Facebook party invite sparks riot in Haren, Netherlands

An 84 year old resident had his head bashed in with a street tile by one of the visitors. Small towns like this are not very well equipped to deal with flash mobs of this kind, especially not when a substantial portion of those arriving has bad intentions from the start.<p>An interesting twist to this story is that those very same social media are now being used to identify the perpetrators with amazing speed. Names and pictures as well as movies have been made available to the authorities and 10's of people have already been arrested and/or have given themselves up at police stations.

I blame the traditional media for this one. The dutch media have been reporting on it for days before the event was supposed to happen. One media outlet even went as far as setting up a live stream for the "event". The traditional media hyped this up so bad, they essentially created a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I don't know how party invitations work in Facebook, because I don't use it.<p>But considering that party flashmobs like these appear to be happening regularly and often cause considerable damage and bad PR, shouldn't Facebook think about changing the way party invitations work? For instance by asking if the user REALLY wants to make the invitation public?

I moved out of the Netherlands a couple of years ago, this makes me feel ashamed. The authorities handled this so poorly that it just had to explode into riots.<p>Two years ago similar problems where arising in France, called Apéro géant. The crowds intended to organize the biggest party at the Eiffel Tower, everyone feared problems. Authorities sealed the surroundings, but let everyone pass through as long as they handed in their alcohol. Once arrived at the location there was not much of a party so nothing happened.<p>It's going to be interesting to see what happens to social media monitoring, also interested to see what happens with the damages and the people on tape (youtube, fb et all)

When I get old, I am going to tell children that "back when I was young, we didn't call those things 'invites', but 'invitations'".

This Project X shit happened some months ago here in Switzerland where I live. In fact the invites were mostly sent out with WhatsApp and not Facebook, so that the authorities could not track it as easily.<p>It ended with glass bottles being thrown around and riot police answering with tear gas.

The sheer absurdity of the whole thing made me laugh.

The guerilla party is one thing, and they've happened before.<p>Having t-shirts printed is a new touch.<p>But I'm more interested in this:<p>&#62; A new Facebook page has since been created called "Project Clean-X Haren" to clear up after Friday night's disturbances. It had more than 17,000 "likes" as of Saturday morning.<p>I'd be fascinated to see a guerilla clean-up crew cleaning the trash, removing graffiti, fixing damage, doing a bit of gardening.

Of course the event was handled wrong by regulators, but I don't think that means you can riot. What were they expecting? Police waiting with pie and drink and music? Of course not, if you go there you should expect the risk of there being not much to do.

Can someone remember this presentation about a social network event going horribly wrong?

I had to check whether today is April 1.

Mainstream news...