Addressing Antisocial Behaviour and Toxic Communication Online

We live in an increasingly digital society. It is a hyperconnected world; a world where digital technologies, and social media in particular, are deeply embedded in our everyday lives. Such is the nature of this hyperconnectivity that, for many of us, we would be unable to work, learn and socialise without our internet-enabled devices and online platforms. Indeed, even our civic participation and engagement with our public institutions increasingly require our digital presence. The very notion of a digital society invokes an understanding of the mutually shaping and co-constituting relationship between humans and digital technologies, and this entanglement arguably presents many different, complex and sometimes harmful effects. Though criminology and criminal justice scholars have long examined technology-enabled crime and criminality, there has been comparatively little engagement with a diverse range of non-criminal harms in our digital society. It is such harmful, antisocial behaviours and toxic communications that this Special Issue seeks to highlight. As we go onto to discuss below, many of the harmful behaviours and communications in our digital society, and therefore the challenges to be met, are social more than technical. It is our intention, then, to draw the criminological imagination to the fundamental question: what kind of digital society do we want to ‘live’ in? Criminological thinking is uniquely positioned to engage in this important and timely debate.