Criminogenic and harm-enabling features of social media platforms: The case of sharenting practices
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14773708221131659 |
| Author | Anita Lavorgna,Morena Tartari,Pamela Ugwudike |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Criminogenic and harm-
enabling features of social
media platforms: The case of
sharenting practices
Anita Lavorgna
Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology, University of
Southampton, UK; Department of Political and Social Sciences,
University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
Morena Tartari
Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology, University of
Southampton, UK; Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and
Applied Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
Pamela Ugwudike
Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology, University of
Southampton, Southampton, UK
Abstract
Sharenting –that is, the sharing of identifying and sensitive information of minors, who are often
overexposed online by parents or guardians –has, at times, criminogenic potential, as the infor-
mation shared can enable both heinous crimes and other types of harmful conduct. Whilst
most research on sharenting has focused on the sharenters and their agency, there is a gap in
addressing whether and to what extent social media platforms display criminogenic or other
harm-enabling features that can render sharenting risky for affected minors. By relying on an
adapted crime proofing of legislation approach, our contribution analyses the self-regulations (in
the form of corporate documents and forms of self-organisation) of five major social media plat-
forms and identifies several risks and vulnerabilities to harmful sharenting practices embedded in
the platforms’policies. In doing so, the study demonstrates how criminological imagination can
effectively contribute to the multidisciplinary debates on digital ecosystems and their regulation,
paving the way for a reduction of criminogenic and harmful opportunities online.
Corresponding author:
Anita Lavorgna, Department of Sociology, Social Policy & Criminology, University of Southampton, Murray
Building (Bldg 58), SO17 1BJ UK.
Email: anita.lavorgna@unibo.it
Article
European Journal of Criminology
2023, Vol. 20(3) 1037–1060
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14773708221131659
journals.sagepub.com/home/euc
Keywords
Sharenting, digital harms, crime proofing of legislation, self-regulation, social media platforms
Introduction
As digital technologies continue to permeate most aspects of social life from work and
social networking to criminal justice, they are creating ‘digital paradoxes’by enabling
positive social changes and improvements to the quality of life, whilst generating new
threats to safety and wellbeing (Fussey and Roth, 2020). These new techno-socialities
(Escobar, 1994) are particularly interesting from a criminological perspective, beyond
the mainstream cybercrime literature, as individuals interacting in non-criminal virtual
spaces can give rise to criminal, deviant or otherwise harmful activities and behaviours
(Powell et al., 2018; Lavorgna, 2021). In this context, mainstream social media platforms
play a key role, providing highly populated virtual spaces. These platforms are best under-
stood as sociotechnical assemblages and complex institutions (Gillespie, 2017), and are
often conceptualised as composite human actors (users and, depending on the platform,
moderators) and algorithm-driven nonhuman entities (automated tools and filters) embed-
ded in their users’general communicative practices (in line with Prochazka, 2019).
In this contribution which originates from the ESRC-funded project ProTechThem -
Building Awareness for Safer and Technology-Savvy Sharenting, we hypothesise that
virtual places have regulatory characteristics and loopholes that can enable harmful practices
amongst users. We demonstrate this using the empirical example of harmful sharenting prac-
tices in online social media spaces. Sharenting is the potentially harmful sharing of identifying
and sensitive information of minors, who are often overexposed online by parents or guardians.
Whilst most research on sharenting has focused on the sharenters and their agency, the
characteristicsof the socialmedia platforms they inhabit,which are at the basisof their poten-
tially harmful sharingactivities, have been so far overlooked. To address this gap, we draw
on insights fromthe ESRC project which analysed theself-regulatory policies andpractices
of five mainstream social media platforms. The aim was to examine whether and to what
extentthe platforms display problematicfeatures, and whetherthere are regulatoryloopholes
that can render sharenting risky for affected children by enabling criminogenic and other
harm-enablingopportunities. To achieve our objective,we utilised an adapted crime proof-
ing of legislation approach which is a conceptual framework for identifying criminogenic
opportunities in regulations and their implementations (see Savona, 2017). This allowed
us to examine whether criminogenic or otherwise harm-enabling features are embedded in
the policies.Of course, what we are addressingin our work is a complex sociotechnical phe-
nomenon, based on the interplay between policies, platformdesign and developments, and
social norms andattitudes. We do not aim to provide a comprehensive understandingof the
issue, but rather to shed somelight on one of the factors accounting for important(criminal
and non-criminal)harms and risksthat social media platformsare currently failing to address
–that is, their self-regulatory practices. Assuch, in this contribution we are focusingon the
orientation of social media platforms towards the legal risks relating to sharenting, rather
than, for instance, on other relevant factors such as their design. In the next section, we
offera brief overview of the natureand limitations of self-regulation(via contentmoderation)
as a core governance mechanism of social media platforms.
1038 European Journal of Criminology 20(3)
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