how the riots have affected social platforms
After three nights of the worst riots in the country for 26years, we are going to take a look at social media’s involvement in the progression of these riots and how it has been affected.
For the first time this year online news and media have had an increase in traffic of 14% between the dates of the 7th & 8th August 2011.
When we compare the search terms people were looking for in prior to any of the riots, compared to the day after the riots were sparked, you can see that the difference is extremely prominent. Twitter seems to be the most popular however.
Twitter has benefitted massively from an increase in traffic in comparison to any other site. Why though? Is this because people are able to gain uncensored information from the site, because the people contributing to the riots are using the site to communicate with one and other?
Well this are some of the explanations, but the main one is this: more people in London are inclined to use twitter than any other social networking site. This is a statistic that has been available much longer than any of these riots and can be seen demonstrated in the table below:
Personally we feel that another reason for this is because you have the ability to talk and see information from people who are not your friend – whether this information is true or not, people don’t seem to mind as they get caught up in the sensationalism of it all.
Facebook however, is more popular in the north of the country in places such as Manchester, Doncaster, Hull and Blackburn. So with the riots progressing to a national level are we going to see a peak in Facebook traffic or are like we think people visiting twitter to get a broader view of what is happening across the country?
“Twitter accounted for 1 in every 170 UK Internet visits yesterday; by our estimations there were over 3.4 million visits to the Twitter homepage from the UK population alone. To put that in context, Twitter received 15% more visits yesterday than it did around the super-injunctions scandal, the previous biggest spike in its UK history.” Via www.hitwise.com.
But people are now beginning to point the finger at Twitter, blaming the social networking site. The BBC’s Iain Mackenzie wrote “Is technology to blame for the London riots?” and the Daily Mail’s Chris Greenwood tweeted “‘if you see a fed… SHOOT!’ Looters co-ordinate raids via Twitter and BlackBerry as messages of rage spread like wildfire”.
As mentioned by the Daily Mail’s Chris Greenwood, Twitter is not the only social platform that is being blamed for helping the criminals communicate and organize these horrific crimes we are witnessing. Blackberry messenger has become more and more popular for many reasons, the main being: It’s fast, it is virtually free, and unlike other social networking platforms, it is private. Adding these reasons to the fact that there are 43million active Blackberry messenger users, growing by 2million every year, which is an incremental growth of 110% YoY, you get some idea of how word can spread so easily through the means of BBM.
Today we are seeing new trends on twitter, in an effort to clean up our country which has already suffered. Hash tags such as #riotcleanup, #catchalooter, #staysafe & #prayforlondon have all been trending today on twitter to inspire more positive action.
Looking at the graph below we can see how twitters average traffic to the site has been consistently growing, peaking at points such as the royal wedding earlier this year and the super injunction scandal in May. But as previously mentioned “To put that in context, Twitter received 15% more visits yesterday than it did around the super-injunctions scandal”.
