David Cameron’s statement on social media and the riots in England risks stirring a moral panic about social networking.
Speaking in parliament, Cameron said:
Everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media.
Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill.
And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them.
So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.
As Christian Fuchs points out, it is common to attack the media and popular culture for causing or spreading violence. With the riots in England, the blame is falling on Blackberry, Twitter and Facebook.
Fuchs quotes Stanley Cohen, who wrote in his 1972 book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics:
There is a long history of moral panics about the alleged harmful effects of exposure to popular media and cultural forms – comics and cartoons, popular theatre, cinema, rock music, video nasties, computer games, internet porn.
As Fuch rightly argues, blaming social media reduces societal problems to the level of technology that can be then solved by controlling the technology.
There more than a hint of technological determinism in Cameron’s words – an assumption that technology shapes society.
As a result, the UK government is considering curbs on social media and instant messaging.
There is the practical issue of policing these networks. Protestors in Egypt used social media to mobilise and amplify their cause. The response of the government was to shut off the Internet.
In any case, there is the question of who would decide whether a tweet is an incitement to violence. Civil rights campaigners argue that this should be left to the courts, not to private companies.
It is too easy to try to stir up a moral panic over social media. In the words of Labour MP Tom Watson on Twitter, such an approach is “Luddite.”
What we are seeing is how people appropriate media technologies and shape their use. Twitter and Facebook have been used to co-ordinate the clean-up in England.
It is sobering to recall Marshall McLuhan’s quote: “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
(Index photo courtesy of Mastermaq)
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