Ecologies of Violence on Social Media: An Exploration of Practices,Contexts,and Grammars of Online Harm

Abstract

Violence is an almost ubiquitous phenomenon in contemporary digital environments. In this context, there is a growing need to understand how violence is enacted and represented on social media. Drawing from a case study where Colombian young adults discussed the violence they interacted with on their everyday uses of digital platforms, this article explores how violence on social media is experienced and understood by users. Findings emphasize the need to look at violence on digital platforms as a multifaceted, fluid, overlapping, and interconnected phenomenon. In light of these results, I suggest framing current harmful practices as ecologies of violence. To better explore these ecologies, I outline three specific areas that highlight how violence is transformed on social media: practices, contexts, and grammars. Overall, this study emphasizes the need to recognize and address the complexity of violence in social media—a necessary step toward building cultures of peace in and outside of our digital environments.

Keywords

violence social media media ecology online harm ecologies of violence case study

Introduction

Even as violence is a concept that has long accompanied humanity, it is no easy task to make sense of what it is or how it is exercised. Certainly, defining violence always involves framing it in cultural and historical contexts (Dwyer, 2017), recognizing that “what violence means is and will always be fluid, not fixed; it is mutable” (Stanko, 2005, p. 3, emphasis in original). Moreover, as digital technologies—such as social media platforms—become increasingly central to our daily existence (Lagerkvist, 2018), they have become essential components in how violence is enacted and experienced. An illustration of the pervasiveness of violence on social media can be easily found in emergent terminology to describe quotidian manifestations of harm on digital platforms, such as cyberbullying and trolling.

Indeed, as access to and use of social media continue to expand across the world (Kemp, 2022), so does the violence enacted through these digital platforms become more common. For example, a report published by the Pew Research Center (Vogels, 2021) found that over 41% of people in the United States of America have suffered online harassment, from physical threats (14%) and sexual harassment (11%) to name-calling (31%). But violence in digital environments is not only expanding, it is also becoming more complex as the evolving affordances, structures, and cultures of contemporary digital environments increase their scale, speed, reach, and visibility (Backe et al., 2018). For instance, violence on social media is found in the new ways cultural and informational wars are enacted and deployed in the United States:

In these wars, the weapons were memes, slogans, ideas; the tactics were internet-enabled threats like swarms, doxes, brigades, disinformation, and media-manipulation campaigns; and the strategy of the warriors was to move their influence from the wires (the internet) to the weeds (the real world) by trading fringe ideas up the partisan media ecosystem and into mainstream culture. (Donovan et al., 2022, pp. 14–15)

And, while violence on social media is most often discussed in countries of the Global North (Backe et al., 2018), attention to this subject in other parts of the world continues to grow, including Latin America (e.g., Anaya et al., 2022). In Colombia, the setting of this study, the end of an internal armed conflict in 2018, and the possibility of entering a new age of violence (Gutiérrez Sanín, 2020) provide great significance to efforts to understand how social media enacts, represents, and transforms violence—especially concerning political and armed violence (e.g., Parra Gregory, 2015; Said-Hung & Luquetta-Cediel, 2018). These efforts are increasingly relevant, as noted by Parra Méndez et al. (2021), who argue that violence in Colombia has migrated to social media environments and the internet, often translating violent practices and antagonistic relationships to these digital spaces. Colombia’s case illustrates that, while violence on social media is a global phenomenon, its impacts and manifestations are intertwined with particular socio-political and cultural contexts.

In the context of the growing complexity, severity, and ubiquity of violence on social media, scholars and civic organizations across multiple disciplines have urged researchers, educators, policymakers, and users to treat digital violence as a severe threat; an integral component in the continuum of violence that is deeply interconnected to other forms and manifestations of violence (Wilkins et al., 2014). To properly address the increasing complexity of violence on digital platforms, however, it is critical to first understand how violence is transformed by social media. Such is the goal of this study, focused on the lived experiences of Colombian young adults on social media. If, as Postman (1998) noted, “a new medium does not add anything, it changes everything” (para. 18), this study responds to the critical and timely necessity to provide further insights into the ways digital technologies transform how violence is enacted, represented, and experienced by users of these platforms.

