even ordinary behavior, as you could never know what, and who, was involved in the malicious activities of the enemy.

Drawing on the analogy of the public detective, this article investigates the dramatization of crime news on Flashback, Sweden’s largest online forum. Our focus is on how participants in online discussions of crime set out on quests to unravel truths that are defined as hitherto concealed from the public. We consider, in particular, how participants make sense of their engagement in, and experience of, these online discussions rather than the actual criminal case, and how they spend hours, at times daily, under pseudonyms, with people whom they rarely have contact with outside this forum. Accordingly, this article seeks to remedy a gap in previous research on online crime discussions by focusing less on the investigative aspects – such as how participants collaborate to solve crimes – and more on the symbolic and affective aspects of the dramatization of discussions of crime. How does participation in these online crime discussions become meaningful and attractive to participants?

Hence, we seek to expand recent findings within research on subcultures and social movements, of how online settings can provide tangible emotional energy and collective excitation, pointing to the idea that online congregation and activities in this particular case should not be seen merely as intermediaries but as necessary elements in establishing social and symbolic cohesion. Drawing on qualitative interviews with participants and an analysis of a dozen discussion threads, we will show how a collective epistemic quest for the truth is dramatized and how this, in turn, orders and sequences online activities, ideals, and identities. We argue that the dramatization of these discussions is based on the establishment of distrust in the traditional media as the primary predicament: the media cannot be trusted, and it has lost touch both with reality and the interests of readers. Online participants construct their participation and commitment as the opposite: the forum is conceived of as characterized by its plurality in terms of participants, competences, and viewpoints, and marked by freedom of speech, but also by a commitment to finding the truth and being firmly rooted in the ‘real’ world. This establishes an epistemic drama in which participants position themselves as the guarantors of truth and justice, working together to uncover what is allegedly hidden by the media. When this dramatization is successful, in the sense that participation is dense and intensified, it establishes a virtual space for the formation and reformation of cultural activities and identities. This reality media is realized, legitimized, and consecrated through collective effervescence.

Setting, Data, and Methods

The main setting for this article is Flashback, Sweden’s largest online forum, with almost 1.3 million members (Wahlström and Törnberg, 2021). Flashback began in 2000 with its roots in a punk fanzine from the 1980s, and it still carries some of that initial edge and unfiltered discussion. It is an open forum in several ways, first of all in that anything can be discussed, be it politics, relationships, crime, diy-repair work, gardening, gaming, philosophy, cooking, and so on (Malmqvist, 2015). Second, it is open in the sense that its main principle is freedom of speech and a lack of censorship. Posts are moderated, but primarily on the basis of whether they are off topic or break any internal rules (Törnberg and Törnberg, 2016). Third, it is open in the sense of being available for anyone to read and participate in the discussion. Registration is all that is necessary to take part in the discussion or to interact privately with other participants. Registration is free and open to anyone, as long as they claim to be over 18 years of age (Flashback, 2021).

Our focus has been exclusively on the part of the forum where crime is being discussed. This subforum consists of some 40,000 threads covering all sorts of crime, including minor felonies as well as white-collar crimes, even though the most popular threads, with tens of thousands of posts, concerns crimes extensively covered by media, and thus most often violent crimes. We have worked with a combination of interview data, online ethnography, and a thematic analysis of discussion threads. We started by analyzing four discussion threads, covering homicides and missing persons cases, that the participants whom we initially contacted recommended as giving a sense of the variety of crime discussions on Flashback. These initial discussion threads were coded using Atlas T.I. based on what participants accomplished through their posts, thus focusing on activities rather than individual posters. Based on this initial analysis, we constructed an interview guide and began contacting participants whose activities on the forum fit these activities. Given the polyphonic nature of the forum, as well as the variety of activities and individuals, potential interviewees were approached partly based on their differences. We did not want to cover only the most established and committed posters, but also the newcomers, the trolls, and casual observers (Hannerz and Tutenges, 2021). In total, we interviewed 30 informants, ranging from active users to casual observers, of different ages, genders, political orientations, occupations, and educational backgrounds, but also journalists, and podcasters using these forums.

