Breaking bad online: A synthesis of the darker sides of social networking sites

摘要

This essay deconstructs the ultra-dark side of social media and explores the variety of 'bad' behaviour online by looking at a wide spectrum of exploitative practices. Through the use of primary data from an online platform, we posit the question What's the worst thing you've done online'? We collect, code and synthesise the fully anonymised discussions and develop a classification model for bad online behaviour. We combine the categories that emerge from our empirical data with those proposed by Baccarella, Wagner, Kietzmann, and McCarthy (2018) and develop a new combined (meta-) classification model that captures both the dark side of social networking and the ultra-dark. A framework is proposed for conceptualising the spectrum of exploitative practices and the essay concludes by providing a series of management considerations. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.