Does the digital really make a difference? Digital access has offered new routes to commit fraud, circulate obscene content, groom, stalk and bully, surveil, and download. Digital encryption conceals identities in relation to terrorist communications, fraud, hate speech, stalking, planting fake news, ‘scareware’ threats, online obscenity, bullying and trolling. Distributed networks and services afford jurisdictional evasions in relation to obscene and hateful content, fraudulent and extorting communications, peer-to-peer and torrent-based downloading and streaming. Digital communications may incite radicalization, polarization, normalization and/or disinhibition in relation to hate, abuse, dispute and theft. Yet, in relation to all of these outlined, digital networks have alternative affordances that, when applied, may inhibit criminality and protect potential victims (see Table 10.1 for a summing up of what is described).

Digital networks offer four affordances for criminal harm: access, concealment, evasion and incitement. These affordances each intersect with the four domains of criminal harm documented in this book: hate (political and personal); obscenity (adult pornography and violent video games, as well as child pornography); corruptions of citizenship (misinformation and invasion of privacy); and appropriation (fraud, extortion and IP theft). As the preceding chapters of this work have identified, networked technologies are symmetrical in principle (affording greater levels of harm alongside greater levels of protection), but such symmetry in principle is not the same as symmetry in practice. The way digital technologies are used determines outcomes, not some (symmetrical-in-principle) logic of technology itself. In this sense, David Wall's ‘transformation test’ (see Chapter 1) is not straightforwardly ‘passed’ or ‘failed’ in relation to any particular field or affordance. The ‘binary’ (scope) measure, by which the digital might be said to pass Wall's test, only applies to pure forms of hacking where computers are both tool and target, and this form of hacking is relatively limited. As such, it is the ‘quantitative’ (scale) and ‘qualitative’ (severity) measures of Wall's test that are most significant; and in these measures, the relationship between symmetry in principle and asymmetry in practice is always contingent. It is also true that symmetry in practice needs to be qualified. Symmetry may still manifest transformation. In such cases, outcomes are ‘symmetrical’ but technology affords, and may be said to have (in practice) fuelled, polarization of relations – that still remain symmetrical, despite this amplification.