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Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums Selina Cho & Joss Wright Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute
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Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums€¦ · Darknet Drug Forums Selina Cho & Joss Wright Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute. Darknet Markets

May 29, 2020

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Page 1: Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums€¦ · Darknet Drug Forums Selina Cho & Joss Wright Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute. Darknet Markets

Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums

Selina Cho & Joss Wright

Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute

Page 2: Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums€¦ · Darknet Drug Forums Selina Cho & Joss Wright Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute. Darknet Markets

Darknet Markets

An online market that operates via networks as Tor or I2P

Sells illicit goods (e.g. drugs, arms, counterfeit goods, stolen credit card details etc)

Different ways to share and gain information in and outside the marketplace

Forums sections inside the market

Reddit

Voat

Chat groups

Page 3: Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums€¦ · Darknet Drug Forums Selina Cho & Joss Wright Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute. Darknet Markets

Reddit

Reddit: one of the largest collection of online community forums.

social news aggregation

web content rating

discussion

Users rely heavily on discussion boards for sharing information related to trading in darknet markets

Page 4: Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums€¦ · Darknet Drug Forums Selina Cho & Joss Wright Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute. Darknet Markets

Reddit (cont.)

In March 2018, some of the largest Reddit forums (>40) related to darknet markets (DNM) were banned overnight to the surprise of many users

A new platform named Dread (only accessed through Tor) rose to particular prominence after positive reviews were spread across

Q: How do darknet market users react to speech bans?

Page 5: Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums€¦ · Darknet Drug Forums Selina Cho & Joss Wright Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute. Darknet Markets

Relevant work

Reaction to Moderation of speech and contents

Backlash is esp. notable in Reddit communities focused on toxicity or taboo topics (e.g. r/CoonTown, r/FatPeopleHate (Chandrasekharan et al. 2017))

Social support

Self-disclosing attitudes under anonymity (Choudhury & De 2014), (Chancellor et al. 2016)

All taboo topics are respected and addressed with communal efforts

DNM community

Law enforcement crackdowns in DNMs had brought about community spirit and solidarity with one another, which enabled the users to survive and migrate enmasse to new platforms (Ladegaard 2017)

Communication boards are crucial for confidence and momentum for markets: feedback mechanisms and reputation create an informal institutional framework (Hardy & Norgaard 2016)

Page 6: Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums€¦ · Darknet Drug Forums Selina Cho & Joss Wright Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute. Darknet Markets

Questions

1. What are the users talking about in the new platform? Have the same discussions made it across to Dread?

2. What is the user perception in the new Dread community towards Reddit and its ban?

3. How has the proportion of user engagement changed in the new platform?

Page 7: Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums€¦ · Darknet Drug Forums Selina Cho & Joss Wright Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute. Darknet Markets

Methodology

Datasets

Reddit: archives from Google BigQuery

Dread: Scrapy & CAPTCHA solving to access the main onion link*

LDA Topic modelling (7 topics)

Sentiment analysis: used TextBlob to analyse the quality of the sentiments spanning across posts that mention “Reddit”

Polarity and Subjectivity

Manual retrieval of banned Reddit archives (just the front page)

Username matching over the two platforms

Both subreddits and subdreads were referred to as forums for sake of simplicity

*dreadditevelidot.onion

Page 8: Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums€¦ · Darknet Drug Forums Selina Cho & Joss Wright Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute. Darknet Markets

Results: Main discourse

Similar topic interests:

Verification of vendor quality by probing for prior experiences

Communication skills

Shipping methods (i.e. how ”stealth” is the shipping method?)

Reliability of the service

In search of high quality drugs (“shatter”, ”flake” >80% purity)

Value of the product (quality given the price)

Page 9: Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums€¦ · Darknet Drug Forums Selina Cho & Joss Wright Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute. Darknet Markets

Results: Sentiment analysis

More positive remarks than negative in the new platform

May be due to the excited praising of the still-new platform.

Positive: 21.9% 30.0%

Negative: 19.7% 17.7%

Neutral: 58.4% 52.3%

User A (anonymised), the heroic saviour

Key figure in enabling the online exodus

Page 10: Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums€¦ · Darknet Drug Forums Selina Cho & Joss Wright Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute. Darknet Markets

Results: User engagement

13 of the 20 Dread forums that we obtained information on showed an increase in per user engagement

Username retention: Across 14,523 unique usernames in Reddit and 5,136 in Dread, including those of identified moderators, there were only 236matching usernames

Country-specific forums - the posting activity rate had increased by a noticeable amount; an increase from 45.11% to 53.75% and from 20.37% to 44.6% in DarkNetMarketsNO and DNMUK, respectively.

Results: User engagement

´ 13 of the 20 Dread forums that we obtained information on showed an increase in per user engagement

´ Username retention: Across 14,523 unique usernames in Reddit and 5,136 in Dread, including those of identified moderators, there were only 236matching usernames

´ Country-specific forums - the posting activity rate had increased by a noticeable amount; an increase from 45.11% to 53.75% and from 20.37% to 44.6% in DarkNetMarketsNO and DNMUK, respectively.

Page 11: Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums€¦ · Darknet Drug Forums Selina Cho & Joss Wright Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute. Darknet Markets

Implications

Discussion boards are crucial meeting place for the buyers to gather and share information about trade e.g. vendor profiles, quality, price, security practices etc

Much more than a transactional relationship: Reddit’s design of information sharing platform (which encourages self-disclosure) enables greater social support

Social media platforms as a way to bring about a collective motion & solidarity

There is usually a handful of prominent figures who help the community stay intact

More intimacy and trust - Dread’s new environment may thus promote more intimacy and tacit trust amongst users who had been initially unhappy about Reddit’s change of policy

Migration to new platforms: Users in fact feel more secure in the newer platform

Use of topic modelling to discover discourse themes in drugs

Page 12: Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums€¦ · Darknet Drug Forums Selina Cho & Joss Wright Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute. Darknet Markets

Future work

Further analysis of public social media that cover darknet communities

Facebook

Telegram

Discord

Analysis of online lexicon variation in polarised communities

Deeper investigation of profiles of lead figures of social mobility and community migration

Page 13: Going Dark: A Case Study on Banned Darknet Drug Forums€¦ · Darknet Drug Forums Selina Cho & Joss Wright Department of Computer Science & Oxford Internet Institute. Darknet Markets

Further Resources

Chancellor, S., Pater, J.A., Clear, T., Gilbert, E., De Choudhury, M.: #thygh-gapp: Instagram content moderation and lexical variation in pro-eating disor-der communities. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. pp. 1201–1213. CSCW ’16, ACM, New York, NY, USA (2016). https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819963, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2818048.2819963

Chandrasekharan, E., Pavalanathan, U., Srinivasan, A., Glynn, A., Eisenstein, J., Gilbert, E.: You can’t stay here: The efficacy of reddit’s 2015 ban examined through hate speech. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 1(CSCW), 31:1–31:22 (Dec 2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/3134666, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3134666

Choudhury, M.D., De, S.: Mental health discourse on reddit: Self-disclosure, social support, and anonymity (2014), https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ ICWSM14/paper/view/8075

Paper: S. Y. Cho and J. Wright (forthcoming), “Into the Dark: A Case Study of Banned Darknet Drug Forums,” in 11th International Conference on Social Informatics, Springer International Publishing, 2019.