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Short abstract:

This study explores research within the context of the Polish drug trade darknet site. It discusses methodological challenges in crime-related digital ethnography and shows how data gathering and user engagement methods offer insights into the online drug trade’s dynamics and community interactions.

Long abstract:

This paper explores digital ethnography within the unique context of Cebulka, the foremost Polish darknet forum dedicated to drug trade activities via TOR. In Cebulka, the users not only buy drugs with particular safety mechanisms imposed, but some engage in active community debating drug-related and more general issues. This aspect challenges the prevailing narrative in the literature that online drug trading spaces are solely transactional. The netnography, conducted from February 2023 to January 2024, employed a dual approach: semi-automatic coding of site data supplemented with field notes and user interviews. This study’s purpose is twofold. Firstly, it indicates meanings ascribed to illegal activities and illuminates the complex dynamics of drug trading by revealing its communal aspects, contrasting with its typically transactional portrayal. This includes emphasizing how the aforementioned approaches to data gathering yielded different insights. Secondly, the methodological side of the study is explained, including the problems and specificity of netnography in a particular crime-related environment. Numerous modifications to standard procedures had to be implemented to gain access to data, some of it hidden, based on the users’ status. Additionally, due to highly suspicious and safety-oriented users, unconventional measures had to be taken to engage them ethically and in a relevant manner. The paper discusses what this particular case study can teach us when conducting digital ethnography in general. The research presented is part of a larger ongoing project on online drug trade financed by the Polish National Science Center.