Social Media Ecologies of Crime: Algorithmic Convergence Spaces and Criminogenic Opportunity Structures Online

Department seminar with Kristoffer Magnus Bjerre Aagesen, PhD student at Department of Sociology. 

Social media platforms host a wide range of crime, from illicit drugs, stolen goods, and weapons to markets for crime-as-a-service and scams. Platforms collapse these different criminal contexts into offender convergence spaces where access and opportunity are heavily shaped by platform algorithms.

Borrowing from ecological psychology, this paper argues for treating social media not as objects but as ecologies containing multiple structured objects and actors spread across different areas and niches. Unlike physical environments, online ecologies shift dynamically, restructured by algorithms whose logics and effects are only partially knowable to those inhabiting them.

The structure of these ecologies, and which other agents are encounterable within them, shapes how digitally mediated spaces afford opportunity for crime. This perspective challenges core assumptions in digital drift theory which rests on the notion of digitally empowered and atomised solo actors who autonomously navigate loosely bounded online spaces.

The ecological framework developed here instead shows how these online environments carry strong affordances that shape possible actions for actors depending on their position in the ecology, their relation to other actors, and how platform algorithms interpret and interact with them.