This study draws from media ecology, an intellectual tradition that sees media as environments comprising a complex set of relationships between media, symbols, and culture (Strate, 2017). While over 60 years old, this tradition offers critical insights into the contemporary media environments, as it emphasizes how digital platforms create environments that transform how we connect to one another and the world (Laskowska & Marcyński, 2019). Overall, two key ideas of media ecology are central to this study. First, the notion that social media, like any other media, is a “complex and multidimensional interaction between people, their media, and other social forces” (Lum, 2014, p. 137). Studying social media through the lens of complexity and multidimensional interaction foregrounds them as intertwined with cultures, agencies, and structures, which is a central tenet throughout this study. Second, media ecology is often approached through the lens of communicative biases, which stress that “media do not determine our actions, but they define the range of possible actions we can take, and facilitate certain actions while discouraging others” (Strate, 2008, p. 135). Using this lens emphasizes that digital platforms are not neutral, rather they are built on a set of physical, technical, symbolic, and environmental characteristics that encourage users to engage with violence in specific ways.

Literature Review: Violence and Social Media Platforms

Violence—understood as direct, cultural, or structural harm targeted toward specific individuals or communities (Galtung & Fischer, 2013)—is no longer at the margins of the web. It is a widespread phenomenon that directly or indirectly affects many aspects of our lives. Nonetheless, digital manifestations of violence are often thought to be less “real,” “serious,” or “harmful” than those enacted face-to-face (Dunn, 2021). Indeed, they are often framed under digital dualism, where the virtual and the real are separated, diminishing the significance of online violence and causing victims to constantly need to restate that this type of violence matters (Gosse, 2021). But boundaries between offline and online violence are increasingly artificial and blurred, rendering such old dichotomies innocuous. Illustrations of complex interactions between online and offline realities around violence abound. For example, Coombs (2021) argues that digital manifestations of violence directly impact various human rights, such as the “rights to privacy, freedom of movement, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly to name a few, as well as rights relating to freedom from violence” (p. 480). In this context, and as argued by Dunn (2021), to name digital violence as violence is an urgent and necessary task, because “to do otherwise risks minimizing the severity of these actions and fails to recognize their interconnectedness with other more familiar forms of violence” (p. 28).

Nevertheless, naming online violence as violence is not enough. To examine its relevance and reach, it is critical to connect the concept to societal issues in the social, political, and cultural contexts in which the acts of online violence are enacted or take place. For example, various studies have explored digital violence associated with issues such as gendered violence (Jane, 2018), racism (Matamoros-Fernández et al., 2022), street fights (Wood, 2017), criminal gangs (Densley, 2020), and even terrorism (Tait, 2008). These examples foreground violence on digital platforms as strongly intertwined with the power struggles taking place in the context in which they occur. And social media do not merely present old forms of violence in new ways, they also transform them in profound and complex ways. For instance, as with most content posted on digital platforms, violence in social media is more visible, spreadable, searchable, and persistent than in most other mediums (boyd, 2014). Such prevalence of harmful content on digital platforms can also naturalize violence by reinforcing discourses that expand and normalize existing structures of oppression (Recuero, 2015).

To understand the urgency and complexity of framing online violence, three areas of literature at the intersection of social media and violence scholarship are especially relevant: studies that discuss the violence that is enacted on platforms, studies that discuss the violence that is represented through platforms, and studies that discuss how platforms enact violence.

