Facebook party invite sparks riot in Haren, Netherlands

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19684708

by oracuk • 14 years ago

30 47 14 years ago

bbc.co.uk

_of• 14 years ago

Mainstream news...

tisme2• 14 years ago

Negative real world impact of social media.

Seems like very much on topic for HN given that quite a few of us make a living and/or are creating new social media sites.

oracuk• 14 years ago

Agreed, it may be my age but I think as IT professionals we have a responsibility for the real world impacts of the systems we build and/or run.

I see this as a similar to an engineer seeing a mainstream news report of an unintended side effect of large scale engineering project.

norswap2• 14 years ago

The sheer absurdity of the whole thing made me laugh.

microtonal2• 14 years ago

It's completely surreal. I live about four kilometers from Haren, it's a relatively quiet suburban area, inhabited by mostly wealthier people. Pretty much the last place you'd expect a riot.

It was mostly white trash that look for any occasion to wreak havoc. Fortunately, the place was also packed with local and national media, so lots of the people who trashed the place are captured on video. One can only hope that they'll send them the cleaning and repair bills.

Also, this will increase the interest in automatically monitoring of social media to identify threats.

rheide• 14 years ago

I would've laughed too, were it not that these people completely wrecked a small village, caused considerable damage, rioted against the police and injured the residents. I am appalled at my own country for letting this happen.

smoyer• 14 years ago

Absurd may be correct and it might have been laughable had no one been injured. At some point you'll want to learn when laughing is appropriate (it's a social skill).

theorique2• 14 years ago

I am reminded of this Simpsons scene: http://youtu.be/ClynhFKMs3c?t=40s

norswap2• 14 years ago

By the same principle, you can't laugh about war, criminals, etc.

alx2• 14 years ago

Can someone remember this presentation about a social network event going horribly wrong?

tomeric• 14 years ago

I think you mean this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyMdOT8YJgY

alx2• 14 years ago

thanks, that's the one :)

muriithi• 14 years ago

I had to check whether today is April 1.

Roelven• 14 years ago

I moved out of the Netherlands a couple of years ago, this makes me feel ashamed. The authorities handled this so poorly that it just had to explode into riots.

Two years ago similar problems where arising in France, called Apéro géant. The crowds intended to organize the biggest party at the Eiffel Tower, everyone feared problems. Authorities sealed the surroundings, but let everyone pass through as long as they handed in their alcohol. Once arrived at the location there was not much of a party so nothing happened.

It's going to be interesting to see what happens to social media monitoring, also interested to see what happens with the damages and the people on tape (youtube, fb et all)

microtonal2• 14 years ago

Or they could just have directed people to a soccer field outside the village (since most people have probably arrived via public transit) and put on a stage with some music.

Even if some rioting would've started, there would be no houses or shops to demolish, and it would be far easier to isolate the rioting core group from other people.

The mayor refuted such plans with claims that that made the authorities responsible on the occasion something happened. As if that is worse than the current outcome.

andreasvc5• 14 years ago

I don't think this idea is really feasible. There wasn't time to prepare an event of such scale adequately (especially its security), and the argument about responsibility is true I think (not that the current outcome is much better). Also I tend to believe the claim that there were hooligans among them who only came to wreak havoc.

In hindsight they should've blocked all access ways to the village (train and roads). I say in hindsight because people simply didn't expect this to go so wrong.

The lesson to me is that mobs are a scary thing. They can turn angry very suddenly as people start to copy the behavior of the first person to throw a stone.

rmc4• 14 years ago

they could just have directed people to a soccer field outside the village

One disadvantage to that is that the pitch could be ruined then. Thousands (or hundreds) of people on a grass field and it'll be mud city. What happens afterwards when that pitch is supposed to be used? Who pays (potentially) for reseeding it?

LaGrange• 14 years ago

khem, Eiffel Tower, you say? You mean, in Paris? I'm pretty sure that Paris has its infrastructure better prepared to handle riots than Haren. The things people mention around here -- like, say, redirecting huge crowds -- require actual urban architecture that's prepared for it.

Also, a proportional "party" in Paris would be two million people. Have fun controlling that.

tisme2• 14 years ago

An 84 year old resident had his head bashed in with a street tile by one of the visitors. Small towns like this are not very well equipped to deal with flash mobs of this kind, especially not when a substantial portion of those arriving has bad intentions from the start.

An interesting twist to this story is that those very same social media are now being used to identify the perpetrators with amazing speed. Names and pictures as well as movies have been made available to the authorities and 10's of people have already been arrested and/or have given themselves up at police stations.

ginko• 14 years ago

I don't know how party invitations work in Facebook, because I don't use it.

