Hiding in plain sight: A tale of trust and mistrust inside a community of citizen reporters

The large volume of user-generated content on the Social Web puts a high burden on the participants to evaluate the accuracy and quality of such content. Researchers have been trying to address this problem by focusing on discovering influential entities inside social platforms to guide their ranking algorithms. Often these entities correspond to people or organizations already influential in the real-world. However, not everywhere in the world is there a right to and protection of free speech. In countries where the traditional media cannot report the truth, anonymity becomes a necessity for citizens who want to exercise their right of free-speech in the service of their community. But is it possible for anonymous individuals to become influential and gain the trust of a community? In this paper, we discuss the case of a community of Twitter citizen reporters, located in a Mexican city plagued by the drug cartels fighting for control of territory. Our analysis shows that the most influential individuals inside the community were anonymous accounts. Neither the Mexican authorities, nor the drug cartels were happy about the real-time citizen reporting of crime or anti-crime operations in an open social network such as Twitter, and we discovered external pressures to this community and its influential players to change their reporting behavior.