Twitter To Meet With UK Government About Riots

"Twitter has confirmed that it will meet with the UK Home Secretary on Thursday, after being called in for discussions over the role it played in the recent UK riots. Twitter will send a representative to the meeting scheduled for August 25. Both Facebook and RIM will also send representatives to the meeting in regards to their effects on the riots."

Comments

Other representatives

[Anonymous Coward]

Will there be representatives from the telephone company, and the postal services, to answer for the roles they played in the riots? What about mainstream print, radio, and television media who made others aware of the riots, and carried the idea of unrest to others, who then joined in?

The communication medium is but the messenger.

Re:Other representatives

[bennomatic]

I heard most of those rioters wore shoes. Maybe shoe companies should be taken to task for all the malfeasance they enable.

Re:Other representatives

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how the gov'ts love to go blah blah blah blah instead of helping to fix the causes that caused people to want to riot in the first place. Plenty of $$$$$$ to flap gums but not actualy fix things

Re:Other representatives

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Dear Sirs, Downing Street Hacks, and assorted Parliamentarians: We simply convey the tweets. Your nasty little island produced the twits tweeting them.

Yours sincerely,
A useless, but harmless, web startup from somewhere that hasn't had any rioting issues lately.

Re:Other representatives

[dark_requiem]

Remember remember the fifth of November...

Re:Other representatives

[PopeRatzo]

And when did it become OK to shift responsibility and blame to anywhere and everywhere except the people who actually committed the crimes?

When a small group of banksters committed fraud to crash the world economy, ruining lives and pushing hundreds of millions of people into poverty or economic uncertainty.

Don't fool yourself. The biggest crimes are the ones where it's " OK to shift responsibility and blame to anywhere and everywhere except the people who actually committed the crimes". And the same people who paid for those crimes are going to pay for the crimes that occur when social contracts break down and civil violence occurs: everyone but the ones responsible.

Re:Other representatives

[AthanasiusKircher]

I heard most of those rioters wore shoes.

I heard most of those rioters had feet. Maybe we should look into those parents who have been plotting for years to enable the riots, by raising those ambulatory children... teaching them to stand erect, to walk, even to run and evade capture.

Re:Other representatives

[JWSmythe]

    It's long been suspected that "ECHLON" already monitors phone calls, faxes, and emails. But hey, maybe all their gear is just a huge expensive decoration, to distract tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy freaks. The truth is somewhere in the middle. :)

      RIM's SMS most likely don't leave their network. Why would they? If I recall correctly, they are encrypted at the phone, so they wouldn't be easy to intercept at the tower.

    The same would also apply to cell providers, unless SMS was already easily interceptable when it hit the tower.

    Although it would appear safe, are messages sent via https://twitter.com/ really safe? Probably not.

    But why would governments have to go through the hassle of intercepting messages at the tower, and decrypting them, when the providers can hand them over, unencrypted, on an E-silver-platter(tm).

    Most likely such a meeting isn't to determine if they should or shouldn't do it, but what the pricing will be. I guarantee, if the gov't wants it, the provider will let them pay at greater than cost. It's a lot easier to negotiate for a live feed, than to come back later with a warrant. For god and country only goes so far, but the right price tag will get you anything.

   

Re:Other representatives

[Stevecrox]

It sounds close to the official number as quick glance at BBC news's website shows. Nothing to do with collusion, people keep talking about all of the CCTV camera's in the UK police have been identifying people through that. Most of the papers have also been printing pictures of rioters in an effort to identify them, there are about half a dozen stories of mothers turning in their kids when they saw the child's photo in a national paper.

This meeting is the higher ups way of looking like they are doing something to daily mail readers, I'm hoping nothing comes of it especially when you realise Twitter & Facebook were used by people to organise clean-ups and identify the rioters.

There has also been a lot of talk about the harshness of the punishments handed down to rioters. The UK doesn't require mobile phones to have Government available GPS tracking like the USA. You can only check-in with Facebook/Google latitude and not twitter.

