Week Four - Response To Content

Did social media cause the British Riots?

Recently, there has been a lot of reports and questioning about the part of social networking and social media in the current riots in Britain. Many believe that various youth involved in the riots used social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to gather more people to the ‘uprising’ and that due to this the companies who own these sites should be held somewhat accountable.. However on a personal level, I don’t believe that social media was the instigator or at all responsible for the disgraceful behaviour happening across Britain.

The riots began due a peaceful protest about police misconduct and have now, due to the immaturity of some turned into the worst public riots Britain has seen since the solid efforts of The Troubles. The British Prime Minister David Cameron expressed his wishes to ban those involved in the riots from all social networking sites, however Jim Killock disagrees, believing that by doing this he is taking away freedom of speech and possibly just fuelling the unrest, “Events like the recent riots are frequently used to attack civil liberties. Policing should be targeted at actual offenders, with the proper protection of the courts”.

I agree strongly with this, after all it’s the people using Facebook and Twitter causing problems not the social media itself and therefore it should be the people punished not them. Social media/networking can’t be held responsible for the actions of the irresponsible humans that use it or the sickening activities they carried out after the trouble began; such as looting and destruction of property owned by people that had nothing to do with the riots or the incident that allegedly begun the saga.

--- georgia-mary
Read more: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/08/11/london-riots-david-cameron-considers-banning-suspected-looters-from-twitter-and-facebook-115875-23337345/#ixzz1W8uOozXa Viewed 20 August 2011