Metropolitan Police says it is increasing number of officers patrolling around schools and town centre, ‘and we will respond firmly to any reports of violence or disorder’
Shutdown: the Met Police says it is acting against social media sites that are inciting Croydon Wars
A senior police officer based in Croydon has issued a statement seeking to offer some kind of reassurance to parents, carers, teaching staff and children themselves over the threat posed by a TikTok inspired mass meeting called “Croydon Wars” this Friday.
The messages circulated included calling on children to “Be violent”.
Children from Years 8 to 11 at a large number of Croydon schools have been urged to bring weapons, including rulers, metal combs and compasses, and to send their videos from the event to the TikTok inciter.
Urgent meetings involving the police, council and community leaders were held last week and agreed to provide some “safe places” in and around Croydon town centre.
Today, the Met Police’s Superintendent Luke Dillon, of the South Area Borough Command Unit, issued this message:
“We are aware of a number of recent posts circulating on social media which appear to encourage pupils to carry weapons and target other schools.
Reassurance: Supt Luke Dillon
“We understand this may be concerning to parents/guardians and we are directly contacting all of the schools in the borough to make them aware of this issue and our planned response.”
And Croydon’s Cambridge-educated copper said: “Here in Croydon we have stood up a local policing plan for the coming days to enable extra visibility around schools, especially at the end of the day, and we will respond firmly to any reports of violence or disorder.
“Should you receive any specific information relating to a particular event, school, location, or date, please let us know and we can adjust our plan.
“We continue to closely monitor online spaces and have already disabled a dozen social media accounts where threats or violence were planned or encouraged.
“If you have any concerns or information you wish to share, please contact us on 101, or 999 in an emergency.”
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Why can’t social media companies hire more people to check video footage where each video is put as pending, not to be aired straight away? To get each one monitored for encouragement of violence, harm to safeguard people and the public? Does that not happen? Then maybe share or collaborate with other social media companies. If a person attempts to upload a harm, violence encouragement video than that person should be banned. Or if they try to upload a type of video more than once should be banned and details given to police, perhaps. That way it prevents things like this from airing and being watched in the first place. It affects parents and teachers who may be trying to safeguard their children and puts people in danger of getting harmed or killed. The government could potentially add this as a law or policy to all social media companies to have get all videos, posts, comments, etc as being screened or checked first before airing it. If a social media has broken it and a video showing this has aired, then there should be a consequence like a massive fine or some kind of prosecution. Groups of people in society, ones who care, probably need to stand up and write this to these social media companies and MPs for a change. Remember the time it was on news where social media video encouraged young people to hold their breath for a certain amount of time and some did this and died? Now we have this, encouraging violence and crime that puts lives in danger and at risk? What next? Social media needs to put safety, health and safeguarding young people and citizens from harm by putting that first, not their profits. Prevention is better than cure and going to the end and it potentially could start with social media companies and the government policy changes that could assist in this.
The sheer scale of content uploaded to social media means that human moderation – which I agree is entirely sensible and necessary – would consume far too much of the big tech firms’ precious profits.
Around 34 million videos get uploaded to TikTok per day, for example. It’d take a moderation staff of thousands, working around the clock, to keep pace with the number of uploads to filter out banned and otherwise illegal content. Which I’m not opposed to – the amount of obviously illegal stuff that very easily navigates around automated content-filtering is just eye-opening.
Unfortunately, the duty to shareholders has now reached a point where duty to society at large is effectively ignored, to make sure numbers keep going up.
TikTok is poisonous. It’s controlled by the Chinese government who insist on all kinds of safeguards but only for their young users in China. The mainland China version is called Douyin and includes a “Youth Mode” with a 40-minute daily limit for users under 14 and emphasizes educational, and scientific content. Inevitably this prioritises patriotic Communist Party material. Clearly the Party isn’t bothered about the health of their world-wide young users