The first relevant area of scholarship refers to violence enacted on social media. This line of scholarship has explored how, since the advent of computer-mediated communication, the affordances of digital technologies have been used to enact violence on others (Moor et al., 2010). Insights in this line of research show that violence is often facilitated by the fact that victims and perpetrators do not have to have a face-to-face encounter (Dragiewicz et al., 2018). In addition, research emphasizes that violence on social media is often perceived as innocuous because it is disguised as humor (Matamoros-Fernández et al., 2022). In this area of research, the expansion of violence enacted by social media has been studied from both disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Indeed, the variety of ways in which violence is approached has led to numerous terms to frame it, such as technology-facilitated violence and abuse (Dunn, 2021), e-bile (Jane, 2014), flaming (Moor et al., 2010), cyberhate (Jane, 2018), trolling (Jakubowicz, 2017), cyberbullying (Whittaker & Kowalski, 2015), and online hate speech (Schmid et al., 2022). While overlapping in many aspects, these terms have distinct epistemological, axiological, methodological, and ontological differences that enrich discussions and insights into online harms.

The second area of research is concerned with how violence is represented through social media platforms, often from fields such as journalism (Mengü & Mengü, 2015), psychology (Stubbs et al., 2022), and criminology (Wood, 2017). In this line of scholarship the focus is often on how digital technologies enable the expansion of violent content over time and scale “circulat[ing] images of atrocity in real time, allowing a global audience to see acts of terror as they unfold” (Duncombe, 2020, p. 627). As such, this area of research emphasizes how social media transforms the representation of violence and war under the new dynamics of media (Reguillo, 2011; Tait, 2008). Furthermore, literature on this area of research has shown that people who are more exposed to violence on social media have complex reactions to it, including being distressed, in need of self-care time, appreciative of their lives, desensitized, or just indifferent to it (Stubbs et al., 2022). Scholarship in this area highlights the importance of studying violence through different lenses of interpretation, as understanding the various modes of violence afforded by the internet enables researchers and policymakers to better respond to potential harms on digital platforms (Tait, 2008).

Finally, a third relevant line of scholarship examines how social media companies and infrastructures sustain and expand violence. Literature in this area explores how digital platforms exercise and expand violence as they accumulate and wield power in contemporary societies (van Dijck et al., 2019). Relevant research in this area can be organized into two categories. First, there is the research that examines how platforms enact violence inside their digital ecosystems. For instance, studies on how specific populations are deplatformed (e.g., Blunt et al., 2021), how violent content is magnified through recommendation systems (e.g., Wood, 2017), how automated accounts are created to amplify and redirect hateful speech (e.g., Uyheng et al., 2022), or how specific affordances reinforce racial and gendered violence (e.g., Yee et al., 2021). Second, there is research focused on how platforms perpetuate violence outside their digital environments. For instance, there are studies that explore algorithmic violence, referring to the processes by which “an algorithm or automated decision-making system inflicts [violence] by preventing people from meeting their basic needs” (Onuoha, 2018). In addition, studies have also shown how social media companies sustain and expand extractivist practices—whether in the form of natural resources to sustain the necessary infrastructures of social media companies (Crawford, 2021) or in the form of the commodification of social relations that enact data colonialism (Couldry & Mejias, 2019). As social media platforms increasingly engage in processes of datafication, algorithmization, and automation, they “contribute to the deepening of global inequality, materializing multiple forms of violence that are rendered invisible” (Ricaurte, 2022, p. 3), exercising physical, economic, social, and cultural violence.

To draw bridges between these three areas of literature, in this study, I foreground an ecological view of violence on social media. An ecological understanding focuses on how violence shapes and is shaped by digital platforms. Here, specific manifestations of violence are seen as being at play to other manifestations of harm, sociocultural contexts, and structures of power—thus connecting literature on how violence is enacted, represented, and sustained by platforms. Indeed, an ecological approach emphasizes that violence is enacted within complex systems that are imbricated and constantly changing—it takes place within practices, structures, and cultures that exist within and outside the digital environment. Accordingly, this study aims to further expand and explore what it means to focus on the contemporary ecologies of violence on social media.

Research Methods

This article is based on a case study that examines how Colombian young adults engage in and understand social media violence. In this case study, I worked with 18 young adults from Medellin, Colombia. The participants were between 19 and 24 years old, and all of them were undergraduate students from seven different universities and various disciplines, including communication, law, engineering, and psychology. Moreover, participants shared an interest in better understanding cultures of peace and violence, illustrated by their involvement with various courses, projects, or collectives at their universities. Accordingly, the recruitment strategy consisted of identifying instructors and professors currently working on relevant projects or classes and asking them to extend invitations to students interested in participating in this study. All the students who fulfilled the requirements of the study (such as age) were invited to participate in this study.

