Misinformation shared online has come under renewed focus in the UK after violent clashes fueled by suspected far-right agitators erupted after a deadly knife attack on a group of children.
Community leaders, politicians and academics have blamed social media for helping to spread false or unverified information about Monday’s stabbing spree in northern England, which left three children dead and five others critically injured.
The reaction escalated into violence on Tuesday night when a group — believed to include supporters of the far-right English Defence League (EDL) — rioted for several hours in the Merseyside town of Southport where the attack occurred. Police have blamed the disturbances on “many people who do not live in the Merseyside area or care about the people of Merseyside.”
Photo: AP
Doha-based propaganda and hate speech researcher Marc Owen Jones said the spiraling events were particularly susceptible to online misinformation.
“Because of the nature of the tragedy, everyone’s kind of emotional,” he said. “So people react to this news and it spreads really quickly and once it spreads online, it means it’s spreading offline.”
A 17-year-old male suspect born in Wales was arrested soon after the attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance event in the small seaside town near Liverpool.
Under English law, his age means police cannot release his name or other details.
This vacuum of information is seen as contributing to online speculation and unverified information about his identity, faith and background, including claims that he was Muslim or an immigrant.
Local MP Patrick Hurley blamed Tuesday’s clashes, which injured dozens of officers, on “a swirling morass on social media of lies and propaganda.”
Jones was similarly blunt, calling the response to Monday’s stabbings a “storm of misinformation.”
“You had a bunch of anonymous accounts, making up false facts about the attacker,” he said. “What happened in Southport was just the spark that then ignited what has been months and months of this diffusion of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant disinformation.”
Posts suggesting that the perpetrator was Muslim or an immigrant were promptly shared by influential far-right accounts, including by former EDL leader Tommy Robinson and the controversial influencer Andrew Tate.
Tate posted a video on X, viewed by about 15 million people, saying an “illegal migrant” carried out the attack.
Andrew Chadwick, an academic of political communication at Loughborough University, said that false claims also then appeared on illegitimate news Web sites that proliferate on social media.
They try to appear as a “legitimate news operation,” but in fact copy and paste stories from other outlets while changing “the wording slightly,” he said.
The spread of misinformation also involves “strategic interventions” by people, Chadwick said.
In this case, those sharing unverified information used witness accounts of the attacks to foment anger.
They “promote their agenda and their particular take, even if that might be based on false information and is biased,” he said.
Chadwick also blamed MPs like Nigel Farage for using “ambiguous language” that “further validates” the opinions and distrust of those attracted to conspiracies and false claims.
After police said the incident was not being treated as terror-related, Farage posted a statement on X questioning whether the “truth is being withheld from us.”
Condemning the “extensive” spread of false information, British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper on Tuesday said that social media companies “need to take some responsibility.”
One claim being shared was that the perpetrator had a Muslim-sounding name. Local police clarified before the clashes that the name being shared was “incorrect.”
“What was most disappointing about what happened yesterday was how slow the response was from X,” Chadwick said.
A post still up on the anti-immigrant account “EuropeInvasion” uses the false name and claims the attacker was a Muslim who came to the UK “by boat last year.” The X post has 1.4 million views.
Other X posts sharing different images of men of ethnic backgrounds and claiming them to be the attacker have “community notes” written by X users refuting the false claims.
However, community notes are “not enough on their own,” and X needs to “step up and show more social responsibility,” Chadwick said.
“Much of the fault lies with social media companies and their unwillingness to police the hate speech and disinformation on their platforms,” Jones added. “There has always been people full of hate in history. The question is, what gives them a platform?”
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