"5 Days in August" – How London Local Authorities used Twitter during the 2011 riots

© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2012This study examines effects of microblogging communications during emergency events based on the case of the summer 2011 riots in London. During five days in August 2011, parts of London and other major cities in England suffered from extensive public disorders, violence and even loss of human lives. We collected and analysed the tweets posted by the official accounts maintained by 28 London local government authorities. Those authorities used Twitter for a variety of purposes such as preventing rumours, providing official information, promoting legal actions against offenders and organising post-riot community engagement activities. The study shows how the immediacy and communicative power of microblogging can have a significant effect at the response and recovery stages of emergency events

Twitter in local government: A study of Greater London authorities

Copyright @ 2011 SIG eGOVMicroblogging services are considered an emerging opportunity for authorities seeking to establish new communication channels with their public. Potential benefits evolve around enhancing transparency and interactivity, as well as sharing information regularly or during emergency events. The purpose of this exploratory study is to advance our empirical understanding of microblogging in local government. In particular, we reflect on online data collected to profile the use of Twitter by 29 Greater London local authorities (LAs). The study shows that London LAs have been accumulating significant experience with Twitter mainly over the past two years. In fact, many of them appear to incorporate conversational characteristics in their Tweets other than simply disseminating information. Furthermore, an analysis of Tweets during the August 2011 riots in England indicates the usefulness of the medium for responsibly informing the public and preventing rumours. Nevertheless, the study also identifies several points of improvement in the way public authorities are building their online networks; for example, in terms of connecting with each other and exploiting even more the conversational characteristics of Twitter

Social media in emergency management:Twitter as a tool for communicating risks to the public

One of the main challenges of emergency management lies in communicating risks to the public. On some occasions, risk communicators might seek to increase awareness over emerging risks, while on others the aim might be to avoid escalation of public reactions. Social media accounts offer an opportunity to rapidly distribute critical information and in doing so to mitigate the impact of emergencies by influencing public reactions. This article draws on theories of risk and emergency communication in order to consider the impact of Twitter as a tool for communicating risks to the public. We analyse 10,020 Twitter messages posted by the official accounts of UK local government authorities (councils) in the context of two major emergencies: the heavy snow of December 2010 and the riots of August 2011. Twitter was used in a variety of ways to communicate and manage associated risks including messages to provide official updates, encourage protective behaviour, increase awareness and guide public attention to mitigating actions. We discuss the importance of social media as means of increasing confidence in emergency management institutions

From Causality to Emergence: re-evaluating social media’s role in the 2011 English riots

This paper is an attempt to re-evaluate the role of social media on the riots. It draws upon interviews and qualitative analysis of tweets posted during the riots to examine how digital modalities reconfigure power relations between vulnerable and invulnerable populations as collectives seek to enact social change. The importance of social media for understanding collective action, I argue, lies in its relevance for conveying what one could call the performativity of public space. My thesis emerges in response to the rise of big data analytics as a means to predict and respond to political unrest, exploring the limits of predictive analyses with regard to issues of trust, power, memory and emotions. My claim is that understanding the power of the digital requires a more sophisticated understanding of emotions. To this end, I emphasize the need to employ multi-method approaches to study new forms of “mediated crowd” membership that combine digital methods with more traditional approaches to emotions research

Online social networking, order and disorder

Whilst online social networking has been used successfully for many years by all strata of the world’s population, its use to ferment and prevent civil disturbances is a relatively new phenomenon. It is clear that the way in which online social networking sites are being used is evolving, and that changing user perceptions of online privacy may impact on the ability of the law enforcement community to adapt to new methods of monitoring and evidence gathering. This paper focuses primarily on the London riots of August 2011, and as such discusses legal issues from a UK perspective. However, the matters discussed are of relevance worldwide, with reference made to similar events outside the UK, to show that what occurred in London was not an isolated incident, or a quirk of the UK social networking scene. This paper explores what occurred, the platforms that were used and how they were used, and the legal framework in which investigations took place. It examines the use of social networking to organise rioters, support community defence, and shape the response of law enforcement agencies such as the police, government and the courts. It concludes that there is significant potential for problems of this type to occur in the future, which will require the evolution of law enforcement methods and procedures, and could change the way in which the law enforcement community utilise e-Government systems

Community Resilience Research: UK Case Studies, Lessons and Recommendations report to the Cabinet Office and Defence Science and Technology Laboratory.

This report presents four case studies carried out for the Community Resilience project funded by DSTL and supported by the Civil Contingency Secretariat (CCS), Cabinet Office. The work for this project was carried out between September and December 2011. The aim of the Community Resilience project was to develop a better understanding of the role of community resilience in emergency response and recovery situations in order to inform Cabinet Office / Civil Contingencies Secretariat policy on community resilience and to inform the development of future work

Privacy in public spaces: what expectations of privacy do we have in social media intelligence?

In this paper we give an introduction to the transition in contemporary surveillance from top down traditional police surveillance to profiling and “pre-crime” methods. We then review in more detail the rise of open source (OSINT) and social media (SOCMINT) intelligence and its use by law enforcement and security authorities. Following this we consider what if any privacy protection is currently given in UK law to SOCMINT. Given the largely negative response to the above question, we analyse what reasonable expectations of privacy there may be for users of public social media, with reference to existing case law on art 8 of the ECHR. Two factors are in particular argued to be supportive of a reasonable expectation of privacy in open public social media communications: first, the failure of many social network users to perceive the environment where they communicate as “public”; and secondly, the impact of search engines (and other automated analytics) on traditional conceptions of structured dossiers as most problematic for state surveillance. Lastly, we conclude that existing law does not provide adequate protection for open SOCMINT and that this will be increasingly significant as more and more personal data is disclosed and collected in public without well-defined expectations of privacy