In this case study, the objective was to center participants’ experiences at the moment they engaged with digital platforms—foregrounding their understandings and lived experiences around violence on social media. To achieve this, participants were organized into five small discussion groups of three to four students per group. Each group participated in an online chat group and four synchronous meetings. In the chat, participants shared experiences and reactions to the violence they identified in their everyday uses of social media. In the synchronous meetings, participants discussed their notes from the social media violence they shared in the chat group and other lived experiences over the week.

The data collected to respond to the study’s objectives included discussions from the synchronous meetings and 233 instances of violence identified and shared by the participants during the project. In addition, participants’ responses to an initial and exit survey were included in this study—especially focused on the question “provide an example of social media violence.” To analyze all the data, I relied on thematic analysis, with the goal of creating and identifying “creative and interpretive stories about the data, produced at the intersection of the researcher’s theoretical assumptions, their analytic resources and skill, and the data themselves” (Braun & Clarke, 2019, p. 594). Following the approach outlined by Braun and Clarke (2012) to thematic analysis, I generated a first set of codes by using a semantic method (Braun et al., 2019), seeking to categorize participants’ intended meanings. Using Nvivo 12, I then constructed and reviewed a series of candidate themes by clustering codes similar to one another and promoting codes that represented a central concept of their own. Finally, all the themes were organized and named into coherent stories that properly addressed the objectives of this research. All data were collected and analyzed in Spanish, and then I translated only the data shown in this article.

To conduct this research, I obtained ethical approval from the university’s office of research ethics. Ethical guidelines often suggest that public social media posts (i.e., accessible without passwords) can be included in a study without consent. However, organizations such as the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) have previously noted that this approach is not enough to assure an ethical approach to collecting and analyzing social media content, as expectations of privacy and safety in these platforms go beyond password-protected content (franze et al., 2020; Markham & Buchanan, 2012). Accordingly, this study takes a contextual and dialectical approach to ethics in internet research, where participants were asked to consider whether or not posts should be shared with others. In addition, at the end of the data collection process, I analyzed case by case whether the social media posts that participants shared were to be included in the study.

Results: Understanding the Ecologies of Violence on Social Media

According to the study participants, violence is a common occurrence on social media. For example, one participant argued that “we are exposed to social media violence just by being there.” This apparent ubiquity of violence is perceived across a wide range of manifestations, sources, and contexts. Indeed, data shows that violence can take many forms—an insult on Facebook from a neighbor, a video of a traffic accident shared on Instagram, a comment on TikTok ridiculing your clothes, a reply on Twitter harassing your friend due to their gender, a sticker on WhatsApp ridiculing a classmate, or a sex tape leaked on Telegram. In this sense, participants recognize that violence on social media manifests in response to a variety of factors such as age, gender, body morphology, sexual preference, race, nationality, or social class. Moreover, beyond noting that violence on social media “can be viewed and caused at any time,” participants highlight how it is “the extension of ‘common’ violence, moving everyday violence into a new space.” In brief, results show that violence not only encompasses all social media platforms, but it is also pervasive and polymorphic, deeply connected to the contexts in and beyond the digital environment.

When discussing how violence on social media differs from that enacted through other media, participants note different aspects and affordances of digital environments. For example, participants noted the increased reach of harmful online behaviors with one participant commenting that “social media is more violent because it has a much larger reach . . . I can easily reach millions of people.” In addition, participants discussed how the ease of creating content enables everybody to engage in harmful behaviors quickly, such as “the ease of expressing disagreement on any content we do not like.” Participants also often discussed how anonymity can promote the creation of social media violence by stating, for example, that “social media allows us to hide behind a profile that let us to say anything . . . people who see this will not really know who is the one who has those thoughts.” Anonymity is also connected to the possibility of being violent at a distance without having to deal with the responsibilities that face-to-face interactions carry. As one participant pointed out, “not being physically close makes the aggressor feel the advantage of attacking without the need for the attacker to respond directly.” Indeed, while violence on social media is connected to other manifestations of harm, these results stress that it is not the same as harm enacted through other means. Accordingly, it is necessary to understand the particularities of violence as it is enacted on social media platforms—that is, they understand violence on social media by following an ecological approach.

