“Media Coverage of Darknet Market Closures: Assessing the Impact of Coverage on US Search and Tor Use Activity”, Eric Jardine, Sarah Cruz, Heather Kissel2022-08-27 (AlphaBay DNM, Hydra DNM, SR1 DNM, SR2 DNM)⁠:

[lead author affiliation: Chainalysis] Darknet cryptomarkets are a common method of drug procurement and are frequently a focal point for law enforcement intervention as a result. Past works assessing the effectiveness of cryptomarket closures by law enforcement have found a high degree of ecosystem resilience. Previous work, however, has not parsed the potential mediating role that official press statements and media coverage of such events might play on subsequent behavior.

Using a new dataset of 27,195 distinct deterrent/publicity-related sentiment-expressive signals taken from 406 media stories and 47 official press releases 2013^–₆2019, this article traces the potential impact of law enforcement closure of Darknet cryptomarkets on both US Google search activity and US Tor network use.

The results generally show: (1) that discussion of certainty and severity of punishment, as deterrent signals, and sensationalism and market resiliency, as publicity signals, are the most forcefully expressed sentiments in the corpus of text; (2) US Google search interest in the Dark Web topic exhibits a fair degree of periodicity that is largely unassociated with the sentiment expressed in media coverage; and (3) US Tor usage tends to be somewhat sensitive to how the closure is framed, with drops in Tor client connections in the US following comparatively high deterrence-coverage events and increases in the same following comparatively high publicity closures.

…These markets include: Alpaca, AlphaBay, Berlusconi, Cloud9, Hansa, Hydra, Pandora, Silk Road, Silk Road 2, Topix, Tor Bazaar, Utopia, Valhalla, and Wall Street Market. This list was partially extracted from the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addition’s Darknet Markets Ecosystem report.

See Also:

• Out of the Dark: The Effect of Law Enforcement Actions on Cryptocurrency Market Prices

• Shedding Light on the Dark: The Impact of Legal Enforcement on Darknet Transactions

• Impact of darknet market seizures on opioid availability

• Collective Dynamics of Dark Web Marketplaces

• On the Resilience of the Dark Net Market Ecosystem to Law Enforcement Intervention

• Drugs on the Web, Crime in the Streets. The Impact of Shutdowns of Dark Net Marketplaces on Street Crime

• A Qualitative Evaluation of Two Different Law Enforcement Approaches on Dark Net Markets

• Policing the Cybercrime Script of Darknet Drug Markets: Methods of Effective Law Enforcement Intervention

• Chapter 7: Black-Hat Hackers’ Crisis Information Processing in the Darknet: A Case Study of Cyber Underground Market Shutdowns

• Is it possible to establish the link between drug busts and the cryptocurrency market? Yes, we can