The United States may have the most gun massacres, but we’re not the only nation prone to random murderous violence. Last month in England, there was a horrific mass stabbing at a children’s dance studio. A knife-wielding assailant killed three girls and injured ten more people, for motives yet unknown.
The attacker, who was arrested at the scene, is a 17-year-old British citizen of Rwandan descent. He was born in the U.K, and based on later reporting, his family are Christians.
However, because the suspect is a minor, U.K. law initially prevented media outlets from publishing his identity. In the turmoil of rage and grief, far-right racists stepped into the information void, spreading inflammatory lies claiming that the killer was a recently arrived Muslim immigrant:
Within hours of the attack, the supposed name of the attacker was posted on social media by a channel called @artemisfornow, which has 44k followers. The name they posted was “Ali Al-Shakati”.
…an account called Europe Invasion, known to publish Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content, posted on X, formerly Twitter, claiming that the suspect was alleged to be a Muslim immigrant.
…It was followed by additional spurious claims that the suspect had crossed the English Channel on a small boat, which were also entirely untrue.
These lying posts were viewed millions of times. They were boosted by right-wing influencers, especially Andrew Tate and British fascist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a.k.a. Tommy Robinson, and they took off like the spark igniting a wildfire. In the following days, right-wing thugs erupted in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim riots across the country.
In Southport, where the stabbings happened, a vigil for the victims was hijacked by far-right groups and broke out in violence. The rioters surrounded a mosque, throwing bottles and trash cans, while the terrified staff barricaded themselves inside. They clashed with police and set a police van on fire.
In two cities, right-wing rioters tried to burn down two hotels housing asylum seekers. There were street attacks on people of color and harrowing video of white supremacists setting up “checkpoints” to hunt down immigrants:
As unrest grips the nation, footage that has been widely shared across social media shows several white men in Middlesbrough screening vehicle drivers’ ethnicity.
In one clip, men stop a a grey car at an intersection and look through the window, before another man wearing a red t-shirt beckons the driver forward.
“Are you white? Are you English?” the same man can be heard saying, while pointing at drivers.
In Liverpool, rioting thugs burned a library and tried to prevent firefighters from putting it out.
However, the anti-immigrant right didn’t have it all their own way. After the initial spasm of violence, hundreds of rioters were arrested, and further gatherings fizzled out. In cities all across the U.K., pro-immigrant groups gathered for counter-protests that outnumbered the rioters and protected establishments they sought to target:
But by the early evening, thousands of counter-protesters had gathered at more than a dozen cities to guard the immigration centers and prevent them being targeted by the far right.
“There are many, many more of us than you,” crowds chanted at anti-racist demonstrations across the country, bolstered by a markedly stronger police presence than over the weekend, and with virtually no sign of any far-right supporters.
Mob mentality doesn’t have a single instigator, but to prevent future outbreaks of violence, we should analyze how these riots started and who deserves the greatest share of the blame. How should we think about the causes?
It’s tempting to blame the riots on social media. On the surface, there’s a strong case for doing exactly that. This almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if not for racists using platforms like Twitter to peddle disinformation and fan the flames of hate. The speed with which the lies spread outran all possible correction, whipping xenophobes and bigots into a violent frenzy. By the time the U.K. legal system recognized the harm of secrecy and allowed the suspect’s identity to be published, it was much too late.
However, I wonder if putting the blame on social media is too easy. It’s not as if we never had race riots or lynch mobs before Twitter. People have always been willing – far too willing – to lash out against disfavored minority groups at the merest whisper of an excuse.
The explosive spread of misinformation is a recurring feature of history in every era. The Roman poet Virgil wrote, “Rumor, than whom no evil thing is faster,” and Jonathan Swift said in 1710, “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect.”
After the Labour Party’s historic victory in this year’s elections, the British far right is smarting. It may be that they were eager for an excuse to lash out. If the stabbing hadn’t happened, they might have tried something like this eventually anyway. The specific cause might have been different, but the result would be the same.
On the other hand, it’s undeniable that social media has been an accelerant to mob violence, like gasoline poured on a blaze. It’s never been so easy for racists to spread inflammatory rumors, to target naive people for recruitment, or to find each other, coordinate and organize.
Elon Musk in particular deserves a large share of the blame. Under his ownership, Twitter has devolved into a cesspool of lies and hate. He scrapped the trust and safety team and lifted bans on a horde of racist, misogynist, and generally hateful characters like Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate. He’s rolled out the welcome mat for neo-Nazi, antisemitic and white nationalist content.
Even worse, Musk has personally sided with the instigators of violence and disorder in the U.K. He’s echoed rioters’ claims that the police were treating them unfairly.
He responded to a tweet falsely blaming the riots on “mass migration and open borders” with the words: “Civil war is inevitable.” As one U.K. counter-protester put it, “The richest man in the world is stirring the pot for a race war.”
As long as human nature is what it is, there’s no single solution to this. Racists will always have a motive to lie and to spread toxic misinformation, and other racists will always be eager to believe those lies. There’s no technological fix for the problem of people being eager participants in their own deception. No social media site, however competently run, can squash the spread of poisonous rumors or screen out all harmful falsehood.