The interviews centered on what attracts participants to the forum, how they conceive their role in the discussions, as well as their relations to other participants. The focus was on their own stories and activities, and the emotional lure of these. While we had worked with hidden populations and hard-to-reach groups before, reaching participants involved in the discussion forum that is the focus of this article proved to be a challenge due to their anonymity, or rather pseudonymity (Creswell, 2021: 73). Contacting participants was only possible through the forum. This was time-consuming, as trust and rapport had to be built through the forum itself: in order to contact forum participants through its messaging service we had to become certified members, that is, made at least 50 posts. The format of the forum restricts changing your username, and posts can only be deleted directly after they are posted. This had the consequence that, in order to contact participants, we had to reflect actively on how we presented ourselves, not only through our initial contacts, but also in the posts we were required to make to be granted the ability to contact people on the site. In the end this was solved by mainly making posts in other subforums, such as discussing things like literature, horror movies, or how to best dry mushrooms. In the cases we posted in the crime subforum this referred to general questions and remarks, such as ‘has that been verified?’, mimicking routine questions others asked. Further, whereas some kind of chain-referral sample is often used for hard-to-reach groups, in this case every new participant we reached was an empirical dead-end: they did not know any other participants other than through interactions in discussions. This meant that access had to be constructed again and again as we gathered our data.

Still, this approach also had its advantages. Whereas some interviewees agreed to be interviewed face-to-face, or through phone or a digital equivalent, most preferred to remain under pseudonym and were interviewed through direct messages. ¹ To some extent this reverses the control of information that often marks qualitative research: while our identities and information about our research were communicated and known to those contacted, they could either ignore our request and thus remain largely unknown to us, or if agreeing to interact with us, they could choose what and how much personal contact details were to be shared with us (Hannerz, 2016). In contacting participants, we initially presented ourselves with our names and a short summary of the project. If they expressed interest, the full information sheet of the project was sent out. The interviews were coded and analyzed, again using Atlas T.I.

Concurrently with the interviews, we conducted online ethnography, observing and taking notes on particular threads, or in some cases, particular activities, such the presentation of the self and relations with the media. Along with the analysis of the interviews, this led to an expansion of the initial typology of activities, focusing the analysis on general patterns across interviews, discussion threads, and online observations. Unlike some previous research on online discussion groups (see Nhan et al., 2017; Wikhamn et al., 2019), we have not excluded what might be referred to as ‘noise,’ that is, posts that were not related to the ongoing investigation. Instead, we have included activities such as wild speculation, trolling, racist or misogynist remarks, and arguments between participants, as an important aspect of how they make sense of these discussions and how threads become attractive.

We further analyzed 10 more discussion threads so as to further explore the initial findings from the interviews and ethnographic work. A few of these were chosen on the basis of recommendations of users, most, however, because of the activities and topics that they covered. Hence, recurring themes in the transcribed interviews worked to refine our focus when observing the threads, but it also makes it possible for us to relate themes in the interviews to more general activities in different threads.

As for the ethnographic part, given that these threads involve sometimes hundreds of different users moving in and out, informed consent has not been possible (Sveningsson Elm, 2009). Still, our focus has not been on single individuals but rather on patterned activities. More so, these discussions are public and accessible to anyone, and participants reminded each other, often with acclaim, that their discussions were observed by not just the general public, but also the media and the police. The project, as well as the methodological approach has been approved by the Lund University Ethics Review Board (Dnr: 2019-01020). All posts and excerpts quoted in this analysis are translated from Swedish.

Discussing Crime News

The continuous presence of crime news in the media since the 19th century is a well-covered fact that is futile to reiterate. The interesting question, as Jack Katz noted in the late 1980s, is what drives people’s interest in crime news, given that this news is repeated, with similar storylines, on a daily basis. Katz’s (1987) point is that crime news becomes a resource whereby individuals can dramatize and negotiate general moral dilemmas and sensibilities that they face in their everyday lives. Mark Seltzer (2007) expands this moral dimension and relates the public interest in crime to a culture of commiseration, a public gathering through referred pain and belief. Seltzer (2007: 37) argues that there is increased public interest in crime as a project: in investigating the investigation and focusing on its re-creation and representation. Accordingly, what is discussed is not so much the actual crime, but rather a continuous storyline, the crime drama, that is at the center. Following Wagner-Pacifici (1986: 5), drama is here used to point to a narrative struggle that sets the competing interpretations of protagonists against those of the antagonists, specifying central roles and characteristics internal to the drama, and marginalizing that which is anomalous through such a reading.

The consumption of crime is thus dramatized, as is the reporting of crime (Cronqvist, 2004). Its representation follows and reiterates established storylines and structures, symbolically extending what is already known to that which is unfamiliar (see Geertz, 1973: 211). Still, as Yardley et al. (2018) argue, the advent of the internet, and especially social media, has shifted the investigation of investigation from a largely one-way communication, where media content is first and foremost consumed (albeit actively), to user-generated platforms where distinctions between consumers and producers are increasingly blurred, and media content is increasingly remediated (Yardley et al., 2017). Audiences can thus produce their own representations that mirror or counter that of the traditional media. This facilitates an investigation of the investigation, turning the participants into active ‘meaning makers,’ in the sense that their ‘activities are in constant dialogue with – and reflective of – other social phenomena’ (Yardley et al., 2018: 86).

