Like many people in 1970s Northern Ireland, my father had a “police radio” – a scanner that could pick up RUC communications. When there was trouble in town he would disappear into the spare room to listen to it, officially to check his shop was safe, but no doubt also out of grim fascination.
I recalled this last Monday evening, the first of several nights of racist violence across unionist areas, as I scrolled through social media to find out what was happening in Ballymena.
Radio and television were of no more use in the initial hours than they were in the 1970s. Newspapers did a better job, via their websites, but only the daily papers in Belfast can manage live reporting. Local weeklies have been hollowed out in Northern Ireland, as they have everywhere else.
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The BBC news website did not update until late in the evening, when it published a PSNI press release. Subsequent BBC reporting was excellent but it took a while for the corporation’s enormous machine to crank into action. It seems to regard its webpage as a features section rather than a place for breaking news.
As BBC coverage of the Ballymena riots took a while to crank up, I turned to ‘FreedomDad73′
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So I spent the first hour or so watching a live video on YouTube from the unimprovably named “FreedomDad73″, as he interviewed protesters then filmed the outbreak of violence. I had never heard of this person – a social media algorithm presented his video to me and thousands of others. One week later, it has racked up 150,000 views.
More self-described citizen journalists were en route to Ballymena by the following morning, from Britain and beyond. None endorsed the violence, as far as I saw. Some could be accused of monetising riots or racism, although they could fire that accusation back at any commercial news outlet. Some were sympathetic to the concerns of the protesters and others clearly were not.
The role of social media in stirring up racial hatred and violence has been widely discussed over the past week. Prof Peter Shirlow, director of the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies, has noted that sectarian incidents have declined by almost two thirds in the 20 years since the PSNI began collecting these statistics. Racist incidents have meanwhile been rising. He has suggested one type of hate crime is being replaced by another, fuelled by sophisticated internet campaigns.
[ The DUP couldn’t have chosen a worse moment to get tough on immigrationOpens in new window ]
The PSNI has long been concerned about the ease of organising riots online. It is investigating alleged orchestration and provocation over last week’s violence, including circulation of victims’ addresses. Unrelated sectarian rioting in Derry in recent weeks has also been organised through social media, said the police.
But while it is no consolation to victims, the odd truth is that the rise of social media has been accompanied by an unprecedented decline in street disorder in Northern Ireland. The last trouble of any significance related to an Orange Order or loyalist parade was in 2015, the longest period of such peace in at least a century.
Organised fights between young people remain an issue, especially at a small number of interfaces, but there is no sign of the internet-driven anarchy many community workers once feared. To an extent, people in Northern Ireland now fight online instead of on the streets, although it might be a stretch to hope this is actively releasing pressure.
Of course, the vast majority of the population have no intention of rioting or attacking their neighbours. It is vanishingly unlikely they would be provoked into such behaviour by anything they saw online.
The great change wrought by the internet for most people is not in how public disorder is caused, but in how it is reported. The violence of the past week has been aired with an immediacy and intimacy unimaginable 15 years ago. The first evening’s footage was largely unedited, with no overall attempt at balance. This set the agenda for much of the media and political reaction that followed.
It is worth asking what impact this might have on wider society.
Research by Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, shows people in Northern Ireland have unusually conservative media habits. They are the most likely within the UK to obtain their regional news from broadcasters and to trust and value its impartiality. These findings have been consistent for decades and are directly linked to the Troubles, due to the significance of “regional news” in Northern Ireland, the importance of a shared media in a divided society, and the attention and professionalism it has demanded from journalism. This is a precious but stranded media culture, left behind by changes in politics, technology and economics. It is vulnerable to being suddenly exposed on any issue where it hesitates or pulls its punches through lack of confidence, knowledge or resources. Others will immediately step in to tell the story.
