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How misinformation and disinformation about the Southport stabbings went viral
Within hours of the abhorrent stabbings in Southport that left three children dead and seven others in critical condition, a range of social media accounts from the far-right to more mainstream figures pushed racialised falsehoods about the 17-year-old suspect.
Under the law, a suspect under the age of eighteen receives anonymity. Nor would a child aged between 10 and 17 and charged with a crime have their details disclosed outside the court, according to the Crown Prosecution Service.
However, during the late afternoon yesterday (30 July), a name circulated online and across Twitter/X, with false, incendiary and racialised claims that the suspect was an “asylum seeker” and was “known to M16”.
By 5:30 pm, numerous accounts shared the name, reinforcing the myth – an important fixture of this falsehood came outside of the UK – from a website called “Channel 3 Now” – with a now-deleted tweet timestamped at 5:51 pm yesterday gaining at least 1.7 million impressions.
Archives of the “Channel 3 Now” news article containing the in-text falsehoods went online just after 5 pm. Minutes earlier, however, though now-deleted, a viral tweet contained the falsehood at 4:49 pm, with users promoting and quoting it by at least 4:51 pm. The “Channel 3 Now” website lifted direct sentences from the deleted tweet and put them into their subheading and body of the article without citation, archives confirm.
A thread by the BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh debunked the falsehood yesterday afternoon, highlighting the account that posted the falsehood before “Channel 3 Now”.
Just after 5 pm yesterday, we identified various other accounts promoting the falsehood verbatim – with some far-right accounts adding pro-Tommy Robinson statements, gaining hundreds of thousands of impressions on Twitter/X.
A far-right Twitter account boasting over 200k followers took a screenshot of the false headline from “Channel 3 Now” in a post that gained over one million impressions -demonstrating a bigger problem with disinformation on the platform.
More broadly, a common trend we saw was of accounts using a collage of female MPs and London Mayor Sadiq Khan holding pro-refugee statements alongside racist and misogynistic statements – blaming politicians for the stabbings.
We also logged examples of racist, anti-Black and dehumanising racist caricatures of South Asian Muslim men in AI-generated memes, presenting them as violent threats to white children (often dressed in Union Jack clothing).
Members of the public also reported a despicable tweet from Laurence Fox, who called for the ‘complete’ removal of Islam from the UK in response to the stabbing.
In an extreme example of some of the material Tell MAMA flagged with the police, an account on Twitter/X called for the “end of Muslims” and immigration in the UK.
As the hours passed and Merseyside Police debunked the name published online, the website “Channel 3 Now” deleted the offending tweet but quietly edited Facebook to remove the false claims.
The academic Marc Owen-Jones also explored the viral reach of the falsehood – from far-right accounts to more mainstream figures.
Times Radio interviewed the investigative journalist Katherine Denkinson to discuss the falsehood.
Reuters Fact Check also debunked the falsehood, echoing claims from Merseyside Police that the suspect was born in the UK.
Tell MAMA’s investigation unearthed a Twitter user based in India who had pretended to be a UK-based Muslim user glorifying the horrific stabbings before Twitter/X suspended the account holder in the hope of sowing further unrest. In some cases, responding to that fake tweet, some called for deportations of Muslims more broadly.
We found that the user had previously spread anti-Muslim and Islamophobic statements on Twitter, with archives confirming a location of Jabalpur.
Outside agitations included from the United States, with overt white supremacists propagating the falsehood, jumping on hashtags and quote-tweeting mainstream news sources to accounts with verified ticks re-posting the same false information highlighted above.
In other examples, websites hosted by individuals banned from entering the UK due to their anti-Muslim views, namely Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, had also shared the falsehood before both “Jihad Watch” and the “Geller Report” had quietly deleted their respective articles.
In a statement today, our Director Iman Atta condemned the misinformation online that helped fuel the targeting of Southport Mosque, making clear that: “We must also work collectively in our politics, media and wider society to challenge and remove scapegoating and stigmatising narratives that collectively link refugees, migrants, Muslims and other minority communities to violence and crime.
Nor can we accept passivity from social media platforms on harmful misinformation. Change must come, and platforms must do more to tackle misinformation.”
The statement adds about the added fear some Muslims are feeling in the current climate after contacting us.
Locals in Southport also helped clean up the mess left by the far-right who violently targeted the mosque and the police – injuring 39 officers after hurling bricks and other objects.
MP Patrick Hurley condemned the far-right violence as they had “hijacked the grief” of the town and families, the BBC reported.
Jenni Stancombe, who tragically lost her seven-year-old daughter Elsie, pleaded publicly for the disorder and violence to stop.
Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, made clear that social media companies “need to take some responsibility” for the material shared on their platforms. Our research identified worrying tweets about the home secretary we also flagged.
To reiterate: the focus should be on the families and those impacted, we like many others grieve for the loss of Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice Dasilva Aguiar.
(c) 2024, TellMAMA
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