In previous research on online crime discussion, the focus has, first and foremost, been on the networked and interactive aspects of such activities, of participants coming together, drawing upon their differences in knowledge and resources. This collective participation in discussing crime online is referred to as a ‘human flesh search engine’ (Gao and Stanyer, 2014), crowdsourced policing online (Huey et al., 2012; Nhan et al., 2017), cyber crowdsourcing (Chang and Poon, 2017), citizen co-production (Chang et al., 2018), web-sleuthing (Yardley et al., 2018), or online detective work (Wikhamn et al., 2019). What these have in common is that they describe the active investigation of a particular case, whereby participants gather information, photos, articles, police reports, and other insights, either spontaneously or through calls for assistance (see Huey et al., 2012: 83). Moreover, the activities and motivations differ, from investigating and reporting findings to the police, to gathering rumors so as to ‘dox’ suspects in vigilante attacks – i.e. reveal their personal information so as to publicly shame them (Creswell, 2021: 104). Still, regardless of whether we talk about vigilante activities or of helping the law enforcement agencies, media reports are what trigger participants’ interest in, and motivation for, participating (Gao and Stanyer, 2014; Huey et al., 2012). Further, the activity within these discussions revolves around remediation, of sharing media content and discussing it (Elsrud et al., 2016; Nhan et al., 2017).

This brings us back to Katz’s idea of crime news as a resource, as well as the affective and moral aspect of these online crime discussions. Although the potential of online detective work in helping law enforcement agencies is certainly interesting (Chang and Poon, 2017; Nhan et al., 2017), it has also been repeatedly noted that helping the police to crack a case happens only rarely, and in fact web-sleuthing often does a lot of harm to the work of criminal justice personnel (Pantumsinchai, 2018; Yardley et al., 2018). The question remains: What makes these online discussions of crime attractive to participants?

Pantumsinchai (2018: 764) notes how mass media and web-sleuthing, far from being opposed, are in an ‘amplificatory relationship.’ Yardley et al. (2018) remark on the participatory aspect of web-sleuthing, the blurring of fact and fiction, of becoming immersed in a drama but also anticipating the happy ending or closure of a detective series or documentary in which justice is served at the end. These are central concerns for our study of how discussions of crime are dramatized so as to create collective identities, closure and effervescence, as well as the role of the mainstream media in this process.

Theorizing Online Identity Work

In her work on online networks and emotional energy, Patricia Maloney (2013) argues that online forums can enable a congregation of like-minded individuals based on mental rather than physical proximity. Paul DiMaggio et al. (2018) point to how online interactions can produce tangible emotional energy that creates tangible social cohesion. Similarly, Philip K. Creswell (2021), in his work on Anonymous, stresses how affective loyalties between participants establishes and maintains a sense of collective identity, both in terms of being entrained into a collective, and of establishing and realizing an allegiance to the collective. Thus, online congregation and activities are not just an intermediary but a necessary element in providing a space that hitherto could not be realized due to obstacles that prevent participants from physically gathering, such as social disapproval and stigma, as well as geographical distance (see Williams and Copes, 2005). Online forums make it possible to perform identities and enact scripts immediately and continuously, and from anywhere, something that would not be possible physically to the same extent, given the rarity of such homophilic groups (Maloney, 2013: 106; Creswell, 2021: 177 f).

The instantaneous nature of online discussions makes it possible for participants to react to, share and discuss information that moves them, collectively and in real time. While co-presence, in Collins’ (2004: 34 f) sense – the immediate and physical attunement of, and to, others – is not possible, recent research has pointed to how co-presence online is established through excitation and a shared rhythm as the online interaction intensifies (DiMaggio et al., 2018; Wahlström and Törnberg, 2021). Other studies on deviant online groups (see Creswell, 2021; Maratea, 2011) strengthen this claim, that in the absence of the possibility to physically meet with others with the same interests, online forums constitute a vital space for setting rules, boundaries to the outside, and moral unity, and for establishing rituals through which collective effervescence and collective identities can be realized. Hence, collective effervescence here refers to how the participants present in this online space attune to one another in terms of intensified mutual activities and emotional states, with a heightened intersubjectivity as their consequence (Tutenges, 2023: 6).

Similarly, Holt et al. (2010) argue that the internet has not only increased the possibilities for individuals to form and pursue new associations by expanding the range of possible interactions, in so doing it has also increased the power of the individual to decide how, when, and whether they want to affiliate with others. Accordingly, online spaces make attachment and participation deeply situational and increasingly volatile. Participants can, at different times, remain passive ‘lurkers’ or feel impelled to actively participate, and can thus drop in and out of discussions. This creates an opportunity for people to coalesce with others with the same interests instantly and anonymously, forming and re-forming new collective identities. While this might only lead to opportunistic and short-lived engagement, there is an invitational edge, a factor of excitement, to the everyday online activity (Goldsmith and Brewer, 2015). This is a form of play that is both enabled by and developed through the mobility, anonymity, and distance that the technology offers.

