Linguistic analysis of suspected child sexual offenders’ interactions in a dark web image exchange chatroom

Child sexual offenders convene in dark web spaces to exchange indecent imagery,  advice and support. In response, law enforcement agencies deploy undercover  agents to pose as offenders online to gather intelligence on these offending communities.  Currently, however, little is known about how offenders interact online,  which raises significant questions around how undercover officers should ‘authentically’  portray the persona of a child sexual offender. This article presents the first  linguistic description of authentic offender–offender interactions taking place on  a dark web image exchange chatroom. Using move analysis, we analyse chatroom  users’ rhetorical strategies. We then model the move sequences of different users  and user types using Markov chains, to make comparisons between their linguistic  behaviours. We find the predominant moves characterising this chatroom are Offering  Indecent Images, Greetings, Image Appreciation, General Rapport and Image  Discussion, and that rhetorical strategies differ between users of different levels  of offending and dark web image-sharing experience.