How much are Twitter and BlackBerry to blame for British riots?

Days of rioting across England have sharpened criticism of social media tools like BlackBerry Messenger, Facebook, and Twitter, which are helping criminals organize looting gangs, British officials say.


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"There’s certainly some evidence of the use of mobile communications to organize what happened, but to understand this you have to go beyond the assumption that this was a spontaneous public uprising," writes Andy Williamson, director of digital democracy at the Hansard Society in London, who has studied the use of social media tools in the Arab Spring.

"You can’t blame social media for what happened nor can you really say it changed the nature of the riots," he notes in an e-mail interview. "It might have spread the message but the evidence points to it being a tool.... These kids use social media instinctively in their lives, of course they’re going to use it here. If social media was to blame, 24-hour TV was more so."

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2011/0811/How-much-are-Twitter-and-BlackBerry-to-blame-for-British-riots

I'm not at all surprised that that's their government's response. This from the same people who decided that the proper response to violent crime was to hamstring people from legally owning anything remotely dangerous, even kitchen knives, rather than address the actual crimes or the reasons for it.

and bike/scooter/car/bus manufacturers for providing the means of transportation.

:sarcasm:

They had them in Roman Empire!

When the rich loot, the poor riot!

They had them in England after the rich "enclosed" the common lands!

No Twitter. No Facebook.

Here's a better idea! Plug the poor youth of England directly into the government--via a dedicated Facebook page and ASK FOR THEIR IDEAS and LISTEN to what they have to say!

Get off the phone to Murdoch and start listening to THE PEOPLE!

Asshole.

Bollocks to suggest otherwise.

Thanks to the absurd economic policies of the Tories and Liberal Democrats in the U.K. their youth, 16 to 25 don't have jobs and no hope of having them in the future.

Adding to that fact, the government has closed down many of the youth recreation centers, which means they have no where else to go but to the streets, where they are routinely harassed by the police.

Jobless, bored teenagers with no where to go and no hope of a future can make a hell of a lot of trouble, with or without modern technology. As the U.S. is likely to find out when even more government funding for needed social programs is cut in this country.

before that all criminal planning took days.