I’ve purposely invoked Betteridge’s Law of Headlines for this article:

Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.

The reason is that the headline I’ve used is the natural stance for the press to take, along with claiming the riots were in part caused by videogames. (As I said on Twitter yesterday, it’s terrible how videogames can lead you into a life of crime. After playing Nintendo games, I cannot pass a turtle without either stamping on it or hurling it at a passing car, so I can overtake.)

It would certainly be naïve to suggest that the likes of Twitter and BBM had nothing to do with aiding the rioting, since they were in part used to plan attacks, but as Paul Chambers said:

Aren’t social networks to blame? Yes, I saw a social network hurl a petrol bomb right into a kitten’s face.

Also, it would be easy to argue rolling news coverage, showing how overwhelmed the police were and how easy it was to loot might just have encourage some additional people to get involved, but I can’t see the press running with “We are in part to blame for riots. Oops” any time soon.

Social networks, though, are just tools, and they can be used for positive and negative acts (unless you’re a Daily Mail reporter, of course—see the BBC’s report for how that publication despicably edited and doctored innocent tweets to make them look malicious). @buttonista also makes a great comment on such technology being to blame for the riots:

If you’re going to blame Twitter, Blackberries etc. for #londonriotsyou might as well blame cars for transporting looters & loot.

And late last night, social networking as a force for good in the riots became astonishingly clear with @riotcleanup and associated hashtags; these have organised mass clean-ups for London, Liverpool and other affected cities, getting things closer to normal far more quickly than councils and locals alone would have been able to. I guess we can await the “Twitter helps with riots clean-up” front-page headline from the Daily Mail any day now, yeah?

Also, a public thumbs-up to @34SP, hosts of riotcleanup.co.uk, which got slammed by traffic and went down (along with other sites on the shared server); the company has now shifted the site to dedicated hosting for free, for a few days.