Accordingly, to explore the components of violence under an ecological approach, I will now focus on three emergent themes from the analyzed data: practices, contexts, and grammar.

Practices of Violence

Practices refer to how violence is exercised in and through digital platforms. This theme connects to practice theory, a theoretical approach focused on the importance of understanding what people are “doing in relation to media across a whole range of situations and contexts” (Couldry, 2004, p. 119, emphasis in original). Accordingly, practices of violence underscore the micro-level interactions through which people exercise and encounter violence on digital platforms. Here, participants observed that most of the violent acts they identified are enabled by the platforms’ affordances. These acts of violence often include personal attacks or threats of physical harm. For example, one participant told the story of how the comment feature had been used to insult a Colombian influencer on Instagram, observing that people were harassing her by talking about “her dress, that she was overweight, that she had had a terrible surgery, that she had a lot of money and wasted a lot of it, that she didn’t help other people.”

Participants also emphasized how the platforms are used to amplify the reach of violence taking place in offline settings. Their accounts demonstrate how violence that occurs in different contexts is then seen, commented on, and shared by multiple people. For example, one participant shared how people were publishing and sharing videos of a massive brawl in a Mexican stadium, where several people died, pointing out that “very explicit videos are being shared on TikTok of what happened in the stadium in Mexico. It really impresses me.”

Furthermore, participants noted that violence can extend to reach beyond the digital sphere, illustrating the profound implications it can have outside platforms, even among those who infrequently engage with them. For example, one participant told the following story:

Informal lenders now use a type of application on Facebook in which you register, and they make loans in 10 minutes . . . in 10 minutes, they send you the money. But they download your WhatsApp data and your contacts because you give the permissions when you download the application. Well, now they have your private information without you knowing so. And they start to threaten you and tell you that they know where you live and who your contacts are.

In addition, participants recounted cases of symbolic violence on digital platforms—violence that “naturalizes the discourse about things and legitimates the domination system” (Recuero, 2015, p. 1). An example of this kind of violence was provided by a participant who recounted how her family used a WhatsApp group to continually comment on how she was dressed or who she was going out with, arguing that “good women from this country do not do that.” Cases like this illustrate how social media platforms are used to naturalize discourses of domination and control—sustaining and expanding cultures of violence.

Finally, participants noted harmful acts being perpetrated by the platforms. In these instances, they pointed out different practices that they identified as violence, such as the collection and analysis of their personal data without their consent (e.g., “[platforms] pass on your data as they see fit. They own our data”), the lack of transparency around algorithmic reordering of their timelines that filter what they see on their platforms (e.g., “other things will come up [in your timeline], little by little. Things that have nothing to do with what you want to see and that can be very violent”), or censoring without explanation (e.g., “there is a monopoly where they can say ‘you have the right to express your opinion and you.’ . . . That can be a factor in generating violence”). These instances illustrate how platforms’ designs and policies enact, reproduce, and expand violence.

In this theme, I listed five ways in which violence is practiced on social media: it is enacted through it, amplified by its affordances, expanded beyond digital environments, enacted by platforms, and naturalized. Moreover, it is essential to note that these five types of practice do not occur in isolation. Indeed, as noted by one participant, “many times, violence is formed from other violence.” This quote illustrates the importance of foregrounding an ecological understanding of violence on social media, showing how digital platforms have further complicated the nature of violence in contemporary societies.

