I live in Barcelona, it was no actual protest as the article accurately explain but weaponised youth. It's incredible how completely artificial and easy it was to make happen, literally none of my friends living in the city saw it coming, me included, these riots came out of nowhere.

▲ uniq7 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

To me, it was shocking to watch the street interviews with the rioters, where they were just repeating the same exact slogans from the French protests, but badly translated to Spanish (like a literal word-by-word translation that was weird and made no sense).

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4gotunameagain 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

Solid sign of foreign interference.

	▲	morkalork 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's baffling how western countries have left themselves completely open to information warfare. It's completely negligent. It's not some new thing and yet the door is open to TikTok, Facebook, X, whatever social media that is at the beck and call of foreign governments.

▲ coffeefirst 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Something similar has been going on in Washington, DC, but ours is organic. Someone fires up a “teen takeover” to a popular area, it floods with kids 99% of which are just there to harmless goof off and see their friends, and of course a small group of jerks starts a fight with no regard for the people around them.

The city council is treating this like a curfew issue. The problem isn’t the kids, it’s the algorithm. But nobody seems to have any power to bang on TikTok’s door and tell them to cut it out.

▲ apetrov 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

at least at 16:30 a lego store on passeig de gracia announced that there was a demonstration starting and they were closing and police was everywhere around so looks like it was a planned protest rather than just some unexpected tiktok looting flashmob

▲ spicyusername an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What would "seeing riots coming" look like?

▲ Zealotux an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Just like in France: a planned and legitimate protest turning violent near the end, clashes with the police escalating into riots after hours of tensions.

Here, there was no context to the riots other than "go to plaça Catalunya and break/steal things", no political demand whatsoever, it was a totally opportunistic chaos and nothing like I've seen in France or Spain ever.

	▲	tel an hour ago \| parent [-]
		And no coordination with the camped protestors who’ve been occupying Placa Catalunya for weeks now.

▲ defrost an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A great many riots result from building pressures and real issues that formed over months or years.

  In the preceding months there had been growing unease between the police and the inhabitants of ...

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Brixton_riot

Which is pretty different to this apparent clear blue sky bolt from blue spontaneous remotely weaponised flash mob.

▲ papyrus9244 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Lots of social unrest on every online platform, for example what happened in the days prior to 15M (which thankfully didn't end up in riots, but riots would have been another logical outcome).

▲ 4gotunameagain 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Pro Israel media: "Analysis: Riots Show the Price France Has Paid for Turning Against Israel" [0]

[0] https://combatantisemitism.org/special-features/analysis-rio...

yde_java pointed it out on a comment below