Following #JillMeagher: Collective meaning-making in response to crime events via social media

Abstract

In the early morning of Saturday 22 September 2012 an Australian woman, Gillian 'Jill' Meagher, was reported missing after spending an evening out with work colleagues in suburban Brunswick (Melbourne, Victoria). Thousands of Australians followed the crime event as it unfolded via the mainstream news and online. On Sunday 23 September, a Facebook group 'Help Us Find Jill Meagher' was created, accumulating 90,000 followers in just four days, while the hashtags #jillmeagher and #meagher were two of the highest trending topics on Twitter across Australia. This article focuses on the social media narrative constructions of this crime: from Jill's initial disappearance, to the identification of her alleged killer and discovery of her body, through to the street march held in her memory on Sunday 30 September 2012. Through a qualitative analysis of a Twitter dataset comprising over 7000 original tweets, the article explores metanarratives of sexual victimisation, 'risk' and 'safety', as well as 'digilantism' and activism that characterised Australian Twitter users' responses to this violent crime. In doing so, the article reflects on collective practices of meaning-making in response to public crime events that are enabled in a digital society.

Citizen surveil-labour: Analysing Crime Stoppers and its alliance of police, media, and publics

“…In this paper we have presented a case study of a Crime Stoppers scheme and examined ways in which traditional media represent crime and how these events are made meaningful especially in adopting a legal, guilty, and punitive frame. There is an imperative to explore further the ways that these representations will be rendered within digital infrastructures and social media platforms which may have greater potential for 'digital vigilantism' and 'lateral surveillance' (Powell, Overington, & Hamilton, 2017;Stratton et al, 2016). However, there is already evidence to suggest that calls to retributive action alongside fear, risk, and warnings of danger are entrenched in the digital sphere and thus continue the legacy of legacy media (Powell et al, 2017).…”

“…There is an imperative to explore further the ways that these representations will be rendered within digital infrastructures and social media platforms which may have greater potential for 'digital vigilantism' and 'lateral surveillance' (Powell, Overington, & Hamilton, 2017;Stratton et al, 2016). However, there is already evidence to suggest that calls to retributive action alongside fear, risk, and warnings of danger are entrenched in the digital sphere and thus continue the legacy of legacy media (Powell et al, 2017). For example, there are social media sites in Australia with tens of thousands of members that post the identities and photographs of local youth who have 'allegedly been involved in property offenses' with many re-postings and comments such as 'time these little grubs disappeared' (Cunneen & Russell, 2017, p. 6).…”

Free Mo Robinson: citizen engagement in response to a crime event on social media

“…Hall et al 1978;Cohen and Young 1981), cultural criminology has extended its scope of enquiry to the production, negotiation and contestation of crime across a range of media, such as film (Rafter 2007), TV dramas (Cavender and Deutsch 2007) and the internet (Yar 2012;Kennedy 2018). This last, emerging subfield of what has been called a "digital criminology" (Stratton, Powell, and Cameron 2017) explores the nature of citizen participation on social media in response to crime events (see Powell, Overington, and Hamilton 2018;Salter 2013). Yar (2012, 207) argues that the internet should not be analysed as just technology, but as "technologically enabled social practices".…”

“…More recently, the one-directional nature and agenda-setting role of so-called "old" media has been altered by digital communication and social media technologies that have transformed the capacity of ordinary people to engage and intervene in debates about crime events and criminal justice responses (e.g. Powell, Overington, and Hamilton 2018). This is because the rise of the internet in general has transformed media "consumers" into "consumer-producers", which for some has raised the hopes for a re-democratised public sphere (see Papacharissi 2015).…”

Justice on the Digitized Field: Analyzing Online Responses to Technology-Facilitated Informal Justice through Social Network Analysis

“…Incidents such as these hold value for criminological analysis, as they can provide a window into public sentiments on the perpetration of, and institutional responses to, IBSA. Moreover, as criminologists such as Powell, Overington, and Hamilton (2018) have demonstrated, examining responses to high-profile crimes on social media can provide a valuable means of researching the content and diffusion of narratives about crime in the contemporary mediascape. In undertaking such projects, a Social Network Analysis (SNA) methodology provides important insights into the degree of homophily within networks who respond to crimes on social media, and the role of central "nodes" in diffusing narratives about crime and perpetration.…”