A British woman has been arrested, for a single tweet.
If you think that sounds unfair, here is the context – and the timing is important.
On 29 July, between 11.40am and 11.50am, a man walked into a dance studio in Southport, Merseyside, and began a frenzied attack on the children inside.
The crime was unthinkable, barbaric. Six-year-old Bebe King and seven-year-old Elsie Stancombe died at the scene; nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar died in hospital the next day. Ten other people were injured.
As medics fought to stabilise eight seriously wounded children and adults, a 55-year-old businesswoman from the nearby city of Chester decided to share a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), naming the killer.
“He was an asylum seeker,” she insisted, “who came to the UK by boat last year and was on an MI6 watch list.”
Her tweet came at 4.49pm on 29 July, as police were still securing the scene, hours before the third victim died.
The woman admitted, in her X post, that she didn’t know if the information was correct or not. But she knew about the powder keg, waiting to be lit.
“If this is true,” she wrote, “then all hell is about to break loose.”
The woman’s tweet was wrong in every way – but all hell did break loose.
A pseudo-news account, ‘Channel 3 Now News’, shared the information in her post on X. It was picked up, almost instantly, by a far-right “ecosystem” including two formerly banned accounts, each with a huge number of followers – Andrew Tate, a misogynistic former kickboxer who has been charged with rape and human trafficking, and British far-right extremist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson.
By 31 July, thanks to these ‘super-sharers’, posts claiming the attacker was Muslim, a migrant or a refugee had earned 27 million impressions on X, according to disinformation expert Dr Marc Owen-Jones.
“It looks like the [original] tweet has been deliberately fabricated to generate hostility toward ethnic minorities and immigrants, and it’s a potentially Islamophobic piece of propaganda,” Andrew Chadwick, a professor of political communication, told the Washington Post.
The woman from Chester was not the first to spread misinformation, although her tweet looks likely to have been the first to share the false (Arabic sounding) name. Race riots broke out hours after her initial post, with a mosque being one of the first targets.
The rioters represented a tiny minority and communities fought back in a variety of ways. But the damage done was vast. By last weekend, police had made more than 700 arrests, with hundreds more to come. “The scale of the operation,” reports The Guardian, “is shown by the fact the arrest took place in 36 of the 43 force areas across England and Wales.” The paper reported that of 741 arrests, 32 related to ‘online offences’ such as incitement.
It is unlikely the staff of a Holiday Inn in Rotherham are ever going to forget barricading themselves inside their hotel against an enraged crowd of 700, who smashed their way in and threatened to set them on fire. (Asylum seekers staying in the hotel had been evacuated). Muslim, migrant and marginalised communities were besieged in their own homes and places of worship. Beloved libraries and advice centres were wrecked, and the NHS and court system hard hit. Fifty-three police officers have been injured as I write this, eight seriously. Some governments have even warned their citizens against travelling to Britain.
But for social media platforms like X, the riots proved a financial bonanza.
‘Engagement’ is a money earner for social media platforms, which use it to sell advertising. Elon Musk has 193 million followers, and his ‘replies’ on X last week drove engagement in the riots, earning him headlines like Jonathan Freedland’s in The Guardian: ‘You know who else should be on trial for the UK’s far-right riots? Elon Musk.’
“Musk has not just ushered in the super-sharers of the far right,” thundered Freedland, “he is one himself… a battle to defeat him is now inevitable.”
Imran Ahmed, founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, thinks Musk should pay for some of the damage caused by the riots. His group estimates that just 10 extremist accounts re-instated by Musk – including Andrew Tate – generated up to $19m in advertising revenue through 2.5bn tweet impressions. Fines for refusing to honour his platform’s own standards would be a start. There is, for the rest of us, the option to leave X – and refuse to help it monetise hatred.
But while social media can trigger violent extremism almost instantly, it doesn’t cause it. British racism is far older than social media.
“Islamophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment has been a staple of Britain’s right-wing press for decades, [and] we are emerging from a period in which a Conservative government made right-wing populism a central part of its platform,” Daniel Trilling noted in the London Review of Books.
As others point out, those who benefit most from inequality don’t travel by migrant boat, but by private jet.
• Jenny Nicholls
©Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2024
