I was interested to read that my former local council in Bury has become the latest landlord to promise to evict any tenant found guilty of offences connected with the riots last week.
This follows similar pledges from councils in Wandsworth, Manchester, Salford, Nottingham and others in the days following the disturbances, which have seen more than 1,500 arrests in a little over a week.
The calls seem to chime with popular sentiment, with more than 100,000 people having signed a petition calling for rioters to lose their benefits. This e-petition has been referred to a parliamentary committee, which will decide if the idea will be debated in the House of Commons by MPs.
I’ve just come across this research, courtesy of Mindflash, which looks at the things companies are finding out about their staff and prospective hires from the information placed on publicly available social media platforms.
There are a few warnings for prospective job hunters, who may be busy deleting damning photographs from their Facebook profiles if they have read the blog.
But there are some positives too which demonstrate how social media can boost people’s professional profile if used with a bit of common sense.
I’ve no doubt that the idea of employers trawling online personal profiles would be chilling for quite a few people.
Facebook, which is more of a network of friends than work associates, is different to professionally focused tools like LinkedIn – although both can be made private so that those who don’t know you can’t see what you are saying. For many users, Twitter tends to sit between these two platforms in the social v professional spectrum and is a much more public tool, as Joey Barton has found out recently.
Yesterday’s news of two men being sent to jail for four years for ‘inciting riots’ on Facebook is proof of how the misuse of social media can come back to bite people, in this case pretty swiftly.
Click on the graphic to the right if you want to expand it for more detail on the Mindflash research.
London riots: Five ways journalists used online tools – journalism.co.uk
A lot of media coverage of the riots across England over the last week has focused on how social media has been used to organise the violence. In this blog, Sarah Marshall looks at how journalists used social media to tell the story of the trouble. The use of interactive maps and video feature alongside tools like Storify, which aggregate other people’s social media content and present it as a narrative of events. Just goes to show, it’s not the tools that caused the trouble – it’s the people using them.