Contexts of Violence

The second theme is contexts, which refer to the settings of creation, publication, and interpretation of violence. In this case, context is understood as a set of conditions (such as time, space, and culture) that locate us in relation to one another, helping us to make sense of the world (Berger, 2022). As such, contexts—a concept of significant interest to social media scholars (e.g., Davis & Jurgenson, 2014)—implies a surfacing of actors involved in the processes of creation, reception, and reproduction of violence, placing them in relation to their surroundings and rendering (in)visible the cultures and structures embedded in their environments.

A first component that people identify regarding contexts is the various spatiotemporal settings from which violence emerges, ranging from international (e.g., the war between Russia and Ukraine), national (e.g., armed conflicts with the ELN in Colombia), local (e.g., fights between soccer fans), hyperlocal (e.g., transit accidents in their neighborhoods), or in their immediate surroundings (e.g., harassment from an ex-boyfriend through direct messages in Instagram) contexts. Here, participants note that contexts of violence—whether near or far, present or past—are easily accessible through social media. For example, one participant who lived away from her family said that platforms like WhatsApp allow family members to exercise violence against her: “My uncles are super macho. They have that culture super ingrained in them, and they are always messaging me things like ‘you shouldn’t be like that,’ ‘girls don’t do that,’ ‘girls don’t behave like that.’”

In addition, participants identify a wide range of actors responsible for creating, sustaining, and reproducing violence in digital environments—such as politicians, friends, family members, sports fans, internet trolls, and influencers. Nevertheless, while these actors are seen as most commonly responsible for harassment on digital platforms, participants note that it is hard to assign them full responsibility for online violence. As such, participants recognize the presence of networked power across the digital platforms they frequently use (Castells, 2011), where interconnected actors sustain and expand enactments of violence. For instance, participants noted how some users repost hateful comments on Twitter or how family members share videos of traffic accidents over WhatsApp. Certainly, due to the presence of these networks of power, participants note that almost all social media users are responsible for the enactment and replication of violence. Indeed, they argue that “we are all responsible for social media violence” and “we are all accomplices.”

Moreover, participants also noted various contextual cultural and structural manifestations of violence. Here, each cultural and structural manifestation of violence changes its visibility on social media. In some cases, forms of cultural and structural violence such as racism, xenophobia, and gender violence are rendered more visible on digital platforms. For example, one participant described how he felt when he saw a trend where women posted on Instagram a screenshot of their name plus the word “found” in the Google search engine. This trend is meant to show how many women disappear every day in Latin America:

I’ve seen this trend about ten times today, and I always think that there will be just one result. But then it turns out that they fill the whole page, and they are all different news about Daniela: “Daniela found in Bello,” “Daniela found in Cauca,” “Daniela found in Ecuador.” It is hard to assimilate how many times this kind of violence happens. . . in the end I understand that it is about something very systematic.

In other cases, however, contexts are rendered opaque and less visible. For example, a participant noted how the prevalence of violence in digital environments often leads to its normalization: “You don’t even realize how there are so many violent things on the internet, so many things.” This observation emphasizes how the ubiquity of harmful comments and content can sometimes hinder one’s ability to identify and make sense of it. Yet, normalization is not the only way violence is rendered opaque. Indeed, participants noted that violence enacted by the platforms—such as data recollection or systems of recommendation—is hard to discern, commenting that “they are systems of algorithms that one does not understand.”

These contexts of violence, moreover, are in constant connection with one another. For instance, participants noted that contexts of violence often “collapse and collide” on social media (Davis & Jurgenson, 2014, p. 483). For example, they discussed how Will Smith’s slap to Chris Rock during the 2022 Oscars collapsed with ongoing discussions of gender violence in Colombia: “From that point on [the slap], there was a lot of memes violence against women in Colombia.” These discussions illustrate how two seamlessly different contexts (the Oscars and Colombian gender violence) are intertwined in participants’ engagement with social media. These processes of collapse and collision stress the porosity of context on social media, where networks and actors easily seep into one another. Furthermore, these processes not only bring the contexts closer together, they also generate new manifestations of violence. For instance, on the topic of how the war between Russia and Ukraine was being discussed among the people she followed on Twitter, one participant observed:

I heard people saying, “Russia supports Venezuela and then Venezuela has super good weapons . . . so, there is going to be a war between Colombia and Venezuela,” and I kept saying to myself: Wait, what are you saying? They are already escalating a war across the other side of the world, and they are promoting hatred against Venezuelans.

