A Social Riot

On Tuesday afternoon the Twittersphere was awash with tweets about the ‘next target’, how shops were being boarded up in various London locations, and how squadrons of riot police were descending on hot summer high streets ready for the turbulent night ahead. All of these things, including the turbulent night, were unsubstantiated nonsense. Now this would have been all but insignificant if it were simply office gossip or rumours between friends, but with Twitter as the medium this hearsay had consequences.

It started with a few Tweets from misinformed/joking/troublemaking Tweeters who claimed rioters had organised to meet at certain stations at 6pm to start the rioting and looting anew in places like Acton, Hammersmith, Southall and Wimbledon. From here other people picked them up, retweeted them directly or put out a tweet of their own about the impending chaos. Once a few dozen people had spread the word it not only multiplied exponentially but attracted tweets about the looting having started and that it was happening at that very moment; and so more panicked tweets came, then more sightings of looting came to fuel the fire and before long an atmosphere had been whipped up on Twitter that had many convinced their area was in danger. Of course any Tweets attempting to quash these stories of looting and police riot squads went unheard and before long stories of businesses telling their employees to go home early for safety reasons, (some true, some not) started to emerge. If one had judged the situation from the Twittersphere alone then you could have easily believed the whole of London was crumbling around you. Of course one trip outside would have brought home the reality that the most dangerous thing actually going on in these ‘targeted areas’ were things like an unsteady 6-year-old on a bike, or an clumsy pigeon scrabbling for food.

Given that Twitter had the power to make many believe they were sitting in the next riot hot spot when in fact they weren’t it is easy to see how it, and other social media, also spread the real violence around the major cities like wild fire. However, according to reports, after their early use many of the rioters and looters started to migrate away from the big social media platforms of Twitter and Facebook in favour of communicating via Blackberry Messenger (BBM). The benefit of this is that unlike the public forums of Facebook and Twitter the messages they sent were encoded and therefore could not be intercepted by the police, this meant blunt and open messages about arranging riots or looting could be sent out to individuals or groups with seemingly no consequences. Unfortunately for the authors of some of the more incriminating messages it looks as though the makers of Blackberry mobile phones, Research in Motion, may well cooperate with police and give them access to the BBMs that were sent on the nights of the riots.

Having castigated social media for the part it played in the looting, rioting and destruction it is only fair to mention the positive role it played in the aftermath also. Soon after the riots, and even during, the online community were making plans to clean up the effected areas. The Twitter profile @RiotCleanup was set-up with the aim of broadcasting information, such as locations and times, of the mass cleanups that are taking place across the country. Having started simply as the hashtag #riotcleanup it was soon set up as a profile and within 10 hours had already amassed 50,000 followers. There have also been pages that have sprung up on Facebook, such as ‘Post riot clean-up: let’s help London‘ which has already gained nearly 20,000 Facebook likes. The content on the site provides information to those wanting to help with the cleanup but also useful links to content such as a handy guide to the Riot (Damages) Act 1886 for people who have had their business or property damaged in the riots. Outside of the traditional social media sphere there are also websites that have been setup in next to no time in order to help those effected by the riots, such as RiotRescue.com where people can ask or give relevant advice, ask for help or offer help such as we have done by offering someone free website help after theirs was effected.

Like many others deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police Steve Kavanagh was quick to point the finger at social media as being the major catalyst, saying “Social media and other methods have been used to organise these levels of greed and criminality”. But in assessing the role of social media in the riots it would be harsh to say that it was a malevolent factor. It may well have provided a forum for people to organise themselves to cause destruction but it can be seen from the generous people volunteering to help with the clean up that this can be used for good as well as bad. It was only a few months ago when we were all praising the role of social media in the uprisings of the Middle East, it would be somewhat hypocritical to damn its use here in our own country.