But considering that party flashmobs like these appear to be happening regularly and often cause considerable damage and bad PR, shouldn't Facebook think about changing the way party invitations work? For instance by asking if the user REALLY wants to make the invitation public?

andreasvc5• 14 years ago

Well in this case the person accidentally made the invitation public.

I don't know whether your idea really helps much, because other times people intentionally make flash mobs, and they can be problematic. It seems to be difficult to address without totalitarian measures.

Zirro• 14 years ago

"Well in this case the person accidentally made the invitation public."

Doesn't Facebook make it possible to change the status or remove it, once she realized her mistake?

arrrg• 14 years ago

I think the problem here isn't Facebook, it's the incompetent and hysterical reaction of the police to those parties.

kitsune_2• 14 years ago

Where I live, an illegal Project X party descended into a riot a couple of months ago. The police were were rational in their behavior. They started to intervene once people started to climb on a bus stop's roof - those idiots were very near to power lines and could have been bbq'ed because of their intoxicated state. When the police tried to get them down the mob started to throw glas bottles at them. Alas, it quickly descended into a riot and the police had to disband the mob with tear gas and rubber bullets.

The entire vibe of the event was not peaceful, it was clear from the beginning that people wanted to start shit. After all was over the entire city's central place was littered with glas shards and trash.

2 months prior to the event thousands of people danced peacefully through another city, Bern, also during an illegal party, and there were no riots.

tatsuke952• 14 years ago

"Hysterical reaction" to a party where 3,000 people show up at a town of 19,000? That's asking for trouble.

Methinks you have too much faith in mobs; as expected, they smashed and looted. I suppose that was the police's fault?

theorique2• 14 years ago

The police reacted as police do when outnumbered by an unexpected and unpredictable large number of people concentrated in a given location.

The problem is a person making a private party invitation public, while being naive about exponential growth as the invite is passed from friend to casual acquaintance to complete stranger to anarchist to criminal.

rmc4• 14 years ago

There's nothing wrong with protecting people from themselves. We do it all the time.

kmfrk• 14 years ago

When I get old, I am going to tell children that "back when I was young, we didn't call those things 'invites', but 'invitations'".

Freestyler_33• 14 years ago

Of course the event was handled wrong by regulators, but I don't think that means you can riot. What were they expecting? Police waiting with pie and drink and music? Of course not, if you go there you should expect the risk of there being not much to do.

DanBC• 14 years ago

The guerilla party is one thing, and they've happened before.

Having t-shirts printed is a new touch.

But I'm more interested in this:

> A new Facebook page has since been created called "Project Clean-X Haren" to clear up after Friday night's disturbances. It had more than 17,000 "likes" as of Saturday morning.

I'd be fascinated to see a guerilla clean-up crew cleaning the trash, removing graffiti, fixing damage, doing a bit of gardening.

tatsuke952• 14 years ago

>"It had more than 17,000 "likes" as of Saturday morning."

I'm sure like most Facebook initiatives, people "Like" the idea, but probably won't be taking any real action on their own. That's for other people.

datr• 14 years ago

Not always the case. The clean up efforts after the london riots last year were quite successful.

This photo [1] is from during the riots but helped to restore my faith in people too.

[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixel-eight/6024429000/

kitsune_2• 14 years ago

This Project X shit happened some months ago here in Switzerland where I live. In fact the invites were mostly sent out with WhatsApp and not Facebook, so that the authorities could not track it as easily.

It ended with glass bottles being thrown around and riot police answering with tear gas.

Freestyler_33• 14 years ago

We have all read about whatsapp security, it is traceable especially with government resources.

waxjar• 14 years ago

I blame the traditional media for this one. The dutch media have been reporting on it for days before the event was supposed to happen. One media outlet even went as far as setting up a live stream for the "event". The traditional media hyped this up so bad, they essentially created a self-fulfilling prophecy.

andreasvc5• 14 years ago

I agree, but of course they are quick to disavow any responsibility, saying only the people who decide to throw stones are to blame.

Even worse than the live stream was the radio DJ who was encouraging people to go to the 'party' (he has since apologized).

This relates a bit to the problem of copycat crimes and the reporting of suicides causing an increase in suicides. Publicity increases the problem, but it's hard to get all the media to agree voluntarily on not giving it too much attention.

I wonder how this problem should be solved. In an ideal world you could have a system as in science with independent peer review, to do fact checking and preventing hypes. But of course such a system would be much too slow and you would have lots of people complaining it's not free press.

rmc4• 14 years ago

It can work in reverse aswell. If car fatalities are reported more, people might become aware that cars are dangerous, and drive safer, hence reducing fatalities & injuries.

Facebook party invite sparks riot in Haren, Netherlands

Related Stories