Grammars of Violence

Finally, the third theme refers to the grammars of violence on social media, which emphasizes how violent speech, images, and narratives are organized in and across environments (Reguillo, 2021). This theme rests on the media ecology’s long-standing notion that each medium ought to be thought of as a new language, and thus require a nuanced understanding of its emergent grammars (Kuskis, 2015). As such, grammars of violence are closely linked to a platform’s affordances (e.g., direct messages that allow users to message people directly), cultures (e.g., tolerance toward harassment of specific populations), and structures (e.g., algorithms that highlight specific types of content in users’ timelines).

Here, it is important to note the common characteristics across the analyzed platforms. For example, participants’ experiences and testimonies highlight humor as a frequent way to exercise and camouflage harmful behavior across platforms, as evidenced by the following observation: “There are often comments in a ‘shit-posting’ style that often camouflage hatred with humor.” Indeed, these commonalities foreground a shared grammar of violence across social media platforms.

However, participants often noted that violence manifested differently in each platform. For instance, participants note that violence on Twitter is often exercised by users (re)posting harmful content or commenting on others’ posts. As the participants observed, this platform facilitates connections between strangers and that acts of violence are often instigated by people they do not know. Indeed, they consider Twitter to be the most violent of all the social media platforms as demonstrated by statements such as “[it] is like a public bonfire” and “it is too toxic.” Furthermore, the participants noted that on Facebook violence often is enacted in comments on their posts or from posts of people they follow. As one participant observed, “in Facebook’s comments there are people who literally want to kill each other.” Here, harmful behavior is typically instigated by people they know or those who belong to a particular interest group. Conversely, violence on Instagram is often symbolic, as demonstrated by portrayals such as one of the participants highlighted where influencers “show on Instagram a perfect life, but it is a false life. They are violating people who want to follow a life that is not possible, that is not sustainable, that does not really happen.” Beyond this symbolic violence, the study participants also argued that violence on this platform is commonly exercised and shared via private messaging. Finally, WhatsApp was considered by participants to be a source of private and intimate violence—that is, violence that is not visible to others and that often comes from people they know, such as family or friends. Violence here can take many forms, such as content shared as chain messages displaying violence—as in one participant’s example of “videos of the security camera of the man who killed himself and had his head exploded, that is shared massively in WhatsApp.” These variations in how violence is organized—that is, platforms’ grammars of violence—highlight the need to better understand how specific digital environments transform and enact violence.

Moreover, these grammars of violence are further complicated when content is shared across different digital environments. Examples of cross-platform harmful content include compilations of TikTok videos ridiculing specific people that are then shared on YouTube, aggressive tweets that are screenshotted and shared on Facebook, or private Instagram messages that are shared on Twitter without consent. These examples illustrate the need to understand social media violence from an ecological perspective, highlighting the limits of understanding violence from a single platform.

Discussion: Toward an Understanding of the Ecologies of Violence on Social Media

Violence is a pervasive and often inescapable aspect of contemporary digital environments. As such, the results of this study align with arguments posed by scholars such as Gosse (2021) and Dunn (2021), who make a case for a comprehensive and interconnected look at violence in and beyond digital environments. Considering the pervasiveness, contextuality, and impact of online harm, the findings of this study emphasize the necessity to frame the unique ways social media transforms how violence is exercised and experienced by users of digital platforms—that is, the benefits of understanding violence on social media by following an ecological approach.

