Shut down social media during future riots? Not the best idea.

In story on the Guardian website today, 70% of people (in a survey of 973 adults) suggested they would be in favour of shutting down the social networks Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry Messenger during civil unrest.

It comes off the back of the prosecutions for inciting riots (even though they did not occur after the said incident), and the use of the Blackberry Messenger service during the riots to organise groups.

So, you’d think that the 70% alluded to in this survey should be 100%. Shouldn’t we ban all social networks, right? Wrong.

That link above, also here, suggests BBM, as it’s known, is more likely to be the messaging tool of choice. However, the article also points to the fact that communication around riots has been by megaphone before, and of course there have been many more, well before the advent of smartphones and online social networking. It’s called basic communication. It occured before smartphones. It will occur when they go.

But – social media. It could be argued that it is the lifeblood of simple communication now. For authorities, they are cheap, easy to run, fast, and effective. It’s a lot easier to spread messages, even with things like the Data Protection Act making it costly and time consuming to store large amounts of other peoples data. It is part of the reason lots of companies hire social media managers and PR firms to run their networks.

Most, if not all, police forces in the UK have a Twitter account, a Facebook page and an online presence. The online presence, their website essentially, costs them whatever the hosting costs are, and the Facebook and Twitter accounts are free, with the same restrictions and benefits as the rest of us.

Because they’re on the networks we’re on, instead of creating their own, we find it easier to join those, whether it’s to become friends, to like, or to follow. With many hundreds of millions of people the world over having a Facebook account, and over one hundred million with Twitter accounts, it is safe to assume that most of the UK is covered. I would wager that by 6 degrees of seperation, you would find someone who is connected by one of these social networks to the relevant authority (Clearly, there is no data on this so far.)

During the riots, lots of people tweeted what was happening. They saw riots occur and expressed opinions over the network. It was by this that police could get a more thorough, quicker overview of what was occuring where, and where resources might need to be diverted. They could have the same over the 999 service as well, and this doesn’t state they didn’t.

However, tweets managed to help people produce live data of it. How is this helpful? Well, if you lived in the areas affected, you want to know just what is happening, whether it’s shop windows being put through, or a fire burning down a department store. So, James Cridland put this map together, which he gathered from live tweets, verified news sources, and his own research. He said it takes a bit of research, but you check tweets authenticity.

James says: It’s curious how few people know how to check whether the news they’re being told is verifiable. Dan Gillmor has some useful principles for media consumers. (Read the book, too – it’s a free download). I discovered it was surprisingly easy to check the veracity of claims being made on Twitter by using the internet to check and cross-reference, rather than blindly retweet.

The police managed to use the Twitter feeds they run to send out confirmed information, straight from the control room. This happened all over the country as people were worried about the threat of riots near them, and served as a useful tool for news sources and the general public wanting to know what was going on, and if they were safe or not.

Because people like Field Producer (Neal Mann from Sky News) and Paul Lewis from the Guardian were tweeting what was verified and known, it is also important to follow these and not to spread false rumours, which very quickly get picked up and spread as assumed fact by the vast majority of the public.

Therefore, I argue that social media should not be shut down, and that it’s very counter productive to do so. It is used, as a whole, for essential communication to a mass audience during times when it’s needed.

For the rest of the time, we can go back to posting about what we had for breakfast.

(Edit 17:20, 08/11/11 – The figures suggest it is agree completely and somewhat agree make up the 70%. Just over half (48%) agree completely, as shown in the public release of this by Unisys. The question is also suggesting they would close them down to prevent co-ordinated criminal activity, which is a fair question in context. The response in this blog post explains why I believe that to not be the case. The Guardian reading the riots study also suggests, through the article on the Guardian website:

Analysis by the Guardian of 2.5m tweets relating to the riots – part of its Reading the Riots study in conjunction with the London School of Economics – found little evidence to support claims the network had been used to instigate unrest.)

This post was written by Andrew Stuart. If you want more, you can follow him on @andrewstuart on Twitter, or his website www.andrewwgstuart.com