This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
Southport became a magnet for beered-up, indignant hooligans this week as members of the far-right decided to pay their respects to the three girls tragically murdered on Monday by smashing up the place they called home. More than 50 police officers were hurt during a sustained and vicious attack which saw stones and bottles launched by angry mobs at the patrolling forces. Eight officers suffered serious injuries including fractures, lacerations, a suspected broken nose and concussion, while three police dogs, including one who had recently been bitten, strangled and kicked by an offender, were also injured in the chaos from bricks thrown at them. It was left to the locals to clean up the mess the following day, and young Taylor Swift fans to raise money for the affected families.
The unfettered violence that broke out had been stirred up by false claims that the triple murder suspect who we now know to be Axel Rudakubana from Banks in Lancashire was an asylum seeker called Ali Al-Shakati who arrived in the UK on a small boat and was ‘on the MI6 watchlist’. A fake news website with links to Russia was behind a string of phoney claims posted on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) which were viewed by millions of people before being deleted. Some of those sharing that false information include actor Laurence Fox and former kickboxer Andrew Tate, while Tommy Robinson also exploited the deaths of the children to push an anti-immigration narrative on X, where his account had recently been restored at the behest of Elon Musk. Even Duncan Bannatyne, the entrepreneur of Dragons Den fame, chimed in on the back of the false claims, tweeting to his own 677,000 followers that “maybe he [Tommy Robinson] was right all along”.
Except, the prevailing narrative that was allowed to be spread like wildfire on X had absolutely no basis in reality. It was completely wrong, and yet far-right mouthpieces were able to share it with their millions of followers and claim that an “illegal migrant” had “stabbed 6 little girls” and that people should “wake up” regardless. The threat of social media channels allowing such narratives to prevail has prompted a strong response from the prime minister, who has warned firms about allowing misinformation that sparks violent disorder to go unchecked. “It’s happening on your premises, and the law must be upheld everywhere”, he announced, in what several people interpreted as a thinly veiled shot at Elon Musk.
Hours later, Musk responded on X by posting two exclamation marks underneath a post put out on his platform not by the prime minister of the United Kingdom but by none other than Tommy Robinson himself, who claimed (incorrectly) that the Labour leader was branding everyone upset about the murder of three little girls as “thugs”. With the prospect of more than a dozen protests across the country in the coming days, the reality of a world without social media guardrails have been thrust into the spotlight, and in Musk, we are starting to see the consequences of a man with the keys to one of the biggest social media platforms in the world who can’t distinguish between free speech and hate speech.
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