It all started on social media: My Tram Experience

On January 3 Emma West appeared at Croydon Magistrate’s Court charged with two racially aggravated public order offences. The case has been hailed as a triumph for social media, as the police had been aware of the incident, but failed to act until the video of the racist tirade became an internet sensation.

Close friend Kerry Finch told the Croydon Advertiser that Emma West had been reported to the British Transport Police at the time by a fellow passenger and removed from the tram by officers, who decided not to press charges.

This was a prosecution that only came about after the video ‘My Tram Experience’ went viral. The shaky footage, taken on a mobile camera phone, was uploaded to YouTube and has since been watched by more than 11 million people around the world.

A video still from the YouTube video which has been viewed over 11 million times worldwide

The video was shared on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and formed the subject of countless blog posts. It was responded to and even remixed online. Other similar videos started to emerge; ‘My Tram Experience Part Two’ and ‘My Bus Experience’ also drew huge audiences. The hashtag #mytramexperience trended as people used it to add their voices to the debate.

The sentiments expressed in reaction to the video were sometimes just as virulent as the opinions shrieked in the original. Piers Morgan used his Twitter account to call for her deportation and following the release of her address online, she received threats that prompted the police to imprison her over Christmas for her own safety.

Chief magistrate Gerald Ellis was forced to deny her bail application, saying “there are grounds for believing Miss West is not safe. We hear a number of death threats have been made”.

On November 28 the BTP announced via Twitter that they had arrested Emma West, a 34-year-old New Addington woman as a result of #mytramexperience being brought to their attention, and that she was due to appear in court later the next day.

Conservative MP for Croydon Central Gavin Barwell told MPs in the House of Commons that the language used in the rant was “foul”, but added “on a positive note, does this not show the power of social media both in allowing a suspect to be caught and in showing the vast majority of Croydon residents do not share the same views?”

This was a story that would never have been a story without social media, just another sad example of intolerance witnessed by only a handful of people on a tram. The video was uploaded onto one social media site and shared via many more. The outrage generated online forced the issue onto the news agenda, a compelling example of how ‘it can all start on social media’.

For more on the online reaction to the story, see some of the collected tweets and video responses on Storify:

http://storify.com/globaltvnews/british-woman-charged-after-racist-youtube-tram-vi/preview

Follow @Lauren__York on Twitter

It all started on social media: Jeremy Clarkson rants about executing strikers

On November 30^th 2011, British public sector workers went on strike regarding their pensions. Considered to be ‘the biggest bout of industrial unrest since the 1979 winter of discontent’ according to the Guardian, with an estimated 2 million public sector workers taking part, it seemed that many of the British public supported the strike (and if not, did not mention it), Jeremy Clarkson however, notorious for his controversial comments, made the following statement on the BBC’s One Show:

“I’d have them all shot. I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families.”

See the video here: 

It all started on social media: Ireland’s unexpected election result

When the Labour Party’s Michael D Higgins was officially confirmed as the ninth Irish president on 29 October 2011, it was described as “one of the most remarkable comebacks in the state’s history.”

But what triggered this turnaround – and the collapse of his biggest rival, the independent candidate Seán Gallagher? A Gillian Duffy style-encounter? A misguided policy pledge?

No – 91 characters.

It all started on social media: England’s August riots

London: the epicentre of August's unrest - photo credit: George Rex (Flickr)

From August 6^th 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 6^th, 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.

It all started on social media: terror in Norway

On 17 July 2011, a 32-year-old Norwegian, Anders Behring Breivik, created a Twitter account to broadcast a single gnomic tweet:

“One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100 000 who have only interests.”

Five days later, on Friday 22 July 2011, Breivik posted a YouTube video, which Storyful contributor Gavin Sheridan describes as: “a mishmash of anti-Islamic propaganda and a digested version of Breivik’s manifesto”. The video has since been removed from YouTube but reposted on a TwitVid webpage.

Sheridan also links to the manifesto, “2083 A European Declaration of Independence”, in which Breivik casts himself as a Knight Templar. He later claimed to be part of an anti-Muslim network plotting a string of attacks across Europe, though investigators believe he acted alone in the events that followed.

Later that day Breivik detonated a bomb targeting government buildings in central Oslo and went on a shooting spree at a youth summer camp organized by Norway’s ruling Labour party on Utøya Island. He killed 77 people.

Among the first-hand accounts from Utøya, amid desperate tweets and Facebook messages, Adrian Pracon’s testimony to the BBC suggests the horror and confusion:

“I then heard gun shots and could see people running. As they were running, they were shot in the back. People were falling dead right in front of me. I ran through the campus to the tent area. I saw the gunman – two people started to talk to him and two seconds later they were both shot.”

Storify user Kathy E Gill records how a Facebook update summoned help from boats on the fjord, saving at least two lives, as desperate youths attempted a desperate swim from Utøya to the mainland.

Within hours of the shootings the inevitable fake Twitter account was set up in the name of “@AndersBBreivik Anders B. Breivik”, and a single Tweet posted:

“Please download the updated version of my Manifest: 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence : api.ge.tt/0/9E7jLS6/0/bl… #NORIA“

The download, a crude ‘screw you’ to morbid web surfers or perhaps just a bad joke, follows a mocked-up front page with a string of cat snaps. The account currently has 79 listings and 3,503 followers.

A mirror of Breivik’s actual Facebook Page has apparently been preserved, in all its banality, on the Public Intelligence blog.

But neither Breivik nor social media’s bottom crawlers should have the last word on this story.

Gill’s Storify pieces together tweets from one of Breivik‘s victims, Marte G. Ødegården, aka. @miniodegarden, who was shot in the back but survived. On Dec 30^th 2011, Ødegården tweeted (here translated, impeccably no doubt, by Google Translate):

“Thanking all the Twitter people for this year’s massive support and concern. Sets the incredible price on it. I hope everyone has a wonderful 2012.”