The combination of these factors: everyday familiarity with technology, the instantaneous and anonymous aspects of online participation, and the obstacles to physical co-presence, provides a way for us to trace the lure of online discussions of crime: how online forums become a potential arena for collective identity, how they can establish shared objectives and rituals, and how this in turn establishes a boundary to the outside and, simultaneously, a perceived unity through intensified emotional energy. Crime news thus initiates a drama in which the participants come to play the leading role.

Distrusting Mainstream Media

The participants we interviewed for this project differ in terms of age, gender, education, political orientation, and how they use the forum. Still, all share and articulate an interest in what we will refer to as an epistemic drama. They are engaged in a search for objective and underlying truth, digging deeper and finding out more, but also approaching and getting closer to ‘the direct’ and ‘the genuine’, so as to gain knowledge of what has actually happened.

This stress on the epistemic is not unique to Flashback. Penn Pantumsinchai (2018) observes that the collaborative aspect of crime discussions online centers on discerning the truth, while Seltzer (2007) notes how perceived proximity to the case, the discovery of new information or the naming of a suspect, is part of the attraction of true crime. The interesting aspect is how this search for truth is articulated and dramatized by participants and within discussion threads and, more importantly, what the truth is defined against.

In the previous research on online detective work, the main antagonists are either the criminals – whom the authorities lack the resources or competence to effectively thwart – or the authorities themselves, for promoting nepotism and corruption (Chang and Poon, 2017; Chang et al., 2018; Gao and Stanyer, 2014). Though both of these are present in our data, we find that a recurrent argument is the opposition to mainstream news media, in both interviews and in discussion threads. The mainstream media cannot be trusted and it hides the truth from the public:

I mean, I have no confidence in mainstream media, I think that there are underlying, like, motives that they wanna pursue, and they keep things in the dark, I mean it is what it is. It’s a bit sad, maybe, in one way, that many of those right-wingers, or Nazi-trolls on Flashback, that they are right. [The media] re-pixelate images of offenders so that you are not able to identify their ethnic origins. They have even white-pixelated some so that they appear as whites, so that people would believe that it is. I mean to me that’s not relevant, but many times it does prove [the right wing] correct, [media] are just so bad at concealing their intentions. And that just adds fuel to the flames to those who distrust mainstream media, I understand that this might not be your main point in this research, but but. But, I mean they feed into another. [. . .] I do not have any trust in [the mainstream media’s] reports. And that is partly due to what I have read on Flashback and partly because I know of many articles that I have read in that kind of media and I know that that is not correct. I have had friends who have been the cause for headlines and multiple spreads and I have read those articles and like ‘this is not correct, this is not true.’ I mean, then everything else in that newspaper is probably just as biased and wrong. (Interview 1)

This quotation summarizes how the distrust argument about mainstream media is established within the threads we observed: (a) ‘mainstream media is unable to tell the truth,’ (b) ‘mainstream media is biased due to its political agendas,’ and (c) ‘mainstream media is outright lying’. The first of these refers to a professional flaw. The media cannot retrieve the truth as journalists are sloppy, witless, uninformed, too eager to chase clicks, and so on. As the foregoing excerpt suggests, participants draw from their own experiences, of ‘knowing’ that the mainstream media misreports. In the discussion threads we have followed, this is also demonstrated by listing all the times the mainstream media got things wrong in relation to the particular investigation, such as misquoting witnesses, mixing up dates, among other errors.

It also partly relates to the ethical rules followed by the Swedish press, whereby the names and identities of both the suspect and the victim are to be protected as far as possible prior to a conviction, unless the case is of general interest to the public, for example a terrorist attack or political assassination. Thus, in the vast majority of cases we have followed, only partial information about the victim and suspect was given in the media, such as a pixelated photo and very general details about age and gender. This perceived lack of information in professional news coverage is at the center in all of the discussion threads that we have analyzed. The media is criticized for not going public with the information they obviously have. Media ethics are rarely perceived as a legitimate excuse in the interviews or threads we have observed. Instead, and, similarly to how it is phrased by the interviewee in the foregoing extract, the concealment of the truth is often fused with an ideological bias. Hence, the mainstream media is believed to ‘keep the people in the dark’ not simply because it is witless or limited, but because it wishes to portray an alternative ‘truth’: it is consciously lying. As the quotation shows, a predominant pattern in the ‘biased’ media is perceived to be that of actively concealing the ethnic background of the suspect – ‘white pixelating’ suspects – or simply not mentioning the skin color or country of origin. This has the consequence that regardless of what the media reported, it may be used to validate the initial postulate of an ideological bias, as the media simply cannot be trusted.

