Digital Cultures of Care Seminar April 2020 at Swinburne Presenter: Dr Alexia Maddox, Lecturer, Communications SCCA, Deakin University Title: Ethics of engaging with the digital community of drug users surrounding cryptomarkets. This presentation will draw upon five studies published by researchers who engaged with drug-user populations in cryptomarkets, including my own experience of conducting ethnographically sensitised research in this space. The presentation will be structured through a consideration of four domains of ethical practice with online populations. The first ethical domain relates to researcher disclosure to the community of their presence, affiliations and intentions (overt research practice). Across the studies, these practices included direct disclosure of their researcher identity to participants, nodal disclosure of the research agenda to site admins and moderators and published disclosure of the research activity to community members through the forums. Researchers in the field need to work within clear protocols for maintaining their participants’ anonymity in their data collection and reporting process. Embedding privacy practices into the choices of technologies researchers use and engage with reduces the risk of implicating their participants. The second domain of ethical practice considered in this presentation is that the researcher should ensure confidentiality and anonymity of informants. Within the cryptomarket space and online research more generally, ensuring the confidentiality and anonymity of informants must move from the researcher management of participant identities and narratives to wider data management practices and reporting protocols. The third domain of ethical practice to be considered is conducting research with essentially a hidden and suspicious research population. This domain gives rise to a discussion of challenges relating to the disrupted nature of the cryptomarket environment which and how the researchers responded to forms of contentious visibility. Researcher bio Alexia Maddox (PhD) is a Lecturer, Communication in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia. Her research sits at the nexus of emerging technologies, social change and social inclusion and is focused through the study of communities utilising emerging technologies to create alternative futures, including cryptocurrencies, blockchain and cryptomarkets. She has published in leading journals including Information, Communication and Society as well as journals with significant real-world engagement such as the International Journal of Drug Policy. Her scholarly monograph through Routledge, titled Research Methods and Global Online Communities: A case study illustrates for researchers how to apply research methods to studying online communities.

1. ETHICS OF
CARE
THE ETHICS OF ENGAGING WITH THE DIGITAL
COMMUNITY OF DRUG USERS SURROUNDING
CRYPTOMARKETS
Alexia Maddox, Deakin University

2. •What are Cryptomarkets?
•The five studies under analysis
•Researcher disclosure
•Participant anonymity
•Hidden or difficult to reach populations
ALEXIA MADDOX 28TH APRIL 2020 TWITTER: @ALEXIAMADD
OVERVIEW
AN ETHICS OF CARE FOR ONLINE RESEARCH
Kozinets, R. V. (2020). Netnography : the essential guide to qualitative social media
research (Third edition.). SAGE, p.179.

3. What are cryptomarkets, where are they and who goes there?
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4. ONLINE ETHNOGRAPHICALLY SENSITISED STUDIES OF POPULATIONS SURROUNDING CRYPTOMARKETS
THEFIVESTUDIES
• 3 phase study
• Drug Consumerism
• Silk Road cryptomarket
• 12 months, 2012-2013
• Case study, interviews,
online monitoring &
engagement
• Single phase study
• Drug use trajectories
• Silk Road cryptomarket,
before and after LE
seizure
• 6 months, 2013-2014
• Interviews, online
monitoring and
engagement
• Extended immersion
• Pseudonymous identity
in high-risk transactions
• Cryptomarkets & social
media
• Four years immersion
• Interviews, online
monitoring and
engagement
• Extended immersion
• The morality of
exchange
• Range of cryptomarkets
• 2014-2017
• Interviews, online
monitoring and
engagement.
• Single phase study
• Adoption barriers surrounding
cryptomarkets
• Range of cryptomarkets
• 7 months during 2016
• Netnographic method
including interviews, field
notes, monitoring &
engagement.
Study 1 Study 2 Study 3 Study 4 Study 5
Van Hout & Bingham
(2013a,b/2014)
Barratt & Maddox
(et al 2016 a,b,c)
Ferguson (2017)
Masson & Bancroft
(2018)
Kowalski et al (2019)
ALEXIA MADDOX 28TH APRIL 2020 TWITTER: @ALEXIAMADD

5. RESEARCHERDISCLOSURE
ALEXIA MADDOX 28TH APRIL 2020 TWITTER: @ALEXIAMADD
Direct disclosure Nodal disclosure Published disclosure
Researcher to
anonymous
participant
Researcher to
moderators & site
administrator
Researcher publishes
forum post/
recruitment thread

6. RESEARCHERDISCLOSURE
ALEXIA MADDOX 28TH APRIL 2020 TWITTER: @ALEXIAMADD
Direct disclosure Nodal disclosure Published disclosure
RISKS AND ADVANTAGES
•Participant can choose if they want
to know researcher identity
• Researcher can negotiate
disclosure at the individual level.
• Interpersonal relationship building
(rapport building)
• Trust negotiated at the individual
level
• Approval sought for the conduct of the
research with site members.
• Acknowledgement of whether the
research can be conducted in the space
• Endorsement from established
personas on the site.
• Avenue of recourse should things “go
wrong”
•Raises the visibility of the research
with the site membership.
• Provides an avenue for engagement,
tester probes and study recruitment
• A record of community receptivity
towards the study.
• Raises the stakes of the researcher
visibility within the community.

