Social media: Let's not forget the positives

The opportunistic violence that we've seen on the streets of London over the past few days has no place in today's society and for those of us who are proud Londoners brings shame upon the nation's capital.

Anyone who believes such actions serve any purpose is wildly off the mark and the fact that the perpetrators of these crimes initially tried to align themselves with those protesting at the circumstances surrounding the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan is merely a smokescreen for bringing anarchy and looting to our streets.

With less than a year to go before we host the Olympics it doesn't look good. The ease with which these criminal gangs have gone about their business is worrying and much of the blame has been laid at the door of social networks and instant messaging.

When the riots kicked off it was initially Twitter which found itself caught in the crosshairs. Last weekend it had the Daily Mail throwing accusations of fanning the flames of rioting in Tottenham at its door. According to the Mail and others, the retweeting of pictures and messages from hooligans via the social networking site were to blame for the needless violence and looting that had engulfed the North West of London over the weekend. Of course, this presented a somewhat distorted reality as Twitter played its part in just the same way as SMS, YouTube and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) have done. The constant stream of news from the media and in particular the 24-hour a day news channels from BBC and Sky have probably didn't help either, helping to brief would be troublemakers to some extent too.

Yet, it's BBM which the focus quickly turned upon and it's no surprise really given the popularity of the free messaging service that allows broadcasts between users at no extra charge. According to Mobile Youth, BBM has overtaken SMS to become the messenger of choice for teenagers and students. The Financial Times recently reported that the use of BBM had rocketed with volumes increasing by up to 500%, while figures from Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of the BlackBerry, suggest that some 39m people already use the platform.

With this kind of technology and those kind of figures its easy to see the damage that can be done in the wrong hands. Can you imagine what the football hooligans would have done with that 20 years ago?

Yet while The Sun and the Daily Mail chose to blame social networking through Twitter, Facebook and BBM for the impact they had during the riots, it took no time at all for communities across the UK to come together to show social media as a force for good.

Yesterday we saw the hashtag #riotcleanup beginning to appear all over Twitter as people began taking David Cameron's 'big society' idea into their own hands, helping with the clean up en masse as they took to the streets with brooms and the like. As it stands, @riotcleanup has more than 87,300 followers on Twitter - a figure that puts the troublemakers seen on the streets across the UK firmly into perspective.

Further evidence, as if it were needed, that social media can be used to positive affect was also seen on the 'Post riot clean-up: let's help London' page set up on Facebook to help coordinate the clean-up efforts. One quick look at this and something like Operation Cup Of Tea tells you all you need to know about the merits of social networking. At the time of writing this Facebook event page had more than 200,000 attendees/fans. Their message is a simple one:

“EVERYDAY, gather us in an anti-riot. For this all you need to do is post a picture on this event with a nice cup of tea* at home!

*if you’re not a fan of tea feel free to post a picture of you drinking any “mugged” drink :)

We don’t need to riot, and this is how we will show it!

If they want to riot, then riot. but this page is for us who don’t want to!”

You can’t argue with that.