The Romance Scam As the Expression of Social Love in Crisis and Instrumentalized Solidarity in Digital Society.

The concept of social love, understood generally as a form of positive regard, care, and concern for others in society, has garnered increasing attention in social research, particularly in relation to its potential to foster solidarity in communities. This proposal explores the intersection between emotions and social actions within the critical and criminal context of social love and solidarity, addressing the theoretical and methodological challenges in studying these phenomena.In particular, the Abstract wants to reflect on the affective needs and the social illusion (Barba&D’Ambrosio, 2023) of the Romance Scam as “relationship constructed through websites for the purpose of deceiving victims in order to extort money from them (Whitty&Buchanan,2012) and to defraud them” (Budd&Anderson, 2011).In fact, while social love is often conceptualized as an emotional state and solidarity includes actions that express collective care and cooperation, it is also true that it cannot be a positive expression of social action. It is an instrumental action (Weber,1922; Merton,1938) concerning an illegal purpose: the Romance Scam is the expression of the social bond breaking, it is a manipulation and a deep damage of interpersonal and social relations (Hochschild,2006) in our individualistic society where people experience (fear of) loneliness (Gidden,1995;Bauman,1999).This dual and opposite nature complicates also the task of measuring and analyzing their relationship in empirical studies. Theoretically,questions arise regarding how social love translates into actions, the role of structural inequalities in shaping these dynamics, and the potential for love to be both inclusive and exclusive and methodologically,operationalizing and capturing intangible and manipulating emotions, differentiating between performative and genuine relations, and accounting for cultural variations in expressions of love.For these reasons, the essay proposes an interdisciplinary approach to better understand how social love and solidarity often fail to achieve a ‘positive’ social function and, in contrast, lead to relational and social problems(including criminal ones).