Liking and hyperlinking: Community detection in online child sexual exploitation networks |
| |
| Institution: | 1. Department of Sociology, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA;2. Carolina Center for Genome Sciences, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA;3. Carolina Population Center, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA;4. School of Criminal Justice, The University of Cincinnati, USA;1. Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and Transcrime, Milan, Italy;2. MOX, Department of Mathematics, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy;3. DEIB, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy;1. Security Lancaster Research Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK;2. German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Kaiserslautern, Germany;3. School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland;1. English Department, Swansea University, UK;2. Psychology Department, Swansea University, UK;3. Languages, Translation & Communication Department, Swansea University, UK;1. Monash University, Caulfield, VIC, Australia;2. Australian Federal Police, Melbourne, VIC, Australia;3. Australian Federal Police, Barton, ACT, Australia;4. Data61, CSIRO, Eveleigh, NSW, Australia |
| |
| Abstract: | The online sexual exploitation of children is facilitated by websites that form virtual communities, via hyperlinks, to distribute images, videos, and other material. However, how these communities form, are structured, and evolve over time is unknown. Collected using a custom-designed webcrawler, we begin from known child sexual exploitation (CE) seed websites and follow hyperlinks to connected, related, websites. Using a repeated measure design we analyze 10 networks of 300 + websites each – over 4.8 million unique webpages in total, over a period of 60 weeks. Community detection techniques reveal that CE-related networks were dominated by two large communities hosting varied material –not necessarily matching the seed website. Community stability, over 60 weeks, varied across networks. Reciprocity in hyperlinking between community members was substantially higher than within the full network, however, websites were not more likely to connect to homogeneous-content websites. |
| |
| Keywords: | Internet mediated research Child sexual exploitation Child pornography Cybercrime Social networks Online communities |
| 本文献已被 ScienceDirect 等数据库收录！ |
|