The racist undertone should not be downplayed. As noted by, for example, Wahlström et al. (2021: 3298 f) in their analysis of online social interactions within a Swedish far-right group, the distrust in mainstream media, and allegations that they cover up the truth, is an important part of racist discourse, and was at times addressed as such during our interviews as well. More so, the first parts of the discussion threads we have analyzed are often full of racist remarks, when the identity of the victim and suspect is still unknown to the forum. This has also been extensively covered in the previous research on Flashback (Törnberg and Törnberg, 2016; Wahlström and Törnberg, 2021), what matters here is rather how such racist discourse is linked up with a broader discussion of distrust. Both the professional and the ideological aspects of the distrust of the media are presented by participants as a democratic problem: the lack of truthful information, they argued, skewed the ability of the general public to discuss causes of and solutions to crime. Hence, to argue that a distrust of, and distinction from, the mainstream media is limited to the far right would not be correct. Rather, it is present in our data regardless of the political views of participants. In the excerpt, the alleged agenda of seeking to portray crimes as non-racialized is even criticized for adding fuel to the racism fire. It is the general pattern of distrust in the mainstream media that is crucial here, as it establishes not only a boundary to the outside, but also the collective objective of an epistemic drama. Since the mainstream media cannot be trusted, and will not disclose what really happened, participants take on the task in its place.

Establishing the Epistemic Drama

In order to understand the role the mainstream media plays in the epistemic drama we have to address a vital paradox in how crime discussions on Flashback are structured. On the one hand, in both interviews and in discussion threads, participants often ground their motivation for participation in a distrust of mainstream media. On the other hand, and in line with previous research, participants describe how their interest in these particular crimes was triggered by the media in the first place (see Wahlström and Törnberg, 2021). This paradox is captured in the rules of the crime subforum. These stipulate that not only should the initial post and title be unique, informative, and initiate a discussion, it should also include a reference to the source, most often a news article. For example:

A woman in [X-town] is missing since yesterday. According to reports to Metro [a newspaper], jealousy is the cause, and it is reported under the heading of possible abduction. It is unclear as to who the woman is, but she is reportedly in her 40s and living in northeastern [X-town]. Does anyone know anything more [link to the article in the newspaper mentioned]?

Following from Katz (1987), the last sentence is vital to how the epistemic drama is established, and how the news of the crime becomes a resource in initiating a quest to supersede the very source of the news and to dig deeper: ‘Does anyone know anything more?’ The news of the missing woman becomes a resource, setting in motion a dramatization of a collective search for the truth behind the news, a truth that the mainstream media outlet that originally reported on the topic is seen as incapable of providing. In our interviews, participants describe how Flashback becomes an alternative media channel: that when they get a push notification of a crime, or hear about it on the news, they reach for their phones and keyboards to follow it on the forum.

The call to the collective to supply more information draws directly from the establishment of the predicament of a media that cannot be trusted. In most of the threads we have analyzed, the main discussion is concerned with uncovering information that is already known to the media and authorities: Who is the victim? Who is the suspect? Where did it happen? What is the relationship between those involved? And so on. This involves searching for pictures of suggested suspects to match these with the pixelated images in the press and validate their identity, or by contacting the courts to retrieve the names of the apprehended person and pursuing contacts and local gossip. The harder the task and the more time it takes, the more the drama intensifies. The construction of the mainstream media thus establishes and validates the outer boundaries and objectives of the group. Further, this enhances the invitational edge of Flashback. Whereas the mainstream media can only skim the surface of a case – whether due to journalistic ethics, particular agendas, or incompetence – Flashback is seen as being able to delve into the facts that the headlines hint at but cannot deliver. If the mainstream media is in for penny, Flashback is in for a pound. We see this when one of the interviewees comments on what makes Flashback more attractive than other ‘real crime’ outlets:

IP: [. . .] On Flashback you are often given an opportunity so as to get a fuller picture, and there will be things that the media won’t report, be it the personal history or the exact place of an activity. Media has their guidelines surrounding what to publish and even if the tabloids are seeking to construct clickbaits through how they formulate themselves you won’t get more from there then you would from the morning papers. Flashback is messier, more erroneous, dirtier, ethically problematic, but often also so much more substantial and information rich, for good and for bad. On Flashback I am not doomed to merely being a passive consumer of information. (Interview 6)

