Reading the riots: what were the police doing on Twitter?

Abstract

The widespread adoption of new forms of digital communication platforms such as micro-blogging sites presents both an opportunity and a challenge for researchers interested in understanding people's attitudes and behaviours, especially in the context of unfolding crises and the need for government agencies such as the police to inform the public and act swiftly to ensure public order and safety. In this paper, we use a study of a recent public order crisis in England to explore how the police, other organisations and individuals used Twitter as they responded to this event.

Keywords:

• big data
• social media
• policing
• riots

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for funding this study. We would also like to thank members of the Analysing Social Media Collaboration (analysingsocialmedia.org) for their invaluable assistance in coding extracts of the corpus. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the invaluable contribution of our collaborators at the Guardian, journalists Paul Lewis, James Ball and Lisa Evans, who made this project possible.

Notes

1. The NPIA ceased to exist on 31 December 2012. The functions relating to social media use have been passed to the College of Policing.

2. e.g. @brumpolice and @suptpaynewmp

3. In our current studies of police use of Twitter we are harvesting tweets sent by police accounts and those containing mentions of them.

4. ‘We have a number of different Twitter channels with updates about different areas of the MPS. We are in the process of getting each one of our 32 boroughs on Twitter. Follow your local borough to receive updates about policing and MPS priorities’. http://www.met.police.uk/webinfo/social_media.htm viewed 24 October 2012.