Most companies, apps, and enterprise software we write about here at Crowdsourcing.org are about bringing the crowd together and harnessing the power of the collective. So when we saw a company looking to break crowds apart, instead of uniting them, we became intrigued. Meet Tiltor, a company that wants to make protests disperse before they turn into riots.
This is all going to sound a bit cyberpunk dystopia, but there’s now a social media company that allows businesses—and potentially law enforcement services—to incentivize crowd control during riots. Tiltor is designed to “break up riots from within,” by rewarding those who discourage violent behaviour from inside the crowd itself. Businesses or police can hire Tiltor to send a message to all the smartphones in a designated area, offering a reward to anyone who attempts to disperse the crowd from within. If the riot ends soon after, everyone who signed up to Tiltor gets a share of the total reward money.