Official Statement from OurSpace.com Concerning the South Street Riots

An official e-mail was sent out from OurSpace.com concerning the events on Saturday:

Increase the Peace on OurSpace.com

Here at OurSpace.com we are pleased to report that the majority of our users have embraced the site wholeheartedly, using it to build new relationships and promote themselves in a constructive manner. To these users, we'd like to express our deepest gratitude. Thank you for positively representing our community.

As with any great opportunity, there is bound to be a small population who chooses to use it in an inappropriate way. Recent news reports have described shocking and appalling teen rampages happening in Philadelphia which allegedly have been linked to OurSpace.com .

View the report.

The OurSpace.com team would like to express our deep disheartenment with the recent events. We built OurSpace to be a positive venue for our users to represent themselves and their communities and do not condone the use of our site to incite violence, destruction, or harassment. We have taken these recent events and any potential ties to our site seriously and are investigating carefully. While we work hard to keep you and your site safe, we ask that you help us by reporting any threatening remarks, any organization of group violence, or other blatant misuse of the site by flagging the offenders or writing us using the OurSpace.com contact form.

-- OurSpace.com Team

Investigations on my end have met dead ends and no possible leads. Since they control the servers and could catch any data sent during that time that a user may had deleted, and its a short amount of time and, really, a fraction of data that would be easy to pinpoint, I think its safe to say that if they have some involvement from users, we'll see an answer soon.

Is Social Networking As WE Know It Behind Saturday's Riots?

As of today, as of me typing this... there is NO EVIDENCE AT ALL that this was organized on a "Social Networking" website. None. Twitter, MySpace, Facebook... so far, nothing that anyone with a computer and an account on them can find readily, or ever with digging. A new name, called "Ourspace.com", was raised and has almost been debunked as of me writing this.

The police believe that these networks ARE to blame, and have taken steps to monitor them. A statment from "Spokesman Lt. Frank Vanore says police had noticed groups of teens gathering in the city in the last few weekends. He says officials will monitor the social networks to try to identify the ringleaders."

So are we seeing just this? Or are we too busy hunting down boogymen when, in reality, we should be hunting for something else?

One report states that teenagers were on cellphones making calls and texting during the event. This adds two things to what we see; the possibility of that this is being organized through cellphones, thus harder to track, or just a few people huddled in a mess they didn't creat. I sure was on my phone while I was stuck down there myself.

There is also the possiblity that, as I said, we're hunting the wrong thing down. Who's to say this isn't being done through something as simple as a message board? Its pretty easy to do: Create an online forum/message board that is marked as "private" and only approved users can either create an account or only registered members can access it. A word-of-mouth forum is entirely possible.

At the same time, we can't simply claim "isolated incident", either. Similar events have happened in Baltimore, MD at around the same time as similar events in Philadelphia that night. A pattern is emerging, and one is forced to question if these are, in fact, "Random events".

Right now, there are still questions with no real answers. Hopefully something concrete will arise.

So far, this is the only video found of the events from May 24th on South Street: