Cybercrime has recently experienced an ascending position in national security agendas world-wide. It has become part of the National Security Strategies of a growing number of countries, becoming a Tier One threat, above organised crime and fraud generally. Furthermore, new techno-social developments in social network media suggest that cyber-threats will continue to increase. This collection addresses the recent 'inertia' in both critical thinking and the empirical study of cybercrime and policing by adding to the literature seven interdisciplinary and critical chapters on various issues relating to the new generation of cybercrimes currently being experienced. The chapters illustrate that cybercrimes are changing in two significant ways that are asymmetrical. On the one hand cybercrime is becoming increasingly professionalised, resulting in ’specialists’ that perform complex and sophisticated attacks on computer systems and human users. On the other, the ‘hyper-connectivity’ brought about by the exponential growth in social media users has opened up opportunities to ‘non-specialist’ citizens to organise and communicate in ways that facilitate crimes on and offline. While largely distinct, these developments pose equally contrasting challenges for policing which this book addresses. This book was originally published as a special issue of Policing and Society.

This reference text presents the important components for grasping the potential of social computing with an emphasis on concerns, challenges, and benefits of the social platform in depth. Features: Detailed discussion on social-cyber issues, including hate speech, cyberbullying, and others Discusses usefulness of social platforms for societal needs Includes framework to address the social issues with their implementations Covers fake news and rumor detection models Describes sentimental analysis of social posts with advanced learning techniques The book is ideal for undergraduate, postgraduate, and research students who want to learn about the issues, challenges, and solutions of social platforms in depth.

How is social media changing contemporary understandings of crime and injustice, and what contribution can it make to justice-seeking? Abuse on social media often involves betrayals of trust and invasions of privacy that range from the public circulation of intimate photographs to mass campaigns of public abuse and harassment using platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, 8chan and Reddit – forms of abuse that disproportionately target women and children. Crime, Justice and Social Media argues that online abuse is not discontinuous with established patterns of inequality but rather intersects with and amplifies them. Embedded within social media platforms are inducements to abuse and harass other users who are rarely provided with the tools to protect themselves or interrupt the abuse of others. There is a relationship between the values that shape the technological design and administration of social media, and those that inform the use of abuse and harassment to exclude and marginalise diverse participants in public life. Drawing on original qualitative research, this book is essential reading for students and scholars in the fields of cyber-crime, media and crime, cultural criminology, and gender and crime.

This reference text presents the important components for grasping the potential of social computing with an emphasis on concerns, challenges, and benefits of the social platform in depth. Features: Detailed discussion on social-cyber issues, including hate speech, cyberbullying, and others Discusses usefulness of social platforms for societal needs Includes framework to address the social issues with their implementations Covers fake news and rumor detection models Describes sentimental analysis of social posts with advanced learning techniques The book is ideal for undergraduate, postgraduate, and research students who want to learn about the issues, challenges, and solutions of social platforms in depth.

This book shows how open source intelligence can be a powerful tool for combating crime by linking local and global patterns to help understand how criminal activities are connected. Readers will encounter the latest advances in cutting-edge data mining, machine learning and predictive analytics combined with natural language processing and social network analysis to detect, disrupt, and neutralize cyber and physical threats. Chapters contain state-of-the-art social media analytics and open source intelligence research trends. This multidisciplinary volume will appeal to students, researchers, and professionals working in the fields of open source intelligence, cyber crime and social network analytics. Chapter Automated Text Analysis for Intelligence Purposes: A Psychological Operations Case Study is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The last twenty years have seen an explosion in the development of information technology, to the point that people spend a major portion of waking life in online spaces. While there are enormous benefits associated with this technology, there are also risks that can affect the most vulnerable in our society but also the most confident. Cybercrime and its victims explores the social construction of violence and victimisation in online spaces and brings together scholars from many areas of inquiry, including criminology, sociology, and cultural, media, and gender studies. The book is organised thematically into five parts. Part one addresses some broad conceptual and theoretical issues. Part two is concerned with issues relating to sexual violence, abuse, and exploitation, as well as to sexual expression online. Part three addresses issues related to race and culture. Part four addresses concerns around cyberbullying and online suicide, grouped together as ‘social violence’. The final part argues that victims of cybercrime are, in general, neglected and not receiving the recognition and support they need and deserve. It concludes that in the volatile and complex world of cyberspace continued awareness-raising is essential for bringing attention to the plight of victims. It also argues that there needs to be more support of all kinds for victims, as well as an increase in the exposure and punishment of perpetrators. Drawing on a range of pressing contemporary issues such as online grooming, sexting, cyber-hate, cyber-bulling and online radicalization, this book examines how cyberspace makes us more vulnerable to crime and violence, how it gives rise to new forms of surveillance and social control and how cybercrime can be prevented.