It started with a flyer sent around on Snapchat. Teenagers were invited to gather at a south London basketball court to celebrate the start of the Easter holidays. They were told to bring their own weed and laughing gas because it was going to be a late one.

What followed in the hours after was chaos. Hundreds of young people came to the “link-up” last Saturday, and then gathered on Clapham High Street.

Shops in the area were overwhelmed, including a Marks & Spencer where videos appear to show teenagers fighting in the aisles. Some shopkeepers reportedly locked their doors, and fireworks were let off on Clapham Common.

Another link-up happened three days later. The Metropolitan police put a 48-hour dispersal order in place and so far six teenage girls have been arrested.

Outrage over the scenes bubbled up in the days after. First came the headlines decrying “feral teenagers”. Then the political backlash began.

The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, said the disorder showed a “culture where too many young people believe they can do what they like and nothing will happen”. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, condemned the “utterly appalling” scenes. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, claimed the unrest was evidence of “societal breakdown”.

On Friday, the boss of M&S called for a crackdown on “brazen, organised, aggressive” retail crime. And the Met has said these events are “fuelled by online trends and viral content on social media platforms”.

But young people organising events online is hardly new. Since the rise of smartphones, word of “link-ups” and “motives” – terms used to describe a meet-up – have spread through messaging and social media apps. In the early 2010s, Blackberry Messenger and Facebook were the main ways link-ups were organised, with details being blasted en masse to friends and contacts.

The difference now, said Lee Elliot Major, a professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, was the “speed and scale” at which news of meet-ups could be spread.

In recent years, Snapchat and particularly TikTok – where posts advertising link-ups are public – have led to events being advertised far and wide. In 2023, hundreds of young people headed to Essex for the “Southend Motive”. The beach gathering prompted police to put a dispersal order in place.

Elliot Major said the lack of places for teenagers to hang out in person was also a factor, with digital spaces now being the only way for many young people to organise real-life encounters.

“There’s nothing new about young people organising mass meet-ups,” he said. “What’s changed is the context. We’ve dismantled the physical spaces where young people used to gather safely: youth clubs, community centres, even affordable public venues. Digital platforms have taken their place, organising gatherings at speed and scale.

“We often frame these moments as problems of behaviour. But they are also symptoms of a deeper shift: a generation with fewer structured opportunities, fewer shared spaces, and more uncertainty about where they fit.”

Elliot Major’s analysis chimes with what one teenager who attended the Clapham link-up told Metro. They said “word of mouth” helped knowledge of the event spread. The original flyer made no mention of it being a mass event with the potential or intent to cause disorder.

“I think some people just wanted to chill somewhere because there’s not really many places to go,” the teenager said. “But link-ups like this are 100% unacceptable – especially when they are setting things on fire. A few people came for trouble and it spiralled out of control.”

Dr Tania de St Croix, a senior lecturer in the sociology of youth and childhood at King’s College London, said the reaction to the Clapham link-up was “exaggerated” and an example of moral panic.

“I can imagine for some bystanders, including young people working at restaurants and in shops, it might have felt scary,” she said. “But the public reaction and the language of ‘swarming’ and gangs of ‘feral teens’ is demonising young people unfairly.”

A recent report by the youth charity YMCA found that local authority funding for youth services in England had fallen by 76% in real terms during the last 14 years, representing a loss of £1.3bn since 2010–11. Services were still struggling to recover.

In 2024-25, the amount spent on youth services by local authorities in England and Wales fell by 10% from the previous year.

De St Croix said: “Youth clubs have been sold off, and when there are still youth clubs, they’re often very seldom open.”

She added that the social media element of this story was a “distraction” from the real issue. “Young people want to come together,” she said. “Social media enables that, but it shows their wish for the opposite of social media. They want to meet up in real life.

“Young people are really showing us that they need space where they can be a bit more informal and be together in groups, but we’re seeing more and more public spaces not allowing this.”

De St Croix, who has been a youth worker for 30 years, said that, in the past five years, she had seen a “huge increase in mental health challenges amongst young people” and a rise in teenagers who do not “feel connected to their schools” because they feel like “they’re in trouble all the time”.

She said some schools had rules where students were not allowed to be in a group of more than six, and that she had seen increased “isolation and a lack of hope” as young people “don’t even know what life to imagine, because their options feel so restricted”.

“These are the teenagers who saw their play areas closed during lockdown and spent some of their formative years locked inside and unable to even see each other in school. Some young people live in cramped accommodations. They can’t get together with their peers at home and they’re not allowed to hang out on the streets.

“I’m not saying it excuses any kind of violence, but it’s hardly surprising that young people are going to seek chances to come together and do something that they might see as exciting.”