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The authors discuss this special edition that emerged from a selection of papers presented at the "Dark Social Spaces" symposium held at Deakin University in Melbourne, Victoria in 2019. Topics covered include the dark Web, digital life via the concept of the social, and various presentations of identity on social media.

Targeted advertising lies at the heart of digital economic models and has been scrutinized with respect to the potential pathologies of discriminatory job and housing advertising along with concerns about harmful forms of manipulation and the invasive character of online data harvesting. This article takes as its focus the non-transparent forms of cultural association reproduced by targeted advertising. We call into question the ready distinction between editorial content and advertising that treats news content as a public interest good and advertising as primarily a matter of private interest and personal taste. In online media environments, it has become difficult to interrogate advertising due to their 'dark' nature (they are only visible to those to whom they are targeted) allowing them to avoid public scrutiny. This project puts forward a prototype for a tool that may be used to advance accountability discussions further by providing insight into how targeted advertising takes place across demographic categories. This article describes the pilot test of such a tool – one that can be deployed to reveal and illuminate patterns that emerge from targeted and dark advertising practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Reddit as a case study, this article blurs the boundary between the 'dark' and 'clear' web, arguing that in between these spaces there is what I describe as a 'brackish web', inhabited by 'brackish social spaces'. Reddit, I argue, sits in a murky space between the dark and clear, with its technological rationality, politics, and technological affordances exhibiting elements of both the clear and dark infrastructures. I study these similarities through examining Reddit's relationship to surveillance, arguing that it exhibits similarities to the dark web through a politics of anonymity and its practices of content moderation. Reddit, however, has slowly moved away from some of its 'dark' elements, in particular through a growing reliance on advertising revenue. This has pushed the platform to engage in more surveillance of its users, pushing it away from its dark web politics. This article challenges the dark and clear web binary, further nuancing our understandings of the politics, economics and technological rationality that underpins online digital platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contrasts the dark with the electrified light of datafied life to bring into relief the impact of data surveillance upon social transformation. Our argument is that darkness remains fundamental to creative social experimentation and thus to a society's capacity for change and sustained transformation. This argument might seem antithetical to the age of information. Yet, we find darkness encourages exploratory forms of engagement, intercourse and exchange, that electrified light forbids. We draw on Rancière's considerations of politics and the police to suggest that the policing by digitally-electrified light extinguishes the politics of experimentation that test the make-up and limits of social interaction. Our work is structured by first explaining the baseline of the digital electric policing through the conceptualization of Facebook's social graph, then switches to antithetical examples of politics enabled in the dark. We use the examples of the Dark Web, end to end encryption, and trustless infrastructures like Craigslist to illustrate generative tensions that are the signatures of what we understand as the dark social. We conclude that the dark social involves a decentralized capacity to experiment and transform what is social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newly emerging technologies for digital communication facilitate rapid data collection, storage and processing whereby subsequent interactions can be unpredictable. This creates a 'darker turn' in neo-communicative practices. That which is 'dark' is understood as communication that has either limited distribution, is not open to all users – closed groups by way of example – or is veiled. Dark social spaces are, however, indistinct requiring further study. This is giving rise to new work in what I call 'dark social studies'. To further explore the nature and use of dark social spaces, a digital (auto)ethnographic study of 'dark' social connection was undertaken. The analysis specifically focused on Mastodon, Galaxy3 and 8Kun's '.onion' available over Tor (The Onion Router). This article concludes that for a number, virtual 'dark' spaces provide affirmative, intimate and vital zones of connection to others and peer collaboration. Further, the interconnected and interactive capacity of dark social spaces facilitates user expectations for dark connection while exposing simultaneously the limitations of our intimate machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Raymond William's concept of the 'magic system,' this article argues that advertising on the Dark Web is a 'dark magic system'. The article first defines 'Dark Web' and then analyzes over 300 banner advertisements appearing on Tor onion service search engines. The advertisements are categorized into navigation, individual vendors, services, and markets. Next, the article traces the associations the advertisements make between advertised objects and values. The predominant values the advertisements invoke include navigation, OPSEC politics, and a justification to exploit the openness of others. The article then traces the limits of the dark magic system, including the system's inability to offer metrics, the problems of 'onion cloners,' and the constant threat of scams. The article concludes with an argument that the dark magic system is incapable of addressing the sort of anonymized political communication the Dark Web might afford. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including Dark Web advertising, social media, and electrified social.