A minute in the life of the London Riots hashtag (#londonriots)

Social media and the London Riots – #londonriots hashtag monitoring

Here at Social Ignition HQ, we are watching in shock and disgust at some of the images and news coming out of the UK in relation to the London riots. As any good social media user would do, we’ve been following the flow of information on Twitter using Tweetdeck and it is almost impossible to keep up-to-date. We decided to film just one minute in the life of the #londonriots hashtag and the results are quite terrifying. There is so much information, it’s moving too quick to see.

Using some cool online tools, we had a look at some measurements of the flow of information. Best estimate show that in the last 24 hours, there have been around 200 million impressions of the #londonriots hashtag on Twitter. The sheer volume of information being shared is incredible and hopefully it’s being used by UK authorities to get a clearer picture of what’s happening.

The latest surge seems to be the ‘name and shame’ approach where people are filming others looting, thieving, fighting and more and putting their details on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. It’s a scary time for a lot of people in the UK, but once again social media has shown how essential it is in a crisis.

So, continue watching, as we all are to see what happens in London and the rest of the UK next. Hopefully people stay safe, no doubt Twitter will be the first to tell us when something happens.