London: the epicentre of August's unrest - photo credit: George Rex (Flickr)
From August 6th onwards one story dominated the British – and at time, global – media. Be it traditional sources; newspapers, television and radio, or modern media channels; Twitter, Facebook and blogs, it was impossible not to be excruciatingly aware of the summer’s English riots.
The riots were arguably 2011’s biggest news in Britain, and will leave a mark on areas of British society for decades, but from a social media perspective, they were – perhaps – just as ground breaking.
Social media’s involvement in the riots can be broadly broken down into four areas; dissemination of news, exaggeration of risk, establishing the post-riot clean-up operation and receiving blame from police and political figures.
The first tweets mentioning the disturbances began emerging at around 8:30pm on August 6th, just as the first serious unrest got under way.
Mainstream news organisations already had reporters on the scene for the erstwhile peaceful demonstration, with the airwaves, TV screens and newspaper web pages soon abuzz with updates on goings-on, but Twitter was there first. One reason for this may be that news editors were understandably keen to verify any reports before throwing them out to the masses, but the instantaneous nature of Twitter certainly shone through regardless, with employees of top news organisations among those taking to the ‘Twittersphere’ with just as much alacrity as members of the general public.
Leading the way among the professionals harnessing Twitter was The Guardian’s Paul Lewis, who went on to accumulate an additional 35,000 followers over the course of the disturbances and their aftermath thanks to the unrivalled coverage he provided.
In the last couple of years Twitter has emerged as an excellent source of breaking news, and the August riots were arguably the best example of this to date. Twitter lists, hailed by many users as the social network’s most useful function, came to prominence no more so than when Sky News’ Neal Mann complied his Riots list, allowing other users to keep abreast of the latest developments as reported by the most reliable and reputable sources.
Another example of social media’s centrality to the August unrest concerns Youtube, where Malaysian student Ashraf Haziq was attacked and then mugged by a group of would-be Good Samaritans.
There were; however, drawbacks to Twitter’s sudden explosion during the riots. First, many less experienced – and perhaps more excitable – users began tweeting about breakouts of rioting where there were none. In one example, a report of looting at Angel’s N1 shopping centre was retweeted over 40 times, even though the source had emphasised that this was unconfirmed. There was no looting there. These were not malicious attempts to cause panic, but rather the result of people who, upon hearing or seeing signs of a police presence, believed that this meant there must be rioting taking place – “no police without riots”, to misquote a familiar idiom.
More extreme, but ultimately harmless, was the spread of outlandish riot rumours. In one example, an image of Cairo’s Tahrir Square full of protesters and military vehicles was tweeted, supposedly as evidence that the army had moved into the area surrounding the Bank of England. Again, users fell over themselves to retweet.
One wholly positive use of Twitter was in its creation and promotion of the @riotcleanup user account and hashtag. Within an hour of its creation, the hashtag was one of Twitter’s top trending topics, and clean-up ‘events’ were soon springing up all over London and other disturbance-hit parts of the country in a wonderful example of community cohesion and unprompted altruism organised through social media.
This blog series is dedicated to stories where social media played a central role in their breaking and continued coverage, but with the riots the level of involvement of social media went even deeper. Hundreds of column inches in national newspapers were actually devoted to accusations that social media was responsible for the triggering, spread and extent of the riots, and senior police officers and politicians alike made statement after statement about how the likes of Blackberry Messenger (BBM) were to blame for many of the wrongs of those few days of chaos.
While there was an element of truth to the BBM line, suggestions from the upper echelons of Scotland Yard that Twitter be shut down during the riots were shown to be wide of the mark, with riot-related Twitter traffic almost invariable spiking after disturbances, not triggering them, as some had suggested.
Even after the riots themselves had come to an end, social media stayed in the headlines, with several cases of youths receiving jail sentences for their use of Facebook in attempting to incite further disturbances.
When you consider the above it is undeniably clear that social media, and in particular Twitter, was not only a platform for discourse and dissemination during the riots, but was in fact a key part of the narrative. Without meaning to belittle what was a terrible few days for all those involved, one might easily look at the events of the Arab Spring and say that the August unrest was very much a 2011 tragedy.
