For me the London riots are a bit too close to home with rioting, looting and disorder just a mile down the road. Like many people in my situation I haven't been able to get enough of the news coverage. I want to know exactly where the rioters are and what they're doing.
I've found that the news is about an hour behind twitter so I've just been sitting watching my twitter feed. This is the first time I've used twitter like this and it's quite exciting, but it's also full of rubbish. About half the tweets are about the Nandos and Krispy Kreme being set on fire which I'm sure is just a lie (the live TV feed is showing them still up). And the same picture is being used as evidence for both, though the building on fire looks nothing like either of them.
But twitter could be doing something worse than spreading misinformation. Local people tweeting live about what they can see from their windows are telling potential rioters where all the action is (assuming they're one of the unfortunate rioters who didn't get the blackberry message). In fact the unfounded rumours they spread on twitter could start focal points of rioting where there was no previous plan to be.
What's the answer? I don't think it's reasonable to prevent people from tweeting about what's happening, and I think it would be very difficult to stop the word getting round on any type of social media. Maybe instead of stopping all messages the police should go the other way and flood social media such as bbm and twitter with messages dissuading the rioters. Obviously messages from the police won't work but if they could get respected community leaders involved then they just might have a chance...
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