Tiltor, Stop Protests From Becoming Riots

Here I would like to recommend a mobile APP system called Titor, which aims at stopping crowd protests from becoming riots. The following introduction article on Tiltor is written by the CEO and Co-Founder of Tiltor, Greg Millington.

Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of joining a protest, doing the mexican wave, or attending a flash mob knows that it doesn’t take long to snap into sync with the crowd. This is because formed crowds are self-organizing systems with many parts supporting a particular global behavior. An entrant to an existing crowd is swept into lock step without having to be explicitly told what to do. Since self-organizing systems are not centrally controlled, but rather each person plays a role in maintaining the global behavior, they can withstand damages and perturbations such as the loss of participants. This feature makes protesting crowds notoriously difficult to terminate and it is exactly what Tiltor attacks.

In this respect, Tiltor can be thought of as the “Anti-Flash Mob.” Instead of making people spontaneously form a crowd, we make an already formed crowd of people disperse.

Tiltor is designed to compromise the collective motivation of a protesting crowd. When a significant segment of a crowd has their allegiances flipped, it does more than only peel away that segment from the protest (which a self-organized system can survive). Rather, the “turned” population of protestors serves to disrupt the system. This has a much greater undermining effect on the crowd sync than if they had just quietly left the protest. By flipping the feedback loop within the crowd from positive (“do what you can to keep the protest going”) to negative (“do what you can to stop the protest”) the crowd behavior can be altered, or even extinguished.

Tiltor presents this non-violent means of crowd control to law enforcement authorities in the hopes that the increasingly deadly clashes between protesters and police can be avoided. Upcoming applications of TIltor include the Winter Olympics in Sochi and the World Cup in Brazil.