Policing, social media, and riots: User responses to the police during the 2024 UK summer protests and riots

Protests and riots occurred across eight days during the summer of 2024 in the UK. Throughout this time, the police shared countless messages with users via the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). This paper sheds light on how users responded to this content. Using a rigorous research strategy, we studied user comments on 124 police threads. Research findings illustrate that users had overwhelmingly right-wing political, social, and cultural views, describing protestors and rioters as largely peaceful ordinary British citizens, while criticising the police for so-called two-tier policing and tyranny. This is significant because it shows that users who believed that the police no longer served their interests instead identified with the protestors and rioters. For the police, our research findings highlight the need to remain on X, and to both challenge and combat hate speech.