The performative and emotional infrastructure of a cybercrime collective: evidence from Dark0de

•Sociology of emotions (Goffman, 1967; Scheff, 1988; Shott, 1979; Turner, 2006) points to the fact that shame (and its “positive” counterpart, pride) are used throughout social contexts (family, peer groups, work environments, etc.) as a key tool of social control. These self-oriented emotions operate among individuals who are socialized to observe the reactions of others and thus constitute collectively social norms. Such affective sanctioning operations are ubiquitously employed to bring “deviant” actions back in line with those norms.
•These findings, however, are based on observations of face-to-face encounters. Evidence from investigations into conformity in digital environment is inconsistent: early research suggests that individuals are less prone to subordinate to normative pressure in an online context, whereas more recent work argue that under certain conditions cyber-conformity to group norms is stronger than in the offline environment (Postmes, Spears & Lea, 1999; Cinirella & Green, 2007).
•Cybercrime collectives are a particularly interesting area of study of intra-group social control based on affective sanctioning in the online context due to two factors: a) due to illicit character of their activity such groups cannot refer to external authorities to exert control on their member’s misbehavior, therefore, internal social control is crucial for their operability; b) for security reasons cybercrime collectives are often deeply anonymized environments, therefore, this study will contribute to better understanding of dynamics of cyber-conformity.