Drugs, Guns, and Selfies: Gangs on Social Media Ciara Byrne - Fast Company
go to original February 5, 2015

It turns out that the gangs, being young men, are very active on social media. (Twitter)

Dr. Robert Muggah’s typical working day involves drugs, guns, and violence. At the SecDev Foundation in Canada and the Igarapé Institute in Rio de Janiero, his team monitors the social media activity of drug cartels and criminal gangs from San Diego to El Salvador. "The U.S. Southern Command recently announced that gangs and cartels were the biggest threat to the U.S. in the Southern hemisphere, rivaling climate change, jihadism and extremism," says Muggah.

Central America has the world’s highest homicide rates and much of the violence is driven by young men in gangs. In fact, of the half a million people who die violently every year, only a small proportion die in war zones. Many more are murdered in cities like Ciudad Juárez or San Salvador which are dominated by gangs and drug cartels. Those same gangs and cartels are also active in the U.S.

"It turns out that the gangs, being young men, are very active on social media," says Muggah. "They use it to tag (mark territory), they use it to coerce, they use it to recruit, they use it to move product, they use it to communicate directives." Even when gang members themselves don’t use social media, they are often embedded in communities which share information about gang activity online.

Social media provides a window into gang behavior that traditional research just can't access. Muggah hopes that analyzing social media can help policy makers to understand which social policies reduce gang violence in the real world, and which do not. "Our end objective is to find ways to help disrupt networks," he says.

Read the rest at Fast Company

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