It all started on social media: bin Laden announced dead

It was meant to be a silent victory in the War on Terror. A carefully managed assassination of the world’s most wanted terrorist, an operation on Pakistani soil by a squad of US SEALs that Pakistan wasn’t meant to know about until after the event. Osama Bin Laden was meant to be killed and buried before anyone was any the wiser, announced only by a presidential press conference.

Maybe it would have worked that way ten years ago, but Twitter made the possibility of a completely secret operation all but impossible. Sohaib Athor, an IT consultant living in the town where bin Laden had been secretly hiding for the past few years, was the first to break the news: “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).

“Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/”

Shortly after, he followed up by reporting an explosion that was later found to be the result of a technical fault in one of the American helicopters involved in the operation: “A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its [sic.] not the start of something nasty :-S”

Athor, who now boasts nearly 80,000 followers, has since turned down hundreds of requests for interviews, many of which came within hours of his first tweet on the Abbottabad raid. What is perhaps most remarkable about his documenting of the raid was the serendipitous fact that he was the closest person to the raid who happened to be on Twitter at the time.

Athor put this bit of luck down to the relatively small number of Twitter users in Abbottabad, saying: “I am JUST a tweeter, awake at the time of the crash. Not many twitter users in Abbottabad, these guys are more into facebook.”

Nosheen Abbas, the BBC’s correspondent in Islamabad, was the first journalist to successfully contact Athor in what was to prove a long succession of media appearances for the unwitting whistle-blower. Over the course of the next few weeks, local and international news flooded the café he ran to interview the man who scooped the American President on the death of Osama bin Laden.

It all started on social media: #bristol’s #stokescroft riots

2011 was unquestionably the year of protests. From the Arab Spring to the infamous rioters across the UK the social media appears in hindsight to have rebelled every day.

In April came Bristol’s turn with the unrest against a newly built Tesco Express store in Stokes Croft. Amid fear from reports that the store was to be petrol bombed by squatters living across the screet, the police came in to and clashed with protesters. According to one blogger, “the news reports […] were mostly late to the party – they were written about 10am this morning, but those of us using Twitter were on top of the real breaking news.”

It all started on social media: #UKUncut

March 2011 was the month that UK Uncut hit the headlines. Born out of the hashtag #UK Uncut which began circulating after George Osborne’s spending review in October 2010, Uk Uncut describes itself as a grassroots movement taking action to highlight alternatives to the government’s spending cuts.

It was on 26^th March – when Uk Uncut occupied the luxury department store Fortnum & Mason’s in response to its parent company’s alleged tax avoidance – that the protest group was transformed into a household name.

The occupation of  ’the Queen’s grocers’, which is owned by Whittington Investments, a company UK Uncut believe to have dodged of over £40 million, cost the 300-year-old store £54,581 worth of business and received prominent coverage in mainstream media.

It all started on social media: the domino effect

Libya Protest in Copley Square by WEBN-TV

February 2011 was the month of the domino effect. Following on from the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, social media was flooded with calls for protests in Middle Eastern counties including Yemen, Algeria, Bahrain and Libya.

The internet’s influence was evidenced by the increasing reliance of mainstream news upon Twitter and Facebook. On 4 February Al Jazeera reported that calls for action were spreading online – citing the Syrian Revolution Facebook page which was liked by 13,000 people.

Bypassing a state ban on Facebook, Syrian protesters used proxy servers to communicate. Fidaa Aldin Issa, a Syrian living in Sweden, told Al Jazeera that he and other activists had found each other through social networking sites such as Facrbook.

“We’re trying through Facebook to break this fear, encouraging them [Syrians] to stage peaceful protests, without violence, even without badmouthing the president.”

Throughout the month, social media not only enabled protesters to coordinate rebellions across the Arab world, but it provided a channel for publicising the protests in action. The popularity of uprisings – and the reactions of ruling regimes – were broadcast to the world through Youtube. Mainstream media faced new challenges as it battled to sift through a wealth of amateur film content, interpreting its significance and veracity before publishing it to a wider audience. As journalists were banned from countries such as Libya, it became the norm for mainstream news sites to publish amateur footage.

It all started on social media: the Egyptian revolution

This festive season, the Interhaktives at City University have decided to follow the trend set by both traditional and alternative media institutes and practitioners by devising our own news round-ups. Blogging about social media on this platform, we’ve chosen to reminisce on the big news stories that month in and month out have emerged on social media first and have then been reported widely. Thus, without further a due, as we appreciate the hustle and bustle the holidays bring upon us all, we’ll start off with January 2011, undoubtedly the month when the Arab Spring ball started rolling.

#Jan25

by Jillian C. York @ http://bit.ly/vwOo5h

The landmark Egyptian protest on January 25 was not only broke but also organised on social media. Inspired by the Tunisian revolution and fuelled by the four Egyptians who died in front of their Parliament at the start of the year, many took to facebook, Twitter and Youtube to voice their concerns. The protest organised on the National Police Day, on 25 January 2011, gathered over 70,000 attendees on facebook, according to the New York Times. #Egypt and #Jan25 are both in Twitter’s top 10 hot hashtags of 2011 and Wael Ghonim, a proeminent activist on the Twitterverse (@Ghonim) and one of the users behind the prolific “We are all Khaled Said” page on facebook, who also wrote on Jan 26: “I said one year ago that the Internet will change the political scene in Egypt and some friends made fun of me,” has been branded the ‘symbol’ for #Jan25 by Twitter. Asmaa Mahfouz, also known as ‘the girl who organised Egypt’s demonstrations,’ posted an