David Cameron’s statement to parliament after the August 2011 riots in England put social networking in the dock. The government, he said, was “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.”
Christian Fuchs argued at the time that this was an old reflex. Blame for violence has repeatedly been laid on media and popular culture; in 2011 it fell on BlackBerry Messenger, Twitter and Facebook. Fuchs quoted Stanley Cohen’s 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.”
The objection was not that the messaging did not happen but that blaming the technology reduces a social problem to something that can be fixed by controlling a service — technological determinism, with the government then considering curbs on social media and instant messaging. There were practical objections too. Protesters in Egypt had used the same networks to mobilise months earlier, and the government’s answer had been to switch off the internet. And someone would have to decide whether a given tweet was incitement; civil rights campaigners argued that belonged in the courts, not with private companies. Labour MP Tom Watson called the approach “Luddite”. The same platforms were meanwhile being used to organise the clean-up.