How social media is changing the way people commit crimes andpolice fight them.

Until the early years of the 21st century, crimes tended to be committed away from the eyes of the majority of society, with traditional media broadcasting information about them often on their own terms. Ray Surette writes that the advent of social media in the past decade has led to a new type of ‘performance’ crimes, where people create accounts of their law-breaking through text, images and video, which are then digitally distributed to the public on a large scale. He comments that social media has also opened up new ways of combating crime for the police, who can take advantage of the self-surveillance of those who publicize their crimes on social media.