Five areas of discussion the Home Office should have had with Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry

1. Differentiation between the networks and understanding what role the individual networks actually played

Social media networks have been conveniently and rather unhelpfully lumped together. ‘Social media’ has been scapegoated in other parts of the media for playing an exaggerated role in the riots. It would be refreshing to see some real insight into the role communication through each individual network actually played. There is no doubt that people are better connected today than they were in the 80s, but user behaviour and intent is totally different across Facebook, Twitter and BBM. We’ve seen people convicted for trying to incite rioting on Facebook (but in most cases cited in the media these attempts failed), we’ve seen large spikes of traffic on Twitter reacting to and reporting on various incidents but only a tiny number of sinister tweets. However, incitement through BBM appears to have been a different matter entirely. How many people are we actually talking about here and how influential were their actions?

2. Retrospective identification of law-breaking individuals

Twitter is an open network, it’s not a particularly smart place to try to incite rioting as users can be identified and traced easily, particularly if they’ve linked to or posted other clues to their real offline identities. Facebook is different – whilst some info is open, the vast majority of communication between friendship networks is closed, it’s likely that the Home Office will want FB to help them identify people through providing access to this data. The same goes for BBM which is even more difficult to track. We’re in dangerous territory here, each network needs to consider and balance the PR implications of the extent to which they choose to co-operate.

3. Future activity monitoring & reporting

The police clearly have sophisticated monitoring of social media channels in place already. Julian Assange has reported that Facebook and other networks have already developed interfaces for intelligence agencies in the US. The British Government is likely to be asking for similar access in the wake of the riots. There’s a high likelihood that, behind closed doors, this access will be granted or perhaps is already in place (how useful and effective it is in quelling spontaneous incitement is another matter altogether). It would certainly protect the networks’ commercial interests in the UK and would act as leverage against Home Office plans to ‘shut down’ networks as an emergency measure.

4. Restriction of usage for individuals

The Prime Minister stated: ‘We are looking at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.’ In practise it’s difficult to see how this could be enforced. If advanced monitoring is put in place we could see a scenario where individual accounts are disabled by the networks seconds after suspected criminal activity, but police resources are already stretched to the limit it’s difficult to see how this could be effectively managed in reality. The PR backlash over diminished social networking services and government collaboration (not to mention resources) would certainly discourage Facebook, Twitter and BBM from this course of action too.

5. Social media blackout

The most extreme alternative is the complete shutdown of some networks should civil disorder scale to previously unprecedented levels. Whilst this is not outside the realms of possibility, it certainly seems unlikely. If we get to this stage shutting down social networking communication is likely to have very little effect at all and will be the least of the governments’ concerns…

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