Police Activities on Twitter during the London and UK Riots

The final speaker in this ECREA 2012 session is Rob Procter, who shifts our attention to the London and UK riots in August 2011. His project collected some 2.6 million tweets from some 700,000 accounts using relevant hashtags from the Twitter firehose, and combines quantitative and qualitative analysis.

A corpus of tweets consists of tweets and retweets, and the tracking of retweets provides us with a clear identification of information flows, and enables a ranking of content by how far it flowed over time. Many of the longest information flows (the most retweeted messages) were for post-riot cleanup messages, especially from widely followed accounts.

This is also interesting in the context of rumours, which break quickly on Twitter but are also counteracted by other users correcting deliberate or accidental misinformation. Police and other authorities do not respond quickly enough to such messages so far, however; even without their intervention, however, eventually the truth does come out relatively quickly.

General police force accounts sent out a broad mix of tweets, and retweeted other accounts more frequently; local police accounts mainly sent local status updates, and mainly interacted with loca accounts. Police force accounts were mentioned largely by mainstream and new media accounts; local police accounts received more mentions from local users. A number of specific riot-related accounts also emerged during the riots themselves; these positioned themselves as information sources during the event itself.

There are clear differences in content between different accounts. However, the focus of the dataset on hashtags must also be recognised – individual replies to inquiries which did not use hashtags may well have been missed here. There may be issues with police communication if hashtags are generally underused, however; police need to make sure that they put out information in the public domain more effectively. A greater specialisation of accounts may also be necessary.

All of this needs further research across other events, and an important question here is how social media may be able to be used for community engagement – also outside of crisis events, of course.