London Met Police Strategies for Twitter Use

The next ECREA 2012 session is on social media and crisis communication, and I have my final paper for this trip in this session as well. We start with Farida Vis, though, whose focus is on the use of Twitter by the London Metropolitan Police. This relates also to the emergence of data journalism, to the work to understand the positioning of Twitter in the wider mediasphere, and to the overall interest in the 'big data' question which has grown over the last year or so. All of this is related to issues of surveillance, user profiling, and other data collection, then.

Much Twitter research is related to specific events and moments, rather than to longitudinal processes of Twitter adoption and adaptation. The range of tools for the use and analysis of Twitter is constantly expanding, and we need to move well beyond isolated (mainly hashtag-focussed) Twitter studies in our research as well. This is also a call to move beyond a focus on big data alone – we must also continue to study the smaller practices. Similarly, the connection between Twitter and other media has yet to be studied in fuller detail.

All of this applies also to the use of social media by police. In February 2012, a UK government response to the 2011 riots noted the importance of social media in policing the riots; the Met's number of Twitter followers grew almost ten-fold following the riots. Many more Met Twitter accounts have since been created, relating to specific aspects of policing or to local police beats. Most such accounts were created soon after the publication of the riots report, indeed.

The Twitter activities of these accounts have been collected by data journalist and researcher Jacopo Ottaviani, especially also during the 2012 London Olympics. Additionally, the police also instituted the #askmetboss hashtag to conduct a live Q&A session with the Met commissioner on 19 Dec. 2011; this session ended up being quite confrontational, due to the problematic positioning of the Met especially after the riots.

Many difficult questions remained unanswered, and this was the only Twitter chat conducted; subsequent chats were moved to the much more controlled space of CoverItLive. Additionally, the #metracism emerged as a way of highlighting allegedly racist behaviour by Met police officers.

Use of Twitter by Met police accounts varies widely; their use of hashtags is also varied and not necessarily very effective. One account, @MPSBarnet, actually hashtags all of its tweets with #MPSBarnet, for some reason. Visual content posted by police accounts also varies; some accounts even use Instagram, oddly. Another account runs a Flickr collection of plants stolen in Wandsworth.

These are clearly emerging practices, and the forces are still finding their feet; how they use social media now may also influence how they use social media during crisis situations, of course. Twitter discourses around the police may also be affected by these uses, of course.