Social media use can enable community members in America’s urban neighborhoods to intervene into potential conflicts to de-escalate, and even prevent, gun and gang violence, according to new Rutgers research.

The study, “How Social Media Use Mitigates Urban Violence: Communication Visibility and Third-Party Intervention Processes in Digital Urban Contexts,” coauthored by Associate Professor of Communication  Jeffrey Lane and published online in Qualitative Sociology on August 2, 2022, is one of the first studies to demonstrate empirically how communication and technology theory can be applied to understand and address one of the most pressing socioeconomic problems of our time: gun violence and its concentration in poor, racially segregated, Black neighborhoods.

“Our findings reject the castigation and scapegoating of social media that allows politicians, media, and police to disregard the racial inequalities and long-term suffering at the root of urban violence,” Lane said.

Drawing on ten years of fieldwork among Black youth in Harlem in New York City and Chicago’s South Side, Lane and his coauthor Stanford University Associate Professor of Sociology Forrest Stuart said they found social media affords a historic level of what new media scholars refer to as ‘communication visibility.’ Communication visibility, they explained, makes relationships and interactions between individuals visible to existing ties and new and wider audiences, thereby generating onlooker effects that allow third parties to more readily monitor and intervene in other’s respective communication networks.

Lane and Stuart wrote, “Our analysis demonstrates how third parties can serve as a vital protective factor against exposure to violence. This provides a potential answer to longstanding questions about why certain individuals, despite their presence in violent cultural contexts and risky networks do not engage in or experience violence at the same rate as peers under similar conditions. Methodologically, our approach to digital urban ethnography offers a framework for examining social media activity as a historically new vehicle by which community members exert informal social control.”

Their findings are significant, Lane said, because politicians, journalists, and members of the public often call out social media as a violent force in young people’s lives, suggesting that law enforcement should use social media for increased surveillance. This presumption places already-marginalized communities of color at even greater risk of harmful legal entanglements.  

“Our findings reject the castigation and scapegoating of social media that allows politicians, media, and police to disregard the racial inequalities and long-term suffering at the root of urban violence,” Lane said.

Lane said in the digital urban settings he and Stuart researched, sisters, girlfriends, outreach workers, street pastors, and other concerned community members have found numerous ways to leverage the visibility of communication on social media to prevent and intervene in potentially violent encounters.

To empirically examine the relationship between “communication visibility” and non- violence, Lane and Stuart said they used a digital urban ethnographic approach first developed by Lane. By using this research method, they were simultaneously both physically in the neighborhoods they were researching, and online on social media feeds and in the online networks of the neighborhoods and their residents. They said this approach better enabled them to understand “the variable relationship between (potential) conflicts and neighborhood ecologies of violence” more deeply than using self-report surveys, arrest data, or even traditional ethnographic methods of shadowing those directly involved in violence.

Their findings are significant, Lane said, because politicians, journalists, and members of the public often call out social media as a violent force in young people’s lives, suggesting that law enforcement should use social media for increased surveillance.

Lane said that past research has also revealed another side of monitoring of social media by third parties that is not necessarily or inherently positive: there are at least two contexts—prosecutions and vigilantism—in which onlooker effects harm community and individual wellbeing.

Lane and Stuart’s findings show that whether onlooker effects enhance or reduce community vitality depends largely on who acts as a third party (e.g., community insiders versus outsiders) and the goal of third-party monitoring and intervention (e.g., community inclusion versus exclusion).

As an example, Lane said his former research documented the ways prosecutors use social media to bring charges against youth suspected of gang-related crime.

Lane said, “As community outsiders, prosecutors seek to use communication visibility to remove suspected ‘gang members’ from the community. The resources brought to bear are punitive, compulsory, and highly exclusionary. They include felony charges, incarceration, and criminal records. Although some argue that such surveillance and punishment can reduce neighborhood violence, these reductions come at steep costs to individual defendants, uninvolved community members, and other public safety mechanisms.”

Their paper, Lane said, reveals the valuable, practical, and timely nature of this research. It shows the importance of applying theories and concepts from communication and technology to new settings, problems, and academic disciplines, including sociology. “In this case, communication visibility—a key communication-and-technology theory developed in organizational settings—allows us to rethink the most taken-for-granted assumptions about urban violence to transform knowledge and intervention.”

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