Characterizing Online Vandalism: A Rational Choice Perspective

TL;DR

This paper applies rational choice theory to understand online vandalism, analyzing Wikipedia vandalism to identify factors influencing vandal behavior and proposing a categorization framework based on social and criminological insights.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of rational choice theory to online vandalism, combining social computing and criminology to categorize vandal acts on Wikipedia.

Findings

Vandalism varies with vandals' identifiability

Policy history influences vandal behavior

Effort required affects vandalism type

Abstract

What factors influence the decision to vandalize? Although the harm is clear, the benefit to the vandal is less clear. In many cases, the thing being damaged may itself be something the vandal uses or enjoys. Vandalism holds communicative value: perhaps to the vandal themselves, to some audience at whom the vandalism is aimed, and to the general public. Viewing vandals as rational community participants despite their antinormative behavior offers the possibility of engaging with or countering their choices in novel ways. Rational choice theory (RCT) as applied in value expectancy theory (VET) offers a strategy for characterizing behaviors in a framework of rational choices, and begins with the supposition that subject to some weighting of personal preferences and constraints, individuals maximize their own utility by committing acts of vandalism. This study applies the framework of RCT and VET to gain insight into vandals' preferences and constraints. Using a mixed-methods analysis of Wikipedia, I combine social computing and criminological perspectives on vandalism to propose an ontology of vandalism for online content communities. I use this ontology to categorize 141 instances of vandalism and find that the character of vandalistic acts varies by vandals' relative identifiability, policy history with Wikipedia, and the effort required to vandalize.