Online activities can serve as tools for criminal opportunities and arenas for victimhood, but they can also function as reality constructions embedded in social control. One example of the latter is online sleuthing, primarily focused on dramatizing and disentangling offline crimes. This article relies on data from an ethnographic project conducted on the Swedish platform Flashback and analyzes posters’ interview accounts of their practices when attempting to unravel offline crimes. The author argues that posters’ ways of accounting for their sifting process within their digital community contribute to making it attractive. The posters’ situated selections and distinctions allow them to reproduce a handy and relatively tasteful interpretation of the crimes that their digital community is engaged in portraying. Online sleuths not only try to bring order to the offline crime dramas at issue but also engage in internal and reflexive social control, intended to order the ordering itself. They bridge the online–offline divide by referring to and incorporating allegedly objective offline circumstances when they set out to edit or cleanse the online debate. Offline investigations, interactions, and information gatherings are drawn upon as a resource in this sifting process.

中文翻译：

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在线侦查时挑选好东西

在线活动可以作为犯罪机会的工具和受害者的舞台，但它们也可以作为嵌入社会控制的现实建构。后者的一个例子是在线侦查，主要侧重于戏剧化和解开线下犯罪。本文基于瑞典平台 Flashback 上进行的人种学项目的数据，分析了发帖人在试图揭开线下犯罪时的采访记录。作者认为，发帖者在数字社区中解释筛选过程的方式有助于使其更具吸引力。海报的位置选择和区别使他们能够对他们的数字社区正在描绘的犯罪行为进行方便且相对有品味的解释。网络侦探不仅试图给有争议的线下犯罪剧带来秩序，而且还参与内部和反射性的社会控制，旨在秩序本身。当他们着手编辑或清理在线辩论时，他们通过参考并纳入所谓的客观线下环境来弥合线上线下分歧。线下调查、互动和信息收集被用作筛选过程中的资源。