Many people are talking about the violence and crime in London and elsewhere last night, there's lots of speculation about the causes and the impact of it, I certainly have my views but thought I'd take a different tack. There was a lot of speculation last night that rioters were using "social media" to coordinate their criminal activities, to the extent that some commentators were actually blaming it.
I expect to see that kind of thing from hysterical right wing sources but such criminally simplistic reporting shouldn't be the norm on channels that are supposed to be balanced and researched, like the BBC for example. Blaming crime on the internet is akin to blaming world war one on the telegraph, or world war two on the radio, or the Vietnam war on TV, i.e. dumb! One wonders how insulted the police must feel about this speculation, the implication being that they are too stupid to read and use the same social media channels as the criminals, and indeed actually use them to pre-empt crime. It seems unlikely that monitoring such feeds with smart software that identifies potential risks would be beyond the resources and intelligence of the UK Government and its security services, then again on second thoughts....
2 comments:
It's only about 10 years since social media was invented. They're probably still going through the tendering process.
AE, true! and the third set of clueless management consultants...
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