A week of unrest in Great Britain

For days, similar scenes played out across England and parts of Northern Ireland – riots, communities in fear, a heavy police presence, with the flames fanned by social media.

For days, journalists at BBC News have been contacting the big tech companies, trying to find out what they’re doing about it.

Either way, they don’t want to talk about it – messaging app Telegram has been the only firm to release a statement on the record.

It is hoped that the tide is beginning to turn on the road. But if they were hoping that by staying silent they would avoid further scrutiny, the tech firms may be wrong.

“I think it’s terrible that they’re not taking more ownership of what’s going on,” says Baroness Martha Lane Fox, one of the leading lights on the UK tech scene.

She knows big tech inside out, having sat on the board of Twitter, as it was then called.

“In general, they don’t like to get involved in politics – it doesn’t serve them,” she told the BBC.

As the UK is a relatively small market, in global terms, she is not “surprised” by the silence – but says it should not stop the government from taking action.

“The lack of accountability and serious regulation that is taking this is something that I think should alarm us all,” she says.

Very little.

Meta – the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – has not commented at all. TikTok, Snapchat and messaging app Signal have also remained silent.

A source close to Snapchat told BBC News that the company remained in close contact with the regulator, Ofcom, and the UK government.

Telegram meanwhile was in the news afterwards a list purporting to contain the names and addresses of immigration attorneys went viral after starting life on the messaging app. The Law Society of England and Wales said it treated the list as a “highly credible threat” to its members.

Telegram did not comment specifically on the list, but told the BBC that its moderators were “actively monitoring the situation and deleting channels and posts containing calls for violence”.

Calls for violence were explicitly prohibited by the messaging platforms’ terms of service, he said.

And then there’s X.

X, formerly Twitter, did not respond to any of our requests for comment.

In relation to the riots, there have been false claims, hate speech and conspiracy theories on the platform.

When Elon Musk bought it in 2022, he reduced the moderation of its content. A year later, far-right activist Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, returned to X after a five-year ban.

Last weekend, Robinson was tweeting encouraging messages to his followers on X while on holiday in Cyprus.

X may have been quiet this week, but her owner wasn’t.

Commenting on the unrest, Musk tweeted “civil war is inevitable” – a post condemned by the prime minister’s spokesman.

Mr Musk then tweeted “why aren’t all communities in Britain protected?” and #TwoTierKeir – a hashtag used for accusations of “two-level policing”.

Musk also deleted an image he had shared, which promoted a conspiracy theory about the building of the United Kingdom “detention camps” in the Falkland Islands for rebels.

“I think tech companies are often reluctant to get into politically charged situations,” Matt Navarra, a social media expert, told BBC News.

“I think they’re afraid of alienating some of their user base or getting embroiled in regulatory battles.”

He said it is a “strategic calculation”.

“By remaining silent, they hope that public attention will shift elsewhere and they can avoid direct responsibility,” he added.

Companies, he says, prioritize their bottom line over “public safety and social responsibility.”

Adam Leon Smith, a member of BCS, the Chartered Institute of IT, said the silence was “extremely disrespectful” to the public.

Media analyst Hanna Kahlert at Midia Research suggested that they didn’t want to say things in public that they might say for fear of being held to those comments at a later date.

“They’re probably going to be very careful about how they comment on it because that’s going to determine their strategy going forward — what they’re able to do, what their algorithms promote, what for them are activities that bring in advertising revenue.”

More powers are coming to the regulator through the Internet Safety Act, which will come into force early next year.

Ofcom published an open letter to platforms saying they should not wait until they take action.

But some – including the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan – are already questioning whether this is enough.

The Prime Minister said on Friday that “we will have to look more broadly at social media after this disorder”.

Professor Lorna Woods, a professor of internet law at the University of Essex – who helped shape the legislation – told BBC News: “If the law was fully in place, it wouldn’t capture all content. So over time organizing a riot would have been caught, some of the dog-whistling and disinformation tactics would not have been.”

According to a poll by YouGov this week, two-thirds of the British public want social media firms to be held more accountable.

Great technology, it seems, has nothing to say. But they may find that others are leading them to a very different future in the UK.