Twitter did not start the UK Summer riots

SOCIAL MEDIA was not to blame for inciting rioters in the UK last Summer, according to a study from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JIC).

The JIC study looked at 2.4 million Twitter messages from the time of the UK riots and found that the hands up, knee-jerk reaction from the Government and other commentators that social networking was behind the spreading social unrest was "wrong".

Rather, the team led by Professor Rob Procter from the University of Manchester found that Twitter is a force for good and came into its own during the post riot clean-up.

"Politicians and commentators were quick to claim that social media played an important role in inciting and organising riots, calling for sites such as Twitter to be closed should events of this nature happen again," said Procter.

"But our analysis found no evidence of significance in the data we have analysed that would justify such a course of action in respect to Twitter. In contrast, we do find strong evidence that Twitter was a valuable tool for mobilising support for the post-riot clean up and for organising specific clean up activities."

The riots kicked off a lot of discussion about the impact of social networking on communications and lead to discussions between the Government and social networking companies like Facebook and Blackberry, during which the idea of shutting them down during social unrest was touted.

Where social networking might not help is in its ability to spread rumours, which the study found could start on Twitter - see reports about the London Zoo being broken into at the time. Procter said that traditional media needed time to catch up with such rumours, and should try to verify them before printing any articles.

"Only after a period of time does the influence of mainstream media organisations become critical for determining a rumour's credibility," he explained.

"We do find the mainstream media is perfectly capable of picking up and publishing unverified information from social media without adhering to the usual standard of fact checking... Consequently, some stories of this nature, though never verified, go unchallenged." µ