What’s the deal with ‘websleuthing’? News media representations of amateur detectives in networked spaces

Abstract

This article explores websleuthing, a phenomenon widely discussed and debated in popular culture but little-researched by criminologists. Drawing upon a review of existing literature and analysis of news media representations, we argue that websleuthing is much more diverse than previously thought. Encompassing a wide range of motives, manifestations, activities, networked spaces and cases, websleuthing has a variety of impacts upon victims, secondary victims, suspects, criminal justice organisations and websleuths themselves. We conclude that websleuthing is the embodiment of true crime infotainment in a ‘wound culture’ (Seltzer, 2007, 2008) and as such, is deserving of more criminological scrutiny than has been the case to date.