Image by Sean MacEntee via Flickr
This has been the end of an extraordinary and horrifying week. The rioting in London which then spread all over the UK has shocked and frightened the general public and has caused a huge amount of damage to homes and businesses and tragically, the deaths of several people. While we all struggle to come to terms with what’s happened, some important questions have been asked about the role of Twitter and other social media in the riots: did people plan riots or incite them on Twitter? Should the social media accounts of these people be blocked and/or monitored? I personally came across one or two tweets that seemed to me to show a flippant attitude towards the rioting and I did find that disturbing. However, most tweets are on public record and if people were actually involved in planning or inciting riots through Twitter, it will surely be a lot easier to track them down than it would be otherwise.
As an ordinary person trying to find out if my home, family and business were safe, Twitter was an invaluable news source for me as a person trying to work out what was happening in my area. I had been watching the news and reading the papers but it was when I checked the “londonriots” hashtag on Twitter that I started realising the riots had moved into my area. I quickly sent out a tweet asking which was the most reliable news source and after a while I had found several journalists on Twitter to follow, ending up on the account of @fieldproducer as he was collating a list of all the different journalists and checking sources/ credibility before he posted tweets. I also found various individuals on Twitter who seemed very knowledgeable and followed them.
By searching for information in my area I found out that there had been a riot in Bethnal Green, that some East London shopkeepers had fought off rioters (confirmed later in the press) and then that rioters had been close to the East London Mosque but had been frightened away by the community there (this story was confirmed in the press a day later). The next thing I found out was that a group of rioters were close to Stepney Green, close to where I live (I haven’t found out any official confirmation for this as yet). Essentially Twitter kept me informed and gave me the tools to access immediate information (including rumours, gossip and errors, of course) as well as reputable journalistic sources. Without it, I would have had no information in my geographical area until at least a day later, which I’m sure you’ll all agree wouldn’t have given me the warning I needed if the rioters were on their way to my immediate area. I’m using Google Plus a lot at the moment, but Google’s disabling of real-time search results meant that I couldn’t find the information I needed about what was going on and I depended on Twitter for up to date news, like a lot of other people (this article gives the exact figures showing the spike in visits to Twitter).
Then there was RiotCleanUp, in the aftermath of the destruction. What a wonderful idea this was, and how it gave us back our faith in human nature as Twitter users banded together and went out to clean up the mess made by the rioters. I couldn’t get involved as I was looking after my children all that week, which would have made it pretty much impossible to help out, but I was impressed that people such as singer Kate Nash were getting involved and personally picking up donations to drop off at shelters where people made temporarily homeless were staying. This was a brilliant initiative and those behind it should all be rewarded for their hard work and community spirit.
Even if there were people involved in the riots using Twitter, you cannot blame the medium for the message. Most of the people I have met on Twitter have come across as excellent and public-spirited individuals, but at the end of the day you cannot control who uses social media and I think the benefits of knowing what is going on, in real time, are many. Governments could potentially control who has access to Twitter (though there is sure to be a legal minefield ahead for our Government if they decide to go down that route), although it seems to me that it would be far more useful to investigators to monitor Facebook and Twitter accounts for intelligence of illegal activity and follow them up than shut them down. We do live in a country that values freedom of speech and the presumption that someone is innocent until they are proven guilty, after all. However, it would be preferable for the accounts of potential or actual criminals to be blocked (as David Cameron suggested recently) than for both networks to be shut down for everybody.
I am very against the idea of governments being able to turn Facebook and Twitter ‘off” completely for public order reasons, as Louise Mensch suggested on Twitter recently. I don’t believe that criminals deprived of access to Twitter would be incapable of organising themselves in other ways, and it seems to me that it would be a lot more terrifying for ordinary people not to be able to find out what was going on, or communicate with friends and family, than it would to be misinformed by rumours. Personally, I don’t trust the government, or the traditional news media to keep me informed of everything I might want to know, particularly after everything we’ve learned recently about the overly cosy relationship between media and government, and the tactics employed by the former to get their information. I prefer the uncensored freedom of Twitter – there’s wisdom in crowds. So please, don’t shut down our best news sources because there’s trouble. We have a right to know what’s going on.
