CorpComms Magazine

Closing down social networking sites during times of civil unrest can exacerbate disturbance and cause previously apolitical people to protest, according to a new academic study.

The findings come just days after UK Home Secretary Theresa May met with the bosses of Twitter, Facebook and Research in Motion, owners of BlackBerry, to discuss their responsibilities in the wake of the riots.

But the government backed down from earlier suggestions that it might control social media during times of civil disturbance.

Yale graduate Navid Hassanpour studied the decision of former Egyptian president, Hosnai Mubarak, to shut down Internet and mobile phone services in Egypt on 28 January, during the Tahrir Square protests.

Hassanpour found that, while Twitter and Facebook can help protestors organise events quickly, it can also confuse and overwhelm people because there is too much information to consume.

He found that, in Egypt, it was Mubarak's decision to shut down communication channels that proved a catalyst, causing the rioting to spread from Cairo across the country.

He wrote: 'The disruption of cellphone coverage and Internet on the 28th exacerbated the unrest in at least three major ways. It implicated many apolitical citizens unaware of or uninterested in the unrest; it forced more face-to-face communication, ie more physical presence in streets; and finally, it effectively decentralised the rebellion on the 28th through new hybrid communication tactics, producing a quagmire much harder to control and repress than one massive gathering in Tahrir.'

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