Social Media as Co-Conspirator

The violence in Vancouver was fuelled by thousands who "witnessed" the events online.

On June 15, I sat on my sofa as the Vancouver Canucks saluted the fans in defeat and the city erupted into chaos. I watched black smoke billow from downtown, and was held rapt in anxious awe as hour after hour of live footage documented the riots. The experience dredged up memories of the 1994 Stanley Cup riots, when I was an 11-year-old boy crushed by the defeat of his beloved team, and grossly fascinated by the violence and flames on my familiar streets.

Not much was different this time around, except for how the experience was documented and shared. The techno-social infrastructure that played such a pivotal role in the recent Stanley Cup riots is the new variable in this unsettling equation. In 1994, there were no mobile phones with high-def cameras to capture the experience, and no social networks that enabled the instant transmission of reactions to the events. In 1994, I went to school the day after the Stanley Cup riots and babbled excitedly to my friends about what I had seen downtown; in 2011, people were posting photos and videos in real time, keeping their friends in the loop as events unfolded.

Much has been written about the role of social media in the aftermath of the riots. In a blog post for Reuters, my friend Zachary Goelman astutely observes how an assumed public anonymity has been shattered by zealous social-media gumshoes, and cautions about the potential impact this could have on other aspects of public life.

There’s another question, though, that begs asking: How did social media contribute to causing the riots? True, a few suspected anarchists and a general mob mentality were the driving forces, but there seemed to be something more going on. As my girlfriend and I watched reports from CTV’s Rob Brown, the courageous reporter who oozed through the violent crowd for hours broadcasting live from the scene, we were struck by the absurdity of the number of bystanders with cellphone cameras in hand, and the outlandish behaviour of those posing for photos in front of burning cars and blown-out windows.

The post mortem of this mess made clear that the results of much of this picture-taking and posing showed up on social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

As concerned citizens of both civic and digital life, we must explore how techno-social platforms shape social dynamics: How does the ability to share behaviour in real time with a social group impact our decision-making and collective actions?

There are plenty of theories about mob mentality and the social currents that drive riots, but none sufficiently capture the impact of social media on what we witnessed on June 15. A pioneering, and somewhat shocking, social-psychological experiment conducted at Stanford University in 1971 might shed some light on the matter: Psychology professor Philip Zimbardo wanted to understand why ordinary people become evil. He took 24 innocent Stanford students, assigned 12 to be guards and 12 to be prisoners, and planned to watch for two weeks as these “normal kids” (young white men) played out their assigned roles in the basement of a campus building. After only six days, the situation in the simulated prison had devolved so far that Zimbardo had to stop the experiment.