Study finds Twitter did not cause riots

Reporter

Friday 9 December 2011

COMPUTER experts from St Andrews University have revealed that social networking sites did not help to incite the English riots.

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Victoria Weldon

A study of 2.4 million Twitter messages from the time of the riots in London and other cities in August found that politicians and other commentators were wrong to claim that the site was partly responsible for the disturbances.

In contrast, the university research team found Twitter was a force for good and helped to organise the clean-up.The study, led by Professor Rob Procter of the University of Manchester, used St Andrews' world-leading cloud computing technology.Mr Procter said: "Politicians and commentators were quick to claim that social media played an important role in inciting and organising riots, calling for sites such as Twitter to be closed should events of this nature happen again."But our study found no evidence of significance in the available data that would justify such a course of action in respect to Twitter."The research, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee, was only possible using St Andrews' large scale computing facilities.Dr Alex Voss, from the university's School of Computer Science, said: "The cloud computing environment at St Andrews meant that we could quickly set up a multi-computer environment that could analyse a large volume of information quickly and accurately. "The study found news rumours appear quickly on Twitter but often turn out to be false. An example was a rumour animals had been released from London Zoo, which was untrue.Mr Procter added: "Only after a period of time does the influence of mainstream media organisations become critical for determining a rumour's credibility. But we do find the mainstream media is perfectly capable of picking up and publishing unverified information from social media without adhering to the usual standard of fact checking.

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Study finds Twitter did not cause riots

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