Thus, even in those cases where the mainstream media is not thought to be outright lying, or protecting a particular agenda, it is nevertheless used as the primary contrast against which to define the activities on Flashback. Here, the interviewee describes his distrust in the media in terms that parallel the distinction between the thin versus the thick, the shallow versus the in-depth, and the passive consumer versus the active prosumer (Yardley et al., 2018). The distinction between the forum and the mainstream media as analogous to depth over surface, and to the active over the passive, is a dominant theme in the interviewee’s description of why he is drawn to Flashback: it provides a truer image, the reality behind the headlines, and all the things that the mainstream media cannot or will not write about. Still, as in the foregoing excerpt, Flashback’s strengths, as articulated by the participants, also include less positive aspects that the previous research has pointed to: the unordered, the biased, vigilantism, and so on. The messiness highlighted in the quotation includes pride in the lack of censorship in Flashback as a whole, not just in the crime subforum. Flashback is conceived of as a temple to free speech and, by extension, a source of truth. The combined resources of the collective, together with the form of the discussion, construct this forum as epistemically superior to the mainstream media.

Nevertheless, as the excerpt also shows, participants do recognize the ethical problems of this messiness, which can often mean that people unrelated to the case get their personal data outed: names, social media accounts, addresses, phone numbers and potentially prior criminal records. In some cases, this leads to outright harassment, often referred to as ‘faildoxing’ (Creswell, 2021: 97). But even interviewees who are critical of such actions agree that the anonymity, the multitude of participants, and the lack of rules or censorship constitute the main resources of Flashback. Similar remarks are repeatedly posted in all the discussion threads we have analyzed: that the wide speculation, plurality of leads, and information on everything – from the hobbies of the suspect and which school the victims’ kids attend, to the taxed income of both families and their friends on Facebook – matters in seeking to unravel the mysteries the collective has identified. Much like the idea of the public detective as always suspicious and critically assessing what is happening, information itself is dramatized (Cronqvist, 2004). Even when posters find that a previous claim or the doxing of someone was due to a misunderstanding, in some cases even due to outright lies by other posters, the format of the discussion itself is rarely questioned. As with the public detective, what may prove to be useful information is vague and unknown and therefore all is of value, as long as it adds to the discussion.

This is the heart of the epistemic drama of these discussions: the predicament of the mainstream media’s inability and unwillingness to reveal the truth about what has really happened. Everything needs to be uncovered. Only then can the collective objective of the group be realized, and the information that the media has concealed be revealed. It is through open, unregulated, and combined knowledge that the anonymous crowd will collectively reveal the truth, and thus achieve justice.

Establishing Commitment

As noted earlier, participants stress that anonymity, tolerance for differing opinions, and the various experiences and knowledge of participants, enable active engagement with a particular issue or case and lead to the uncovering of more detailed information than is otherwise available: Who is the victim? Who is the suspect? Where and why did it happen? What is the relationship between those involved? And so on. Part of this is the directness of Flashback, not just in terms of participants being able to express themselves freely and instantly, but also in the perception of knowledge as unmediated and genuine, delivered straight from the horse’s mouth. In the discussion threads we have analyzed, posters make numerous calls to witnesses, relatives, friends, or people with local knowledge to step forward and add to the discussion. This call is frequently answered by people claiming inside information of the case. This interactivity, as well as the perceived unmediated nature of the information, increases the edge of the forum. The curiosity aroused by the mainstream media – which it can itself never satisfy – can thus be pursued and quenched through Flashback. This constitutes the epistemic drama.

Nevertheless, the relation of the discussions to the media is intriguing. Group solidarity is made possible through the establishment of a shared delineation with the outside – the depth and veracity of Flashback against the shallowness and dishonesty of the mainstream media – and through the perception of a shared objective. The coalescing of the multitude is supposed to discover and reveal the truth. But, as noted by Nhan et al. (2017), the discussion reiterates and summarizes discussions in the media. Part of the ‘investigating’ described by our interviewees is about delivering breaking news, either from the media or from witnesses and the friends and family of the victim. As part of the epistemic drama, Flashback participants re-enact, to a degree, the very role of the journalist and the imagined virtual newsroom that they oppose, calling out to each other ‘do we have any information on that?’ ‘there must someone in the thread that has local knowledge,’ or demanding people who live nearby visit the scene of the crime and collect more information. There are other examples of this, such as live reporting from a particular scene, outside a suspect’s home, or from a search party, whereby this re-enactment of a collective and live newsroom is accomplished (see Goffman, 1986: 550), or by exposing the social media accounts of those involved and investigating hobbies and relationships. Further the constructed proximity to the drama, with relatives, friends, and witnesses appearing in the thread, makes it possible for individual posters to interview them, either publicly, in the thread, or privately, through direct messages and then reporting back to the general discussion. Through this epistemic drama, participants enact different roles: they are prosecutors, arguing what perpetrators should be sentenced to and why; judges and jury, doxing suspects and calling for action; defense lawyers, attempting to discredit witnesses and relatives; and, of course, detectives, hacking social media accounts, setting up honey-traps, and so on. Hence, rather than being an alternative to the media as participants claim, forum discussions are saturated by mediatized tropes from traditional news. Participants draw on reports in the traditional news to validate their speculation, and its tropes inform the activities they engage in (such as being at the scene or interviewing witnesses).

