Nick Clegg has said that the government won’t “start cutting people off” from social networking sites, following the riots two weeks ago.
He also pointed out the value of such networks in emergency situations like these:
As it happens, those social media sites were also quite useful for the police to communicate with people, and were also quite useful for people to communicate with each other to avoid trouble. So there’s another side to the story and we will proceed with this with a great deal of care – we won’t do anything pre-emptive.
Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone has also warned against “jumping to conclusions” in the wake of the riots. See her latest column for her local newspaper, reproduced on her blog.