Double Standard

[Anonymous Coward]

When it happens in Egypt and Libya, its an amazing tool for freedom of speech and the spread of democracy.

When it happens in your own back yard, its a problem.

Re:Double Standard

[MakinBacon]

There's a fine line between staging a revolution and looting an electronics store, my friend.

Re:Double Standard

[no-body]

Any social problems in that area - like high unemployment, low standard of living, educational/career dead-end. other types of violence/repression, possibly from government agencies?

And - if so, what are the solutions of the local governments?

One person protesting there was interviewed and stated that news media would not care unless fuss would be created.
 
A fine line.... right.

Re:Double Standard

[Riceballsan]

aye, while I agree there is little defense for what the rioters do, there is something important about them having the technology to have either option. You can't ban talking to each-other, or even saying specific things (even if it is down with big brother). The right to say things the government dosn't want you to say should be fought for, regardless of the consequences, and banning twitter etc... just gives the rioters/looters something to justify their actions with.

Re:Double Standard

[AngryDeuce]

With the speed with the government can clamp down on the citizenry with it's resources, it's only fair that the population have access to the same level of coordination. I think we would all agree that all societies have the right of self-determination, and if self-determination takes the form of open rebellion and revolution, that's the price we pay for democracy.

These days, freedom to communicate via the internet and text messaging is almost as important as the right to assemble, and definitely as vital. The powers that be are using their authority in order to force it's agenda on the citizenry. Whether they agree or not, if the citizenry decides to rise up against them and defy their authority, is immaterial. Government exists at the will of the people, not the other way around.

Re:Double Standard

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the key difference is whether NATO supports it by shooting at the police and dropping weaponry on the looters or not.

Re:Double Standard

[digitig]

Any social problems in that area - like high unemployment, low standard of living, educational/career dead-end. other types of violence/repression, possibly from government agencies?

In some of the areas where there were riots and looting. Not in others. And the rioters seem to come from across the social spectrum (the teenage daughter of a millionaire has been arrested, although she has pleaded not guilty). The rioters, and their reasons for rioting, were so diverse that every pundit can find cases to support their political or social agenda, and the opponents of every pundit can find cases that disprove it. If anybody (eg, David Cameron) says that the causes were simple then they are cherry-picking cases to fit their agenda.

Re:Double Standard

[digitig]

The UK riots were ONLY looting. Do you think more than about 10 people cared about the police shooting some armed dealer? really?

No they weren't. In some places if was just trashing stuff, with no looting. In others, one gang would come along and smash all of the windows, and a while later others would come along and loot. In some places and in some groups there was clear protest going on, in others the riots seem to have been just for the hell of it. Even those who were not bothered by the police killing of a suspected criminal were bothered that they misled the public about what had happened (forensics showed that the shot the police said he fired at them actually came from a police gun), and a lot more are bothered by increasingly heavy-handed policing. But yes, plenty were bothered by the fact that others were getting free stuff and they weren't, and set out to change that.

Re:Double Standard

[Kvasio]

you call it looting, some call it "electronics liberation"

Re:Double Standard

[MightyYar]

One person protesting there was interviewed and stated that news media would not care unless fuss would be created.

Right, because they tried peacefully protesting first, and that didn't work.</sarcasm>

Re:Double Standard

[mywhitewolf]

I'm disappointing you aren't willing to put your name against that comment Mr AC. Because IMO you're at least partially right. The kids can try and play the society game that we have laid out to them, or they can make their own rules and fight to have them apply instead. we like our rules so we apply them with force and fight back, but that doesn't make our society rules "right" any more then they are "wrong". there are winners and losers in any social contract, when the losers are sick of losing they stop playing by the rules, and the winners get angry because "but, we said that wasn't ok to do!". but pretending there is some "rules" to life that "everyone should follow" and those that don't are "evil scum" is ignorant to the complexity of even a basic animal let alone one as complicated as the exceptionally resourceful, extremely opportunistic naked ape.

