Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

1. 
Collaborative projects (e.g., Wikipedia)
2. 
Blogs, including microblogs (e.g., Twitter)
3. 
Content communities (e.g., YouTube)
4. 
Social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn)
5. 
Virtual game worlds (e.g., World of Warcraft)
6. 
Virtual social worlds (e.g., Second Life)
The difference between social media and “traditional” media is the potential for 
users to create and exchange content that they themselves have created (
Kaplan 
and Haenlein, 2010
). This shift has resulted in users moving away from the 
passive reception of content to actively participating in the creation of online 
content.

---

198
CHAPTER 15
Social media and its role for LEAs: Review and applications
In this process, social media has begun to serve a number of disparate purposes. 
Ji et al. (2010)
 differentiate between five main functions:
1. 
Communication
: conversations with friends and the conveyance of individual 
opinions through the network
2. 
Connection
: maintenance of relationships created offline
3. 
Content sharing
: sharing or distribution of content such as information, music, 
videos, etc.
4. 
Expert search
: search for people, who hold professional knowledge and 
expertise that users wish to access
5. 
Identity
: publishing of own characteristics, emotions, moods, etc., to express 
users' identity online
These functions are not necessarily linked to specific social media platforms. In fact, 
often one social media platform can serve multiple functions. LinkedIn, a profes-
sional social networking site, accommodates all five: building connections with of-
fline acquaintances such as colleagues, the sharing of content such as documents and 
links, searching for subject matter experts as well as the representation of the user's 
own professional identity. It can also be used for communication purposes that range 
from the sending and receipt of personal emails to the advertisement of business 
services.
For many citizens social media has become an integral part of everyday life. 
Currently, estimates state that around 30% of the world's population use social net-
working sites (
Gaudin, 2013a
), and while established networks such as Facebook 
may be seeing a stagnation in their user numbers or at least a shift in the demograph-
ics of their users, the general trend of growth in the use of social media remains 
unbroken. As of 2013, 73% of US adults have memberships to at least one social 
networking site, with around 42% using multiple sites (
Duggan and Smith, 2013
).
In Facebook's ten-year existence it has developed from a small network of col-
lege students to a global platform that boasts 1.19 billion users. Further, rival plat-
forms such as Google 
+
and Twitter each boast around 500 million users each, with 
LinkedIn having 238 million users. And despite the fact that the most prevalent social 
media services are still US-based, the most engaged users in terms of average hours 
spent using social networks per month hail from Israel, Argentina, Russia, Turkey 
and Chile (
Statistics Brain, 2014
).
Given its almost ubiquitous nature, social media has become a vital tool for LEAs 
in developing competitive advantage against organized criminal threats. To this end, 
social media serves three main purposes (
Denef et al., 2012; Kaptein, 2012
):