7. FROM COMMUNITY PRACTICES TO DATA COLLECTION TECHNOLOGIES
PARTICIPANTANONYMITY
•Culture of anonymity
•Operational security
•Technical anonymity
•Social anonymity
•Ensuring participant identities are
disconnected from data sets.
• Ensuring data sets are securely
stored.
• Ensuring participants cannot be re-
identified through quote text
matching from content taken from
social media and forums.
• Ensuring stories provided do not
make participants recognisable to
the community under study.
•Fully de-identified data also means
disabling how the technologies of data
capture, correspondence, and analysis
retain traces of participant identities.
• Researching security and privacy issues
and community receptivity of technologies
for engagement.
• Considering the use of encryption for data
storage.
• Identifying secure cloud storage and data
sharing practices.
• Ensuring data territoriality concerns are
taken into account.
Community Research practices Technologies of data capture
ALEXIA MADDOX 28TH APRIL 2020 TWITTER: @ALEXIAMADD

8. WORKINGWITHHIDDENPOPULATIONS
•Hidden populations are hard to reach for a reason, either they wish to stay hidden due to illicit practices and/or they experience
severe social stigma.
•Online communities have made some of these populations easier to reach through their increased visibility but no less difficult
to engage with research.
•Online anonymity does not detract from the depth of insight that can be gained from engaging with people. If this is a normative
practice, the researcher needs to navigate disclosure with this in mind.
•If working with populations that engage in illicit practices, researchers in Australia must consider this in their research design (ie
how to ensure their data has value for the research but little value for law enforcement activities.
•Hidden populations may occupy contentious spaces where both the research participant and researcher can be put at risk
through the conduct of the study.
•Empathy, compassion, rapport building and the investment of time is what it takes to engage populations, alongside a strong
value proposition for the research itself with a clear contribution that overlaps with community agendas.
ALEXIA MADDOX 28TH APRIL 2020 TWITTER: @ALEXIAMADD

9. STUDYREFERENCES
Barratt, M. J., Lenton, S., Maddox, A., & Allen, M. (2016). ‘What if you live on top of a bakery and you like cakes?’—Drug use and harm trajectories before, during and after the
emergence of Silk Road. International Journal of Drug Policy, 35, 50-57. doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.04.006
Barratt, M. J., & Maddox, A. (2016). Active engagement with stigmatised communities through digital ethnography. Qualitative Research, 16(6), 701-719.
doi:10.1177/1468794116648766
Ferguson, R. H. (2017). Offline ‘stranger’ and online lurker: methods for an ethnography of illicit transactions on the darknet. Qualitative Research, 17(6), 683-698.
doi:10.1177/1468794117718894
Kowalski, M., Hooker, C., & Barratt, M. J. (2019). Should we smoke it for you as well? An ethnographic analysis of a drug cryptomarket environment. International Journal of
Drug Policy. doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2019.03.011
Maddox, A., Barratt, M. J., Lenton, S., & Allen, M. (2016). Constructive activism in the dark web: cryptomarkets and illicit drugs in the digital ‘demimonde’. Information
Communication and Society, 19(1), 111-126. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2015.1093531
Masson, K., & Bancroft, A. (2018). ‘Nice people doing shady things’: Drugs and the morality of exchange in the darknet cryptomarkets. International Journal of Drug Policy,
58, 78-84. doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2018.05.008
Van Hout, M. C., & Bingham, T. (2013a). ‘Silk Road’, the virtual drug marketplace: A single case study of user experiences. International Journal of Drug Policy, 24(5), 385-391.
doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2013.01.005
Van Hout, M. C., & Bingham, T. (2013b). ‘Surfing the Silk Road’: A study of users’ experiences. International Journal of Drug Policy, 24(6), 524-529. doi:http://dx.doi.org/
10.1016/j.drugpo.2013.08.011
Van Hout, M. C., & Bingham, T. (2014). Responsible vendors, intelligent consumers: Silk Road, the online revolution in drug trading. International Journal of Drug Policy, 25(2),
183-189. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2013.10.009
ALEXIA MADDOX 28TH APRIL 2020 TWITTER: @ALEXIAMADD