The unlikely social network fuelling the Tottenham riots

Saturday the 6 August 2011 and the streets of Tottenham are set ablaze by rioting.

As many people will recall, it isn’t the first time this has happened. On 6 October 1985 a notorious riot occurred on the Broadwater Farm Estate that led to the murder of PC Keith Blakelock.

On both occasions the disturbances were triggered by deaths caused by police. In the first instance it was that of Cynthia Jarrett, an African Caribbean woman who died during a police search of her home. This latest incident was sparked by the shooting of Mark Duggan, a 29 year old man killed during an alleged gunfight with police on Thursday.

As I write this in the early hours of Sunday morning, the disturbance is ongoing and it is not yet clear how serious an incident this will become.

In recent public disturbances such as the Student protests, commentary has focused on the role that social networks such as Twitter and Facebook have played in the planning of demonstrations and coordination of protesters. By contrast in this riot it appears the social network of choice is one provided by none other than BlackBerry.

Blackberry’s have been produced by Research In Motion (RIM) since 1999. They were originally associated with busy office executives who needed to access their emails on the move, but in recent years they have become increasingly popular within youth and urban cultures. I have to admit that I found this puzzling. It took my far cooler 17 year old nephew to explain that the main reason for their popularity is due to BBM – BlackBerry Messenger.

BBM as it is known, is an instant messenger system that has become popular for three main reasons: it’s fast (naturally), it’s virtually free, and unlike Twitter or Facebook, it’s private.

Blackberry recognized the appeal of their products to the urban market and has had a long association with Jay-z in the States. In the UK, they recently hosted a ‘secret gig’ in Shoreditch Town Hall featuring Tinie Tempah, Wretch 32 and Devlin.

So what has all this got to do with the riots in Tottenham?

Well, it appears that BBM messages have been circulating since Thursday’s shooting of Duggan by the police. These have fuelled the anger of the youths that have taken to the streets. BBM was also the channel used to spread the word that the riot had started, and from what I can tell on Twitter, it appears to be the means by which communications continue to be shared.

The key point here is that although these messages are spreading virally, by being shared via BBM they have been less visible to the outside world, making them harder to track.

I am not a security intelligence expert so I don’t know the extent to which the police are able to monitor the BBM network, but Canadian police officers have previously complained that criminals prefer using Blackberry Messenger because it is harder to wiretap.

As we have seen throughout the world this year, when angry young people utilize social networks to communicate and coordinate publically or privately, the results can be explosive.

Photo Credits: LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images via Flickr

UPDATE: It appears that the Daily Mail has found a way to pin the blame for yesterday’s riot in Tottenham on Twitter. This is because ‘a picture of a burning police car was re-tweeted more than 100 times’. However, as pointed out here, the logic doesn’t quite stack up, as the Mail (and every other news channel) was also responsible for sharing these images with far larger audiences.

Still, it’s prehaps not surprising that journalists defaulted to blaming the usual suspects.

Social Media etiquette: How to lose friends and influence people

A few things have got me thinking about the etiquette of Twitter recently and the social norms that are developing around it. Many of these themes were addressed at the ‘Social media – a force for good?’ event held at NESTA yesterday that featured Biz Stone, co-founder and Chief Executive of Twitter; Reid Hoffman, Founder and Chief Executive of LinkedIn, and the inimitable Stephen Fry.

You can watch the whole event here, so rather than rehash their discussion, I want to highlight three instances where the unspoken social norms of Twitter were brought out into the open.

To Tweet or not to Tweet

The first was a reaction to my use of Twitter.

Earlier this week I launched the Urban Mashup blog with a post on the  ‘Social Media 09′  Mashup*event where I had been one of the speakers. As I was keen to get a debate going, I used Twitter to send a Direct Message (DM) to a number of the other speakers and participants that had attended the event. I also copied the DM to a few people that weren’t there who I thought might be interested.

I didn’t figure this was a big deal. After all, you didn’t need to be at the event to have an opinion about what I was discussing. However, I figured wrong.

I soon received this public rebuff from a recipient of my Direct Message:

1. I wasn’t at the event. 2. We’ve never spoken. 3. You DMing me a link to your write-up not exactly *social* media genius it?

Although I issued an immediate public and private apology (via DM) to the offended recipient, there followed something of a ‘Twitter spat’ between us that required an intervention from @paul_clarke, who knows us both, to help calm things down.

The harder they come, the Harder they Twitterfall

The second situation occurred at another Mashup* event where this time, I was not present. The story goes that during the panel discussion there was a delay in connecting the live Twitterfeed to the overhead display.

While this was getting set up, a member of the audience used the #mashupevent hash-tag to criticize Tony Fish, the Chair of the panel, using a four letter expletive and making a derogatory remark about his physical appearance. Moment’s later, the feed went live and the remark was made public to everyone in the audience, much to the shock of everyone in the room.

What happened next was interesting.

Emma – one of the Mashup* organizers – was so incensed by the remark that she identified the individual concerned through his Twitter ID (@swith) and attempted to confront him immediately after the event finished. His rather sheepish looking colleagues all claimed that he had legged it, but that didn’t matter because the Mashup* team had all the details they needed to get in touch with him and his employer (who had paid for him to attend).

Sure enough the next day, @swith sent a deeply apologetic email claiming that he was horrified when it appeared on the screen. But you’ve got to wonder why did he use the event hash-tag if he didn’t want it to be seen? Given that his company had paid for him to attend the event, who was responsible for his message? If the comment had been sent by email, would the consequences have been different?

The court of public opinion

My third observation comes from the national response to the appearance of the BNP’s Nick Griffin on Question Time.

According to Tweetminster (who did an excellent job of providing live stats throughout the broadcast), 99% of Tweets expressed anti BNP sentiment.  However, the comments received by message boards such as the BBC’s ‘Have Your Say’, were far more varied, and apparently the moderators were overwhelmed managing the flood of offensive comments.

Why the difference between sentiment expressed on Twitter and elsewhere? A recent YouGov poll points to a different Twitter demographic, but I think there could be something else in play.

Unlike a message board that enables you to post messages as ‘Angry from Aldershot’, Twitter displays your personal identity to the world. As a result, I suspect that people Tweet the version of themselves they want other people to see.

As Stephen Fry and the other participants at the #svuk event acknowledged, Twitter is blurs the public and personal even more than Facebook. If you break the unwritten social etiquette – as I discovered – there is a powerful and immediate feedback loop.

The Twist in the tale

Ironically, it seems my public spat on Twitter led to more people viewing and commenting on my original blog post. So was it a case of  ‘lose friends and influence people’?

Photograph: Stephen Fry and Biz Stone at Social Media – A force for good? Courtesy of NESTA via Flickr