The role of social media in the illegal online trade of medicines. An evaluation of situational crime prevention measures

In recent years, social media websites have been used by offenders to advertise illegally traded medicines (ITMs) directly to customers on a large scale. Recently, new situational crime prevention (SCP) measures aimed at identifying, blocking and removing contents linked to ITMs have been implemented by most of the social media platforms. This seems to be a promising path to follow in the fight against this criminal market: however, their ability in reaching their goal is still unknown. The aim of this dissertation is to evaluate the impact of those measures on the illegal online trade of medicines in social media websites. In more detail, systematic keyword searches were performed on the three major social media (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) in order to identify contents linked to ITMs: results were then analysed and compared to the situation existing before the implementation of the measures with reference to six qualitative indicators. These indicators are a) extent of the social media usage in the illegal online trade of medicines, b) ease of finding ITMs, c) visibility over time of ITMs-related contents, d) language of posts concerning ITMs, and e) types of posts concerning ITMs. Research results have provided evidence supporting the hypothesis of the limited impact of the measures, since they are spotting, blocking and removing only some illegal contents. At the same time, the features of the advertisements for ITMs on social networking websites are only partially different if compared to those existing before the implementation of the SCP interventions. Seemingly this is not linked to a lack of effectiveness tout court, but to an asymmetrical implementation of the measures. For this reason, a possible, legally binding, obligation for social media platforms to implement them more widely is suggested.