UK riots shine light on far-right disinformation

Ishaan Tharoor
| Washington Post

Days of discord and violence have culminated in displays of solidarity. After far-right rioters set cities on fire, attacked mosques and asylum shelters and harassed ethnic minorities across the UK, thousands of anti-fascist counter-protesters took to the streets in cities across England on Wednesday, denouncing racism and standing outside buildings housing asylum seekers – a protective stance amid fears that asylum centres were being exposed to further far-right attacks.

The explosive scenes that have rocked the country were sparked by the horrific fatal stabbing of three girls in the seaside town of Southport on July 29. They were sparked, more particularly, by false reports on social media linking the attack to a Muslim migrant.

“Within hours of the stabbings, a little-known social media account linked to Channel 3 Now News said the attacker was a migrant who had arrived in the UK illegally by boat and was on security and mental health watchlists,” reported William Booth and Leo Sands of The Washington Post. “The post on Platform X gave the suspect’s name, which police said was incorrect.”

The post would be amplified by the far-right social media ecosystem, both in the UK and beyond. It would later emerge that many of the details given were completely wrong, and that the attacker was a teenager born in the UK to Rwandan migrant parents. His religious identity was probably not Muslim. But the match had already been lit.

“It appears that the tweet was deliberately fabricated to stir up hostility towards ethnic minorities and immigrants. It is potentially Islamophobic propaganda,” Andrew Chadwick, a professor of political communication at Loughborough University and an expert on the spread of misinformation online, told The Post.

What shocked so many observers was how much of a spark in British society was already ready to be lit. Numerous governments outside the West have issued travel warnings to their citizens to avoid the UK. Authorities have already made hundreds of arrests in connection with the violence, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government has promised harsh penalties. “If you provoke violent disorder on our streets or online, you will face the full force of the law,” the prime minister said.

The anger behind the riots likely reflects deep-seated antipathy towards minorities and Muslims among sections of the British population, rooted in decades of anxiety about Britain’s particular multicultural project. Although polls show that the vast majority of Britons condemn the violence of far-right “hooligans”, their motivations are inevitably linked to a more mainstream set of politics.

“Islamophobic, anti-immigration and anti-refugee sentiments have been a staple of the right-wing press in Britain for decades, but we are emerging from a period in which a Conservative government has made right-wing populism central to its agenda,” wrote Daniel Trilling in the London Review of Books.

“At every turning point since 2019, the Conservatives and their media cheerleaders have chosen to double down on populist rhetoric, portraying their opponents as enemies who threaten the integrity of the nation,” Trilling added. “The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were treated as signs of an ‘alien’ culture taking over British cities. Demonstrations demanding a ceasefire in Gaza were denigrated as ‘hate marches’ by Suella Braverman when she was Home Secretary.”

The outgoing Conservative government may also be responsible for the deeper socio-economic conditions that underpin the far-right riots. Many of the cities that saw the worst violence were in areas that were hardest hit by Britain’s deindustrialisation and Tory spending cuts in the previous decade. “These are all classic examples of post-industrial Britain – places where the heart of the economy was ripped out in the 1980s and 1990s, and factories were replaced by call centres and distribution warehouses,” noted Larry Elliott, the Guardian’s economics editor, pointing to cities like Rotherham and Stoke-on-Trent. “They suffered more than most from the austerity imposed after the 2010 election.”

Migrants have long been easy scapegoats for inequality and disillusionment. But in the current moment, social media is playing a key role in accelerating anger and disinformation. Yvette Cooper, the UK’s Home Secretary, said social media platforms had acted as a “booster rocket” in stoking unrest. While some platforms, such as Meta, Google and TikTok, appear to have responded quickly, removing disinformation and posts that appeared to incite violence, X, owned by the increasingly right-wing tech billionaire Elon Musk, has clearly locked horns with Starmer’s government.

Rather than reckon with the toxic disinformation his platform enabled, Musk seemed to encourage it, stoking the hysteria of far-right commentators and adding his own. He noted that “civil war is inevitable” in the U.K. and accused the Labor prime minister of being overly harsh toward far-right protesters. Musk’s hostility here is nothing new. Under his watch, X has reactivated a string of incendiary, often racist accounts, some of which played a role in fanning the flames last week.

“In November last year, X reinstated the account of British far-right activist and co-founder of the English Defence League, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known as Tommy Robinson, who had been posting persistent comments and videos of the riots on the site,” the Financial Times noted. “Before Musk’s takeover, Robinson was banned from Twitter in 2018 for violating its hate speech policy.”

Heidi Alexander, UK Courts Secretary, earlier this week slammed Musk’s interventions, calling them “completely unjustified”.

“I think everyone should be calling for calm at this point in time,” she told the BBC. “He has a responsibility, given the massive platform he has, so I think his comments are quite deplorable, to be honest.”

If Musk heard the news, he ignored it. On Thursday, he amplified a tweet by a far-right British activist who had circulated a fake newspaper headline suggesting that Starmer’s government was creating detention centers for far-right protesters in the Falkland Islands, a remote archipelago in the South Atlantic. The tweet was viewed nearly 2 million times before he deleted it.