The Reality Media Experience

To speak about these online crime discussions as dramas implies there has to be some kind of closure, a moment when the quest of exposing the truth is seen as either resolved or not (Cronqvist, 2004). Our use of the concept of drama also adds to previous research on online crime discussions, as the focus is not so much on the investigation and on solving the case, but on establishing a predicament and subsequent collective work to resolve that predicament. Yardley et al. (2018) here point to how participants in online crime discussions become immersed in collective anticipation of some kind of closure, similar to those in detective series or true crime documentaries. This is obvious in our interviews: though some participants express a wish to solve a particular case, they see this as an idealized, and unlikely, consequence. Rather, they describe how they are drawn to Flashback for the intensity and emotional energy. When asked what drives him to continue to participate in these discussions, one interviewee notes, ‘To retrieve names, motive, and to get the whole story. That would be the goal [. . .] I’m part of it, and watch it get solved in front of my eyes’ (Interview 2).

Maloney (2013) describes how participants establish group unity and collective effervescence by gathering around a common objective and being able to instantaneously and continuously establish an intensification of shared feelings through this interaction. Both in the interviews and in the discussion threads, participants tell of such experiences when the collective efforts of Flashback have managed to unravel the truth, and how this involves an intensification of both participants and emotions:

You can follow it in real time, yeah. That’s not something I count on, but when it happens, and it does happen in some threads. That people, like let’s say that there are suspects in a particular case, and then people can write ‘yeah but he lives here now, I saw him at [the grocery store] this morning’ ‘they just arrested him’. Like you can follow things in real time on Flashback. Of course, media do report live at times, but it’s not the same thing, this feels more like sitting with the journalist in their living room, that you, in some way. That there are no formalities to it, that there is no article with some angle or tone, but it is people who write in a way you can relate to [mänskligt]. I might have been able to get that through Aftonbladet’s you know live-stream. But it feels more entertaining and more authentic to be sitting you know update, [press] F5 on Flashback ‘has anything new happened, has anything new happened.’ But it is rare that these things happen [. . .] that it is, it is kind of like being part of it. It is like a movie, but it is happening in real life and you are there, you’re almost a part of it, you can even choose to make a post and almost become part of the move. It is interactive, almost. (Interview 5)

Yardley et al.’s (2017) discussion of new media as blurring the line between consumer and producer is demonstrated here, as is the muddling of fact and fiction. The inability of mainstream media to report on what is really happening is extended temporally. Flashback is not just direct in the sense of establishing perceived proximity to the crime, through witnesses and people with local knowledge, but also in terms of its interactivity and liveness: it is something that can be followed in ‘real time.’ Similarly, the epistemic drama is expanded to include not just the result, but the experience of taking part in the discussion and contributing to the collective objective, which creates a heightened proximity to others who are doing the same. The reference to ‘F5’ captures this intensification and density of participation: when closure is perceived to be imminent, the posts increase to the point that one constantly has to refresh the page by pressing the F5 key, so as not to miss out on new information. In their discussion on online emotional energy, DiMaggio et al. (2018: 99) refer to this as ‘excitation,’ whereby the rhythm of the interaction is intensified as well as the response of the crowd, of being where the action is. As Durkheim (1995: 217) notes, such an intensification involves the transition from the sparse to the dense so as to build up the ‘heat’ of the crowd. In the discussion thread, this moment of collective effervescence constitutes the final distinction from the mainstream media: whereas one might be able to follow the climax of an investigation through a live-feed on a news site, it does not make one feel like one was there.

The epistemic drama in Flashback establishes a reality media experience, and it is this collective effervescence that participants seek to realize. Hence, the uncertainty of the drama, of taking on difficult tasks that require time and commitment, and thus are deemed hard or nearly impossible, and the intensification that follows of solving these tasks, establish the foundation for this climax. In our data, this refers to, for example, finding a missing link between the victim and the suspect, geographically pinpointing the movements of the perpetrator or victim, or finding a photo that ties the suspect to a particular group. While the interest is triggered through what the media is saying, the drama is initiated through what media is not saying, and it is solved by retrieving information that is already known to the police and the media. Yet, to the participants, the climax of identifying the suspect comes to represent a revealing of the truth: it establishes a closure, a happy ending where justice is finally served, thanks to the collective objective. Consequently, collective effervescence is achieved through a shared and intense excitement and powerful feeling of connectedness, that is then materialized into symbols and tropes that provide the participants with an increased sense of purpose (Tutenges, 2023). In the observed threads this is celebrated through congratulating each other, cheering with emojis, and praise for the efforts of others. The epistemic drama is then perceived as having been reconciled.

