Username Construction and Identity Performance in Dark Web Child Sexual Abuse Communications

Abstract

Child sex abusers use the dark web to exchange illicit imagery and share advice. As part of their identity work, users can make use of a number of resources – linguistic , social, cultural, situational – to form their online identity and create a unique username. Employing corpus-assisted discourse analysis with a focus on social actor representation, this thesis investigates child sex abusers naming practices and uncovers the resources child sex abusers draw on when crafting their usernames and how those relate to users’ discursively performed identities. The data analysed stems from a corpus of eight dark web discussion fora related to child sexual abuse consisting of 295,799 forum posts written by 32,410 unique users. In study 1, the usernames are manually segmented and are then classified thematically into categories. 20 username categories emerged which are typical for users’ naming choices in the dark web CSA context. The analysis shows that users draw on a number of resources to create their usernames and specific considerations regarding anonymity impact those choices. Interestingly, users in this high risk/low trust environment still opt for proper names as parts of their usernames. For study 2, forum posts for the most frequent posters in the data (n=1837) are analysed through a corpus-assisted approach examining the usernames and forum contributions for a subset of 5 username categories. Findings suggest that users who identify in a certain way will also show linguistic behaviours related to that self-assigned identity and engage in discussions of topics which can be inferred from the username choice. Study 3 dives deeper into the 5 selected subcorpora and applies a thematic as well as a detailed concordance analysis for top keywords identified against the full corpus of most frequent posters. The results show that while similarities between the subgroups are present, differences between the subgroups show clear distinctive features by type of user. Users engage in discussions of topics directly or indirectly linked to their self-assigned identities and different types of users are shown to be more or less concerned with topics such as age of consent, security measures or the exchange of CSAM. In addition to adding to the linguistic literature on identity performance, child sexual abuse and offender communities, this research opens up possibilities for law enforcement policing such online environments: findings can aid agencies in identifying targets and aid undercover officers in choosing appropriate usernames when engaging in infiltration tasks.