Your World Social media: A “force for good” during England’s riots
Social media: A “force for good” during England’s riots
Social media bosses greatly advised against shutting down their services during disorder, reasoning that there was little evidence that site such as Twitter, Facebook and BBM helped fuel illegal activity during the riots.
Widely known as the worst disturbances of their kind since the 1995 Brixton riots, the flood of riots that transpired across England a little over a month ago saw 5 people killed and many London looted and damaged. The atrocity sparked a nationwide debate over the contributory factors, with several speculations emerging, ranging from socio-economic causes focusing on unemployment and spending cuts, as well as social media, gang culture to criminal opportunism.
The Home Affairs Select Committee who is currently delving into the situation - examining its origins and policing of the riots, called upon instant messaging and social media providers which have been accused of being used as tools to coordinate the riots and looting.
Observers labelled the violence the "BlackBerry riots" because they were reported to have been fuelled by the use of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), an instant messenger service on phones which can be shared between up to 30 people.
However, Stephen Bates, managing director of BlackBerry Messenger makers Research in Motion in Britain and Ireland, insisted that social media was generally a “force for good”, during the hearing in London.
While he conceded that social media was indeed used for “malicious purposes,” Bates claimed that the majority of its seven million British users, who included many police officers and workers at top companies, were law-abiding.
“On the whole the vast majority abide by the law and use social media systems as a force for good,” he told MPs.
“We saw many instances while the riots were happening where social media were used to check people were safe and they had got to places where they wanted to.”
He advised against blocking services during disorders, recalling that attempts to restrict the sites as in some Middle East states were “not proven to be a good idea”.
Richard Allan, the director of policy for Facebook in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, also insisted that restricting the sites “would not serve the public interest”.
“We are extremely pleased that the home secretary has indicated that there is no intention to restrict internet services and we hope that position is sustained after this committee has concluded,” he said.
“Frankly, if we had found widespread evidence of [users organising riots] we would have said so, but we haven’t. Literally we found a handful of cases where people were doing things which were serious organisation as opposed to the good stuff or what you might call joke activity.”
Alexander Macgillivray, representing Twitter also insisted that the microblogging service fully co-operated with the police and rejected suggestions that access to it and other social media should be barred if a similar scale of disorder arose in the future.
He said: “We think it would be an absolutely horrible idea to suspend service during important times.”
Arguments that social media were used for the greater good stand true, as clean up strategies such as @Riotcleanup, instigated on Twitter and a Facebook page titled ‘Post riot clean-up: let's help London’ were amongst numerous platforms that garnered the support of thousands of citizens to unite together in the wake of the riots.
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