Interpreting the 2011 London riots from twitter metadata

Social media have rapidly become one of the principal venues for personal and public communication. This makes them rich sources of information about real-world events. As a case study, we used Twitter metadata to investigate social dimensions of the 2011 London riots. The results showed that Twitter-based commentary and participation in the London Riots are closely linked to the real-world manifestation of the riots (e.g. in terms of geographic presence). Twitter metadata on users and their messages during the riots can be used to generate useful inferences which allows us to gain a better insight into intents, information-sharing behavior, and demographics of both the rioters and observers of the riots. Pattern recognition approaches can be used to further reveal latent properties from the acquired inferences.