"Instead of hanging out on street corners, they're hanging out on social media." That's how Francesco Carlo Campisi, a Ph.D. student at Université de Montréal supervised by criminology professor Francis Fortin, describes the online presence of Canadian street gangs.
In a study in the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Campisi scrutinized some 50 Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) profiles linked to Canadian street gang members, as well as a dozen YouTube music videos produced by them.
His goal was to explore the behaviour of this new breed of social-media user.
"Law enforcement, the media and some academic publications suggest that street gangs have started using social media to find and recruit new members," he said. "However, we don't have enough information to describe what this actually looks like online."
The reality, it turns out, is more complicated. Campisi's most notable finding was that most of the content gang members post on X and Facebook is not crime-related.
Indirect recruitment
Campisi set out to explore "cyberbanging," a general term for the interactive online relationship between gang members and other users.
He found that cyberbanging content consists of promoting the gang lifestyle more than recruitment per se. Gang members display "gang culture" by showing off their money, weapons, women, alcohol, partying and drugs.
"These promotional strategies are a form of indirect recruitment, as they can entice impressionable individuals attracted to the lifestyle to seek membership in the gang, rather than the gang seeking potential recruits," Campisi said. "The impetus for recruitment thus shifts to the potential member rather than the gang."
He added that being part of a gang is only one aspect of members' identities and does not appear to dominate their online presence or define the content they post.
"The users sampled on X and Facebook may be gang members, but they are also sons, sisters, fathers and students, with interests beyond gangs," Campisi noted. "Like you and me, they use social media to communicate and maintain social connections."
Content varies by platform
Campisi found that X is the platform where gang members are most likely to post mixtapes and songs. Hip-hop and rap serve to support street cred, since many of the most popular artists in these genres are self-proclaimed gang members.
On Facebook, however, the dominant element of cyberbanging is "the display of gang colours and symbols," perhaps because the audience is made up of friends and family members. "Studies have shown that Facebook is used mainly to elicit positive reactions; people post content to feed a general, superficial sense of vanity," Campisi said.
On YouTube, showcasing drugs, weapons or money and bragging about the gang lifestyle serves to enhance the gang's social status.
"It's ultimately a form of content marketing, similar to how far-right influencers 'sell' their ideas," Campisi observed. "And vulnerable individuals seeking this kind of lifestyle can find it much more easily; they don't have to live in the same neighborhood as the gang to be exposed to it."
About this study
"Unveiling the digital underworld: exploring cyberbanging and recruitment of canadian street gang members on social media," by Francesco Carlo Campisi, was published last summer in the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
