Did BlackBerry Fuel the Fires Of London’s Riots?

While analysts are predicting the imminent death of BlackBerry as Android and the iPhone battle it out for the title of the top smartphone, the phone that initially gained popularity among corporate IT departments may be finding a new following among London youth.

Over the weekend, protesters in London turned out to show their opposition to the shooting of Mark Duggan by armed police. In London, unlike the vast majority of the United States, not all police officers carry guns. Duggan was a passenger in a livery cab when police made a pre-organized stop of the car to arrest Duggan. Details are still emerging, but initial reports from investigators pointed to an exchange of gunfire. At the end, Duggan was dead. To date, none of the investigating agencies have confirmed that Duggan fired the weapon he was allegedly carrying at police.

Protests were organized in response, and while a march to the Tottenham police station (near the scene of the shooting) started peacefully, it eventually devolved into violent riots. While Twitter was initially credited with helping to spread the unrest, newspapers and tech blogs are suggesting that the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service actually had more of a role, thanks to the privacy of messages exchanged on the network and its popularity with young people. {TechCrunch Europe}

How did a phone which early adopters have abandoned for iPhones or Androids, with a network that’s rarely mentioned in the same breath as ones like Twitter become the unofficial news and organizational device for working class young people in London?

BBM offers inexpensive chat options between BlackBerry users, which means an option that’s less expensive with more privacy than traditional SMS messages. In other words, some of the same things that initially attracted corporate users.

So it’s not necessarily that BlackBerry has become a sinister network for those plotting riots and criminal acts. There was already something of a trend of the BlackBerry gaining in popularity among young people in London, and for good or bad, BBM is where they knew their friends and updates on the situation would be.

That included some people organizing copycat riots which may have had little in common with the initial protest in Tottenham, even if news spread through the same channel.