The DIGSUM Centre for Digital Social Research at Umeå University, in collaboration with the Swedish Research Council (VR), invites everyone interested to a 2-day symposium on 18-19 September 2025 to explore how crime and control are reshaped in a digital society.

  • As technological infrastructures increasingly mediate everyday life, they also transform how harm is enacted, policed, narrated, and resisted. From online vigilantism to platform-driven surveillance, from algorithmic governance to digitally enabled abuse, the digital is not just a backdrop to crime—it is deeply entangled in its formation and interpretation.

    This symposium entitled Digital Darkside: Crime and control in online spaces brings together scholars across law, criminology, media studies, and digital sociology, the symposium critically engages with how power, violence, and justice take form in online spaces. We ask how digital technologies blur boundaries between policing and surveillance, how platform architectures influence both criminal activity and its prevention, and how digital environments reshape who is visible, who is vulnerable, and who is believed.

    Across two days of keynote lectures and research presentations, the symposium opens up a space for reflection on the shifting dynamics of crime and control. Rather than offering definitive answers, it invites interdisciplinary dialogue about the uncertainties, tensions, and urgencies that define the digital darkside of contemporary society.

  • The symposium is held at Galaxen, UMU [map]

SYMPOSIUM PROGRAMME

Thursday 18 September

  • Welcome to the symposium and Umeå! Here you will be presented with the symposium programme, the people and an outline of the upcoming two days, packed with presentations and discussions

    Simon Lindgren

  • ☕

    1. When Words Become Warnings: Assessing Threats in Online Spaces [abstract]
      Lisa Kaati [profile]

    2. Mathilda Åkerlund

    3. Making Sense of Senseless Violence: Introducing the '764 Network' as a case of emerging online extremism [abstract]
      Felicia Lundstedt [profile]

  • [Click for map with location]

    1. Shame and Sanction: Social Control Practices in Darknet Communities [abstract] 
      Tove Gustavsson [profile]

    2. Forbidden Fields: The Selling and Buying of Women's Bodies Through Online Brothels [abstract]
      Erica Bergkvist [profile]

    3. Åsa Eldén(?)

  • ☕

    1. Conceptualizing Digital Force – Police hacking in Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands [abstract]
      Marcus Naarttijärvi [profile] & Ingvild Bruce [profile]

    2. Jannice Käll

    3. Tinker, Teamer, OSINT Spy: Towards a Typology of Antifascist Doxxers in Three Cases [abstract]
      Samuel Merrill [profile]

  • Moa Eriksson Krutrök

  • [Click for map with location]

Friday 19 September

  • ☕

    1. Simon Lindgren

    2. Maja Klinga(?)

    3. Negative campaigning and mobilization through visual disinformation [abstract]
      Xénia Farkas [profile]

  • Item description

    1. Synthetic or Authentic? - The Evidentiary Challenges of Deepfakes and AI-Generated Media [abstract]
      Nina Sunde [profile]

    2. Policing online child sexual abuse – Organizational challenges and investigator wellbeing [abstract]
      Oscar Rantatalo [profile]

    3. Swedish Police’s Social Media - A gray area and its implications for public safety [abstract TBA]
      Jens Alvén Sjöberg [profile]

    4. Katarina Winter

  • Simon Lindgren

    Moa Eriksson Krutrök

  • 👋