Tracking Discourse Influence in Darknet Forums

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for visualizing semantic and temporal features to analyze discourse influence in darknet forums, providing insights into cybercrime communication dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a joint visualization approach combining semantic and temporal data to understand darknet discourse influence, a novel method in this context.

Findings

Insight into message impact on darknet communities

Visualization of discourse dynamics over time

Publicly available code and data for reproducibility

Abstract

This technical report documents our efforts in addressing the tasks set forth by the 2021 AMoC (Advanced Modelling of Cyber Criminal Careers) Hackathon. Our main contribution is a joint visualisation of semantic and temporal features, generating insight into the supplied data on darknet cybercrime through the aspects of novelty, transience, and resonance, which describe the potential impact a message might have on the overall discourse in darknet communities. All code and data produced by us as part of this hackathon is publicly available.