To better understand these ecologies of violence on social media, I propose an analytical framework based on the concepts of practices, contexts, and grammars (see Figure 1). This framework can be approached in various ways to understand how violence is transformed and enacted in digital environments. For example, it can be used to understand particular enactments of violence (such as a particular attack against a user) by analyzing the specific practices, contexts, and grammars involved. It can also be used to analyze wider manifestations of violence, such as the practices, contexts, and grammars of gender violence across various platforms. Finally, it can be used to analyze specific platforms, for example, starting with the grammars of Instagram and exploring what practices and contexts are highlighted and emphasized by the platform. The uses and applications of this analytical framework ought to be expanded, applied, and criticized in future studies—especially contemplating how different demographic groups outside the sample included in this study experience violence on social media platforms.

Figure 1.

Analytical framework for studying the ecologies of violence on social media.

It is crucial to highlight that, as Reguillo (2021, p. 119) observes, violence does not arise out of nothing: it nests and grows through structural, subjective, and symbolic factors. Accordingly, future studies could combine this analytical framework with other theoretical lenses that contextualize, prioritize, and respond to power imbalances that depend on, expand, and sustain harmful behavior in digital environments. An example of a relevant theoretical approach is Martín-Barbero’s (2002) work on mediation, a lens that centers on the processes of interpretation and appropriation of media in specific socio-political and cultural contexts. Indeed, this approach foregrounds an epistemological shift in how we could address the complexity of violence on social media, focusing on the perspectives of the people engaging with it, emphasizing the need not to see the other but to see with the other (Martín-Barbero, 2019). Such an epistemological shift in how we study media is particularly relevant given violence’s subjective and contextual nature (Schmid et al., 2022; Stanko, 2005).

Conclusion

The objective of this study is not to discuss whether social media are cursed with pervasive and impactful harmful content. Instead, it is to note that violent behaviors on social media platforms “are here” (Postman, 1998, p. 11) and, as such, we ought to better understand how violence is interwoven and transformed by the affordances, cultures, and structures of contemporary digital environments. Ecologies of violence are a useful approach to explore how violence flows and is transformed within, across, and through social media platforms, intertwined with existing and emergent networks of power in and out of digital environments.

Ecologically understanding violence is essential to framing appropriate strategies, policies, and actions to respond to it. Indeed, an ecological reading on social media emphasizes the limitations of platforms’ traditional approach toward violence, which heavily relies on limited models of content moderation (Roberts, 2019). In this sense, it is clear that platforms could do more to address violence by evaluating and transforming their policies regarding online harms (Blackwell et al., 2018; Katsaros et al., 2022). In addition, users need to be aware of how their engagement on social media sustains and expands cultures of violence—an issue that can be addressed through educational programs that promote critical literacies (Nagle, 2018). Finally, policy makers ought to formulate better procedures that respond to contemporary forms of harm (such as gender violence) enacted on digital platforms (Dunn, 2020).

Recognizing that complex problems require complex solutions, the results of this study highlight that the best approach to address the ecologies of violence on social media is responding to the interconnected forms of systemic violence present in contemporary society. Such an approach resonates with the work of decolonial and feminist scholars, who raises questions such as: “Can we imagine addressing only part of this violence without considering the rest? Can we continue to feign not to see that all of these forms of violence mutually reinforce one another (. . .)”? (Vergès, 2022, p. 4) This effort would thus require a multi-stakeholder collaboration (Bailey & Liliefeldt, 2021; Schirch, 2021), where governments, platforms, and users promote cultures and structures of peace in the digital environment.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Rachel Horst for her constructive comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. The author would also like to Dr. Leah Macfadyen and Dr. Katherine Reilly for their insightful feedback on this article. Moreover, the author would like to thank Dr. Teresa Dobson and Dr. Mark Turin for their comments on the design and implementation of this study. The author also thanks the editors (Dr. Anatolyi Gruzd, Dr. Felipe Soares, and Dr. Philip Mai) for coordinating this issue. Finally, the author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, which have helped to enrich this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Esteban Morales

Author Biography

Esteban Morales is a PhD Candidate at the University of British Columbia. His research area is technology and society, with a special interest in the processes by which citizens and communities learn, resist, and appropriate digital media. Esteban has experience studying datafication, online violence, digital literacies, and peace education, among others.

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