Twitter 'did not incite riots'

According to the innovation, the social networking site helped to organise clean-up operations afterwards rioting across London and other English cities just as Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Manchester and Salford.

The study looked at 2

The study looked at 2.4 million tweets sent while the disturbances in August and found "no evidence" to back calls that Twitter should be closed down for inciting unrest.

Professor Rob Procter from the University of Manchester, who led the team, said: "Politicians and commentators were quick to claim that social media played an important role in inciting and organising riots, calling for esites just as Twitter to be closed should events of this nature happen again.

The millions of tweets generated while

Researchers were able to analyse the millions of "tweets" generated while and afterwards the riots by using experts in cloud computing from the University of St Andrews. Cloud computing allows large-scale computing facilities to be accessed and shared by many users over the internet.