if you've never had to rely on government handouts to eat, you're not in a position to condemn the actions of the less fortunate, its completely disheartening to have your survival reliant on a faceless entity who is willing and able to throw you to the dogs at a moments notice.

the riots may have occurred because people are selfish, but you can't stop people from being selfish, IMO social policy is what is wrong and what caused this issue. people are just people doing what they do to give them selves an advantage at life.

you're expected to pay into this society to help make things "better for everyone", and yet when you need help, then what? Imo this won't be the last high profile riot in western cultural hubs until the government gets a lot more social in their spending to offset the hardships that the financial crisis induces on the population.

Re:Double Standard

[timeOday]

There's a fine line between staging a revolution and looting an electronics store, my friend.

But not that much. Most political political discontent (beyond a few radicals like Noam Chomsky) is really just about pain in the pocketbook. (Perhaps you've hard of the Boston Tea Party, or have even noticed that "it's the economy, stupid" in US presidential politics lately.) When people's quality of life goes down, they get angry. When enough people can no longer afford food, it's game over. That's what happened in the Middle East. In the US the system failed more gracefully, and morphed into modern Big Government (the New Deal).

Don't get me wrong, the poor in Britain are relatively well off. But not as well as they used to be, and, more importantly, their prospects of a life beyond being kept like a house pet are shrinking fast. None of which justifies what they did. Let's just not confuse righteous disapproval with actual solutions.

Re:Double Standard

[karuna]

The truth didn't come from the police. It came from IPCC which is the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The police initially said that Mark Duggan exchanged gun-fire. Actually they found Mark Duggan's gun hidden in his sock.

It is hard to say if it was the police miscommunication or an attempt to cover their mistakes but the incident was badly managed.

Re:Double Standard

[karuna]

It is all about relative prosperity. You will be miserable if you make $10,000/y in the US while your neighbors make $100,000/y. Whereas if you lived in poor village in India you would be quite happy even with $5000/y.

The social issues in the UK are as much real as in India or elsewhere. Don't be mislead by absolute comparison between countries. The high unemployment and slums are very real and if nothing is done about this, it will turn very ugly.

Re:Double Standard

[Hognoxious]

Relative prosperity - is that the new name for envy?

It wasn't twitter, morons, it was Blackberry msgr

[WillAffleckUW]

How dumb can they get.

Twitter only was used by peeps like me in other countries to rebroadcast the pics and vids they tried to pretend weren't happening.

It was Blackberry messenger that was being used to coordinate things.

Total insanity.

Btw, I used to do counter-terrorism ops, and right now high-end automobiles are being burnt in record numbers in Germany.

You can't put the genie back in the bottle - either create jobs for youth and stop subsidizing the rich, or watch your country burn.

Re:I agree, entirely..

[jd2112]

I am not sure why you think the government would be opposing itself. What would be the motivation of Congress to revolt?

Congress is already revolting.

If only.

[v(*_*)vvvv]

The UK government were friends with their citizens and followed them on twitter, they'd have a clue what all the commotion was about...

May not be so bad

[Sarten-X]

I know it's terribly unpopular to be the voice of reason in a "GOVERNMENT IS BAD" discussion, but this meeting may not be a bad thing. Perhaps the government just wants insight into how they can get advance notice of violent trends. Perhaps Twitter can provide easy access to its data, to find people bragging about the loot they took. Perhaps whatever socioeconomic factors (if any) that led to the riots could be derived from other posts by the rioters, and the government could better understand the problems it faces.

But hey... never mind me. Let's all continue jumping to conclusions anyway. Up next, Linux Torvalds looks at Windows 8. Could this mean Microsoft secretly controls Linux development?

Re:What's sauce for the Chinese goose

[Hognoxious]

Your premise rests on a false assumption of equality, namely that the UK government is as repressive as the Chinese one.