The Digital Street
The presence of social media has extended to the arena of gang conflict. On the digital street gang members can initiate contact with each other 24 hours a day with the click of a button. In digital social sciences one of the most important questions in scholarship on community violence is the extent to which social media plays a role in gang interactions and how/if negative online interactions spill over into offline violence. To answer these questions, using insider knowledge of where gang conversations take place on social media, and insight into their highly specialized language, I created an original data set using digital trace data from a public Chicago Latino gang Facebook page. The collected data includes 140,140 posts, likes, comments, and comment replies. My first project (Leverso and Hsiao 2021) investigates how gangs as groups interact in online spaces and how those interactions relate to geographic proximity. My co-author and I find that fighting among gang members in the online environment is conditional on the type of post displayed and is correlated with geographic proximity of gang territory.
My second project, The Corner, the Crew, and the Digital Street: Multiplex networks of gang online-offline conflict dynamics, investigates the relationship between online gang interactions and violence in neighborhoods and communities. Rather than try to establish a causal primacy of online or offline relationships we instead, unpack the intertwined nature of the social relationships of gangs and gang members on both the digital and geographic streets using a multiplex network framework that conceptualizes online and offline gang relationships as co-constitutive networks—online and offline relationships that often overlap and entangle in complex ways that influence behavior in both the virtual and real worlds. For this research, data on social media gang interactions were merged with law enforcement data on violent gang events and gangs’ geographic territories. From these data we constructed multiplex networks of geographic territorial networks, offline shooting conflicts and online conflict networks. Hostilities between gang members do not randomly occur but depend on relationships offline that evolve on the streets. A focus on multiplexity allowed us to extend beyond classifying types of behaviors and, instead, disentangle situations in which multiple overlapping social ties might align or produce additional conflict on or offline. For gangs with greater correspondence over multiplex networks we would expect a larger correlation between the digital and geographic streets.
Continuing my study of online interactions, I’m investigating background characteristics and attributes of sequences of recent messages (e.g., topic, prior messages, time, etc.) that drive positive and negative interactions between gang members online. Additionally, I am conducting research that focuses on gender in relation to gang interactions in online settings; I am examining the commonalities and differences between gang involved women and men in this space. In a similar vein, I’m also investigating the situations and context in which homophobic, emasculating and feminizing language are deployed within social media based gang interactions. Findings indicate gang members employ slurs on social media to emasculate and directly target individuals' sexuality, masculinity or both.
Finally, to holistically understand street gang interactions on social media, I am also conducting research on positive interactions and de-escalation of conflict in the online environment. This research will identify the conditions and situations that involve positive interactions and de-escalation among gang members on social media. Understanding what situations de-escalate conflict, rather then escalate it, can potentially pay dividends of equal or greater value to decreasing community violence. Taken together, my research in this space seeks to comprehensively understand street gang interactions (both positive and negative) and how those interactions relate to offline behaviors.
Published work
Hsaio Yuan, John Leverso (Equal contribution and listed alphabetically), and Andrew Papachristos. (Forthcoming) “The Corner, the Crew, and the Digital Street: Multiplex networks of gang online-offline conflict dynamics.” American Sociological Review.
Works in progress
Leverso, John, Ming Ming Chiu, Jeong-Nam Kim, Chong-Hyun Park, Yu Won Oh and Hyelim Lee. “The Darkside of the Moon: Understanding Social Media Interactions of Gang Members.”
Leverso, John and Kate K. O’Neill. “Bargaining With Gang Patriarchy in the Digital Streets: Girls in Gangs Online.”
Leverso, John and Meredith Worthen. “Gay gang slurs and misogyny off the streets and on Facebook.”