Interviewees describe such affective experiences as ‘becoming a co-actor or at least an onlooker within a novel,’ and say that immersion in the drama means being part of a revelation that is ‘hidden and is gradually exposed.’ Others stress the realness of the event, that the story becomes ‘for real,’ concerns ‘real people,’ and is composed by ‘real people.’ Indeed, in the excerpt just given, the Swedish term for this style of writing is mänskligt, ‘human.’ Accordingly, the experience is superior to passively consuming something. The entire experience of the anonymous mass struggling to resolve the drama and reveal the truth continuously brings an edge to the experience: you are there and are part of the event, yet no one knows how the drama will end and what the outcome will be.

Bolter et al. (2021) suggest that the term ‘reality media’ describes the consumption of media through virtual reality and augmented reality, and that it offers a new means, alongside print media and television, of perceiving the world. The latter part of this definition is crucial: it relates the perception of the world to the affective aspects of co-presence in the sense of being ‘there’ where the truth is revealed. Seltzer (2007: 38) comes close to such a reading in his discussion on true crime as playing with the boundary of fact and fiction, in how the everyday normal becomes something extraordinary and unthinkable. Similarly, Cronqvist (2004) argues that the drama of Cold War spies in Sweden involved blurring fact and fiction to the point that the real is presented as more inconceivable than the fictional. Thus, our interviewee describes this reality media experience as a film that is happening in real life, and where you are part of that film. Another example of this excitation refers to the frenzy of the perceived climax described earlier, of having to continuously update the page as hundreds of new posts are made within minutes. This is especially so when news breaks about an arrest in a high-profile case, and forum participants set out to uncover ‘the truth’ about the suspect by comparing photos, summarizing news reports, and detailing local gossip.

Conclusion

In this article, we have sought to remedy a gap in previous research on online crime discussions by adding a cultural sociological lens stressing the symbolic and affective aspects rather than the investigative results. We have pointed to how participants, though differing in activity, age, commitment, and political orientation, come together through the construction of an epistemic drama that establishes: (a) a particular predicament, (b) a collective objective, and ultimately, (c) an emotional climax related to the attempt to solve this predicament through the collective objective. It is through this drama, its density and intensity, that participants come together, and attune their activities and emotions to one another so as to reach agreement (Durkheim, 1995: 232).

We have shown how an established distrust of the media, although varying in degree, creates not only a necessary boundary with the outside, but also a common focus and activity, that strengthens co-presence and collective striving (Collins, 2004). We have pointed to the trope of the public detective, where participation is presented as the last frontier of truth and freedom of speech, so as to legitimize the sharing of information and doxing of people deemed to be associated with the case. Flashback posters are engaged in a form of boundary work against the witless and untrustworthy that fuses the fictional and factual and unifies participants around the collective objective of standing up for the epistemic quest.

The role of the mainstream media is crucial in understanding these online discussions and the motivations of participants. Throughout our interviews, as well as our analysis of the discussion threads, it is obvious that what is at stake is not so much solving the case, but the epistemic drama initiated through a contentious relationship with mainstream media. Of being there, of taking part in the experience of the drama.

Even though in the vast majority of the cases we have observed, the result of the epistemic drama is revealed to be insubstantial when the preliminary investigation report is released before trial, or through new leads in media, the collective effervescence achieved through the ritualized resolution of the epistemic drama is what keeps drawing participants to these discussions. Through the drama they intensify moral discussions and boundaries and invite people to become part of the creation of truth rather than feeling obliged to remain on the sidelines as consumers of mainstream media. Moreover, the combination of instantaneous accessibility, anonymity, and a forum full of potentially like-minded individuals should not be underestimated (Goldsmith and Brewer, 2015). The form of Flashback enables an immediate reaction to the media, turning participants into producers, and making it possible to initiate the collective search for truth, as well as a truer experience: what we have referred to as a form of ‘reality media.’

Accordingly, this article adds a contribution to the cultural sociological approach to online detective work through pointing to the concept that what is at stake in these discussions, is less the actual crime, and more the attractive tension of the epistemic drama that provides these activities with a shared purpose. In so doing, it pushes the importance of investigating the symbolic and emotional aspects on this detective work, as well as its boundary-making and unifying functions. Whereas Katz (1987) points to how crime news becomes a resource for further and more general discussions of moral boundaries, we have shown how the media itself becomes a resource that dramatizes epistemic concerns. Maloney (2013) stresses the ability to participate in these discussions synchronously and from home, and being able to do so without having to share real names or contact information. Online forums have the potential to bring participants together on the basis of their proximity of interests, thus bridging and, to some extent, even pursuing geographical distance as positive.