Prompt's TechBlog

On the evening of 31 May, thousands of revellers descended on London Underground Circle line stations with bags and stomachs full of booze. This was their last chance to enjoy drinking on the tube - a ban on all alcohol on the London Underground came into effect the next day. As Wired reports, the alcohol ban was a response to unruly behaviour and, unsurprisingly, as the night progressed, things did get... unruly.

The big party on the Tube was largely organised through social media sites like Facebook and MySpace. People passed the details of the event to each other through the sites, and thousands joined a Facebook group that posted all the planned details.

At the beginning of the evening, all was peaceful, but as the party went on, and the booze started flowing freely, things started to get out of hand. Just like the social media-organised water pistol fight in Leeds a few weeks ago, chaos broke out. As well as the expected breakages, spillages and vomiting, fights started breaking out, and trains were damaged. Six major Tube stations had to be closed down, causing problems for those who were genuinely trying to travel through London, and 17 people were arrested.

Pictures and videos of the event are spreading across Facebook and YouTube, and give a good idea of what the event was like.

Now, a few days after the event, people are starting to look at the role of the social media in organising this party. "Could an event billed as a no more than a good-natured get-together have been organised - and degenerated so quickly and dramatically into scenes more commonly associated with football terraces - without sites such as Facebook?" squealed the Daily Mail. It's a typically leading statement, and the answer is both yes and no.

An event of this scale would have been difficult to arrange without the social media sites, but to suggest Facebook is in any way responsible for the party degenerating seems ridiculous - the problem lies with the booze and people not the way the invites were organised.

Having said that, the media has been full of stories about social media organised parties getting out of hand: the Leeds fiasco, this recent Underground event, house parties. It seems to me like the problem isn't sites like Facebook, it's that people are not careful or discriminate enough when distributing event information this way.

And finally, an update. It seems as if the Facebook organised Leeds mass pillow fight, reported on this blog a couple of weeks ago, was successfully cancelled after all. The residents of the city are sleeping soundly now, their pillows safely on their beds instead of in each other's faces.

See - these events can be controlled.