Slashdot Mirror
Can Riots Be Predicted By Social Media?
sciencehabit writes: The broken glass and burned wreckage are still being cleared in the wake of the riots that convulsed Baltimore's streets on 27 April. The final trigger of the unrest was the funeral of a 25-year-old African-American man who had died in police custody, but observers point to many other root causes, from income inequality to racial discrimination. But for a few researchers who are studying Baltimore's unrest, the question is not the ultimate causes of the riot but its mechanism: How do such riots self-organize and spread? One of those researchers, Dan Braha, a social scientist at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been collecting data from Twitter that spans the riot from buildup to aftermath, part of a larger study of social media and social unrest around the world. He spoke to Science about how researchers are helping to predict the riots of the future.
Is it really a prediction when someone tells you where and when they are going to riot ahead of time?
I wonder what the cause of those riots are....
http://chimpmania.com/forum/images/imported/2013/08/culturaldiversityatitsfinest_c_1600913-1.jpg
Sure worked great for Mubarak et al.
Funny how quickly we forget how we berated those middle east regent when they tried to prop up their failed regime by banning social medias, then promptly turn around and want to squelch dissent at home by monitoring and controlling them when it threatens our own regime.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They don't really need to monitor though, riots can easily be predicted by how bad the fuckup was that provokes them.
Seriously, the unrest is brewing in our towns. The powder keg is filled to the brim, all it takes is a spark, and any kind will do, to blow it up. You're getting close to a critical mass of people who are severely unhappy with how things are going, the only thing missing is a focal point for this anger. As soon as a justification is found to vent that anger, you have a riot.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm terribly sorry that there's poverty. But:
I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. I mean, pretty seriously on the wrong side of the tracks.
I thought speaking English was a good idea, so I learned how to speak, and how to write.
I thought education was important, so I learned to read and even where teachers were inadequate, I taught myself.
I thought that nobody owed me a life but I had to make it for myself.
It's really that simple.
Most of us are willing to create civil unrest about something, at least in theory. That's why you have all those guns, right? It just has to be bad enough that you see civil unrest as the only available option.
For emotional teenager minds, police in riot gear surrounding you and presumably yelling at you to disperse while simultaneously preventing you from leaving might be that trigger. Sure the first guy who threw a rock was probably an asshole who should have been expelled for something else months ago, but others might join in who would have also been perfectly happy to just get on a bus and go home if they had been allowed to two hours earlier when school let out.
That's where the police failed - by creating a situation where immature people feel rioting is their only option, when they just as easily could have tackled the rumors of a riot by trying to disperse the kids into the city and away from trouble instead.
In other words, police showing up in full riot gear and marching in unison down the street at you is an incentive to start a riot. Honestly I'm surprised the libertarian gun-loving wing of Slashdot isn't rising up to support people "resisting the police state".
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
The problem is people - government goons and ordinary internet users - who can't tell the difference between blowing off steam and real incitement.
The standard in meatspace is that you can advocate violence, but you can't advocate specific violent right now. You so can say "we should overthrow the government," you can't say "Let's go burn the FBI building down right now."
Making that distinction online is impossible for most people, because most of the internet is text only, without context or body language, and because most people are hysterical idiots. So the teenage boy who says in some online game "go rape yourself" to some teenage girl, because that's how teenage boys always talk to each other is suddenly under investigation for making terrorist threats. And then the outrage starts from both sides, and the police have no clue what any of it means, or how to respond. They only know that voters are harassing their political bosses to do something, anything, even if it's wrong.
Add in a few Joker types, "who just want to watch the world burn," who are deliberately inciting violence, mixed with the usual retarded morons who gobble down whatever propaganda they're spoon fed, so long as it agrees with what they want to be true, and, well, welcome to 2015.
What's the point of predicting riots if all we're going to do is stand around and give people "space to destroy" when they do riot?
These aren't thunderstorms...
Doesn't matter.
That's a struggle for anyone that wants to organize a protest.
Look at the protests put on my MLK jr. He was a big fan of sit ins for example. He'd have all his people sit down somewhere and then King would lead them in a prayer or a sermon or something. And anyone standing up and acting crazy was understood to not be part of his protest.
What is more, if anything crazy started to happen, he would tell his people to go home immediately.
His family has actually been very outspoken in these latest racial issues. Ferguson and Baltimore got responses from the King family and they said in both situation that the protesters should have gone home or organized very differently because the whole thing is indistinguishable from a riot which is counter productive.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.