Community and/or commotion?

Today's Onlife engagement provides unprecedented levels of communication between otherwise unconnected users. Social media has effectively provided concrete instances of moral panic that underscore the delicate balance of online discussions and their impact on everyday life. Already well-known on the anonymous image-board platform 4chan (Threadgold, 2019; Ball, 2023) hybrid forms of mass raids have gained global attention. These incidents often involve groups of youths, dressed in dark hoods, storming popular shops to steal goods in a swift, coordinated manner – a trend widely reported across the UK in recent years. Similar tactics have also been observed in the US and Brazil, where social media has played a key role in mobilizing pro-Trump supporters (Klein, 2023) and pro-Bolsonaro groups (Malleret et al, 2023), amplifying and organizing such actions. More subtly, social media platforms foster environments where toxic elements mirror traits associated with the ‘Dark Tetrad’ of personality – narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism (Craker and March, 2016). These traits are not only visible in the toxic gendered communities of spaces like the so-called ‘manosphere’ or ‘femcels’ but they also serve to ignite and spread harmful ideologies and behaviours that cross races, gender, and the political spectrum (Johanssen and Kay, 2024), with artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots only making the matter more complex and harder to reason with (Alegre, 2024). Despite the damaging nature of toxic communities, intervention by platform moderators often comes too late – banning content and users only after significant harm has already been done (Hoffman et al, 2020; Ball, 2023).