Social Media and the London Riots

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...

Should we demand to pay for Social Media?

This week, GrrlScientist wrote an open letter to Google after her account was deactivated without warning:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/jul/28/google-open-letter-google

While she argues that she did not contravene their terms and conditions (as they were claiming), I believe that they are legally within their rights to deactivate it anyway.  And it raises an interesting point.  We all rely so much on free services provided by companies like Google and Facebook that we (or certainly I) would be lost without them.  If Google one day decided to deactivate my  gmail account then I would lose all my emails from the last few years.  And since I have a tendency to forget passwords for websites, I would be permanently logged out of most of my other accounts, because the websites have no other contact address for me.

And even worse, what if Google decided tomorrow that they had been successful enough and were going to stop trading immediately, deactivating all gmail accounts.  There would be complete chaos!

Because we are getting these services for free, the companies legally owe us very little.  The obvious solution would be for us to pay for the services and got more rights and guarantees in return.  I wouldn't dream of getting all my post sent to an address manned for free by someone who I had never met, so why do I do so with my emails?

Saying that, people have got too used to receiving all these services for free so it would be a very hard sell to get them to pay for it.

What do you think?  Is there another solution?