Gang Violence on the Digital Street: A Case Study of a South Side Chicago Gang Member's Twitter Communication

Background and Purpose:

Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are widely popular among youth who use them to share information, develop community, and curate their identity. But high levels of connectivity have raised concerns that online harassment represents a public health issue. However, discussions regarding online harassment may not accurately reflect the lived reality of marginalized youth, whose experiences with violence and trauma uniquely affect how they communicate online. For example recent research suggests urban gang-involved youth use SNS to brag and insult and make threats a concept known as Internet banging.

This paper acknowledges that the social ecology of urban neighborhoods influences

the nature of online interactions.  Through an in-depth examination of  Twitter communication  of Chicago youth who claim a gang affiliation, we explore the extent to which Internet banging resembles and functions like tradition forms of gang violence.

Methods:

We use inductive textual analysis to examine 800 twitter posts from a deceased female Chicago gang member and users in her Twitter network. We examined a small data set because urban, gang-involved youth curate a complex communication style that warrants careful and attentive coding by hand. We collected tweets that represented personal Twitter communications by and with Gakirah Barnes, a.k.a. TyquanAssassin.  We used Radian6, a social media tracking service, to obtain all tweets posted by @TyquanAssassin or containing “tyquanassassin” in the tweet between March 29 and April 17th 2014. During this time Gakirah’s best friend was killed and she was subsequently killed two weeks later. We isolated tweets coded for aggression to further examine and identify any emergent themes that might explain how aggression is communicated on Twitter.

Results:

Our analysis found that examples of aggression in Gakirah’s Twitter network closely aligned with Anderson’s “code of the street” and resembled the three mechanisms of gang behavior identified by outlined by Andrew Papachristos. We categorized our findings according to those three mechanisms: intergroup conflict, reciprocity, and status-seeking. We also identified emergent themes unique to the convergence of geographic and digital space that Gakirah’s network represents—including group tweeting and spatial referencing.

Implications

Study findings have implications for developing innovative prevention and intervention strategies to address electronic aggression via SNSs. For example, the ability to call out someone’s neighborhood in a derogatory or demeaning way via social media may trigger the sort of territory defense that characterizes gang conflict. Given the online presence of gang-involved youth, scholars and practitioners should consider developing online intervention techniques for this population. Social media researchers and designers could pair qualitative and computational approaches to support urban youth exposed to violence, by facilitating emotional processes critical to well-being and physical safety. Among men who face significant stigma against seeking such assistance, the anonymity of online interventions may reduce masculinity-related barriers to mental health care.