The role of digital and social media in the London riots

TORONTO – As fires ripped through homes and businesses in north and south London Monday, police say rioters and looters coordinated their acts of anarchy using text and instant messages on their BlackBerry smartphones.

In a message posted on its UK Twitter account, Research In Motion expressed sympathy over the chaos that has gripped parts of Britain’s capital since Saturday.

“We feel for those impacted by the riots in London. We have engaged with the authorities to assist in any way we can,” the company Tweeted Monday from its @UK_BlackBerry account.

While lawmakers and police struggle to contain the country’s worst unrest since the London race riots of the 1980s, a police force 16,000-strong will be patrolling the streets Tuesday night. Officers have been authorized to use rubber bullets to prevent further violence.

The challenge they face is staying ahead of the rioters, many of them unemployed city youths harnessing social media and smartphone technology to plan their next opportunities to attack.

Hackers target BlackBerry 

Mike Butcher, a technology journalist and digital advisor to London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson, reportedly Tweeted it was “unbelievable” that BBM had not been shut down for its role as an anarchy organization tool. 

“There is evidence that BBM is an encrypted, very secure, safe, fast, cheap, easy way for disaffected urban youths to spread messages for their next target,” Butcher said in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday.

“Mobile phones have become weaponised in their capability of spreading information about where to target next,” he said.

BlackBerry is the most popular brand of smartphone used by teens in Britain, according to research by Ofcom, an independent regulator and competition authority for UK communication industries. On Monday, RIM said it would comply with police investigations of riot or looting instigators using its instant messaging application, BBM.  

RIM’s move to stay on side with the law made the company the target of a hacking attack. On Tuesday, August 9 the company’s official BlackBerry blog, Inside BlackBerry, was infiltrated by hackers warning the smartphone maker not to cooperate with police.

“You Will _NOT_ assist the UK Police because if u do innocent members of the public who were at the wrong place at the wrong time and owned a blackberry will get charged for no reason at all,” the statement by the group Teampoison said.

The hackers then threatened to pass on RIM’s employee information to rioters if the company assisted police.

“If you do assist the police by giving them chat logs, gps locations, customer information & access to peoples BlackBerryMessengers you will regret it, we have access to your database which includes your employees information; e.g – Addresses, Names, Phone Numbers etc. – now if u assist the police, we _WILL_ make this information public and pass it onto rioters,” it said.

The company has yet to comment on the hacking incident. 

Social media and the #Londonriots    

London police are using social media to identify rioters and looters who’ve boasted of their plundered goods and violent acts over Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

On Tuesday, police launched a Flickr page with photos of people they believe took part in the riots and looting. The initiative, dubbed Operative Withern, contains CCTV images of suspects involved in looting in two south London neighbourhoods.

The project is one example of how social media is being utilized as a tool for law enforcement.

“Social media is almost far more of a powerful tool for those trying to stop the violence and catch the people behind it, than for those trying to orchestrate the violence,” says Alfred Hermida, a digital media expert and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia School of Journalism. 

“Part of what we’re seeing here is a lot more information being available…if you’re the police trying to identify people, that’s incredibly powerful,” Hermida says. 

Social media has also been instrumental in organizing clean-up efforts in the aftermath of the riots.

Hundreds of Twitter and Facebook users have joined volunteer clean-up crews, with the hashtags, #takebacklondon #ReclaimLondon and #riotcleanup trending online, replacing the search term #londonriots, which was previously used on Twitter to identify Tweets and stories related to the violence around London.   

“Every means of communication can be used for good or for evil,” Hermida says.

“Some of the prevailing narrative on Twitter is people responding to the rioters and expressing their disgust of it or trying to, in a sense, organize a clean up or organize attempts to share their videos or photographs of some of the things they’ve seen that has shocked them,” Hermida says.

“We saw this in the riots in Vancouver. People posting pictures of them doing an illegal act on the streets of Vancouver almost as bragging rights, saying ‘I was there,’ without realizing that if you post it on Facebook, maybe other people can see it and maybe it can used by police as a way of identifying the perpetrators of this illegal act,” Hermida adds, contrasting the violence in London with the hockey riots that swept through downtown Vancouver after the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup in June.

In Vancouver, social media was a helpful tool for police to pursue leads and track down unidentified rioters unmasked by peers over social media.

“There’s an ability to reach a lot more people who can help in potentially identifying some of these people,” Hermida says. “Far more people are taking videos and pictures of what’s going on, so you have an incredible resource of material that you can then look through.”  

As was the case in Vancouver-and with Toronto’s G20 investigators before them-the challenge that lies ahead of London police will be to sort through tremendous amounts of digital data to find valuable information that may lead to arrests. 

But the volume of information obtained through social media could also provide a safe haven for criminals.  

“In some ways, that sort of helps the people who are doing this…because they can hide in the noise,” Hermida says.

Still, social media remains a crucial communication tool with whistleblowers and citizen journalists helping to shape the story as it unfolds.  
“It does help give us a much broader picture of what’s going on so we’re not just relying on what’s being reported by professional journalists,” Hermida says.

“A journalist is not going to be everywhere. Social media is helping to give us a more rounded picture of what’s going on.”