But that doesn’t excuse these platforms from the responsibility of even trying. That’s where we can assign blame, because for the most part, they’ve given up trying to do anything about it. And some of the world’s biggest tech giants are actively doing the opposite, stoking the coals of hate whether for profit or just to advance their own twisted ideologies.
raven says
The targets of the right wing rioters have zero to do with who actually killed those kids.
Which was a native born UK citizen from a xian family.
This 17 year old kid’s motives are unknown but likely based on some personal disordered thought processes.
raven says
Elon Musk is a generic but very horrible person.
As time goes by, he helpfully reveals just how malevolent and sick in the head he actually is.
His latest was bullying and verbally beating up on his oldest kid, Vivian, for being transgender. Vivian has nothing good to say about her father except that he is out of her life.
He is also involved in a long running custody lawsuit with the mother of 3 of his children, Grimes.
Here we see two things.
.1. Elon Musk, the South African white guy, is a racist. No surprise.
.2. Elon Musk is also just wrong here.
No, there isn’t going to be a civil war in the UK based on race and/or religion.
The head of one of their right wing parties, the Tories, was a nonwhite of Indian descent.
The right wing thugs rioting are a small minority of the UK population.
What is happening is the riots will fizzle out and a lot of the rioters will be arrested and end up in court. A lot like what happened with our January 6 rioters.
I will never buy anything even remotely associated with Elon Musk. Never buy a Tesla car, never spend any time on X, formerly Twitter. Never use SpaceX rockets to launch anything into orbit.
A lot of people have come to the same conclusion.
Why support a horrible person like Musk? Tesla car sales aren’t doing so well lately.
Katydid says
The right wing thrive on scapegoating and othering. Whipping up the usual suspects into murderous rage at the “other” lets them forget their sad and pathetic little lives where they do nothing and are nobody.
I agree that social media is an accelerant.
sonofrojblake says
Blaming the wrong people.
Don’t blame the morons rioting in the streets. I mean, blame them for rioting, obviously, but they didn’t set up the conditions, they only responded to the stimuli like the biddable cretins they are.
Don’t blame social media, or for that matter the old media (looking at you, Daily Mail). Again, they’re a symptom, not the problem.
And for fuck’s sake don’t even credit Musk with relevance, much less influence. He’s a clown.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, I guess, but if you’re going to be realistic, none of the above should show up without a microscope, while you can see from space the amount of blame that should be attached directly, unequivocally and permanently to the UK Conservative Party.
They’re a pack of nasty, racist bastards, and yes I do include in that names like Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, none of whom I’d piss on if they were on fire. They have, over the past fourteen years, deliberately veered further and further and further right, in a demonstrably vain attempt to out-cunt Nigel Farage.
They’ve given us Brexit, they’ve given us the “hostile environment” and they’ve given us “Stop The Boats”, which was literally being chanted by a mob the other night as they set fire to a hotel housing refugees. They are the worst worthless scum, and blaming the duped tattooed working-class idiots who do their bidding is to massively misunderstand how this shit works.
If you’ve got a machine that kills fascists, please, PLEASE only point it at ones who are so wealthy they don’t need to work, until there are no more of that sort left. Why? Because once there are no more of that sort left, the rest – the poor ones, the *stupid* ones – will be (a) incapable of organising, even with social media making it easy and (b) might not be getting fed the kind of lies that rile them up in the first place.
Focus blame where it belongs: the mainstream Conservative Party and their fellow travellers in Reform UK. THEY are the enemy, they are the people who brought us to this position. Don’t for a second think that the Labour landslide means they’ve gone away – if Reform hadn’t taken so many of their votes, then incredibly it’s conceivable the Tories might even have won in June, even after everything. The threat has not gone away, and they should NEVER be let off the hook just because they lost a battle. The war goes on.
Raging Bee says
Here’s another place we can assign a lot of the blame: over a decade of Tory mismanagement and corruption, including (though not limited to) undermining NHS, mental-health services, and public education.
The initial mass-stabbing that provoked (or rather, was used to provoke) these latest riots was done by a teenager who probably needed an intervention and didn’t get one. And the thugs committing the violence were almost surely ill-served by the Tory-UK educational “system.” And Tory pandering to British xenophobia is just icing on that huge poisoned cake.
Raging Bee says
I also kinda wonder if Israel’s supporters in the UK and Europe have anything to do with this incitement of hatred against Muslim/Middle-Eastern people. Given that they clearly enabled and all-but-explicitly invited Hamas to attack their own people last October, I really don’t think we can put anything past their very-well-funded and energized propagandists in the West.
sonofrojblake says
@Raging Bee – if you’re looking for an excuse to blame da jooz, please take that elsewhere. As I said – and as you seemed to agree in your first post – you really, really don’t need to look much further than 14 years of Tory government.
Raging Bee says
What makes you think I’m blaming Jews? I very clearly said “Israel’s supporters in the UK and Europe” (and I was also thinking of Israel’s supporters in the USA). Forgive me for restating the obvious for the bazillionth time, but not all Jews support Israel or its current leaders, and not all supporters of Israel or its current leaders are Jewish.
Raging Bee says
PS: And some of Israel’s supporters (in the US at least) are about as blatantly anti-Jewish as Hamas.
Adam Lee says
From what I’ve seen of the rioters, they seem like the kind of people who aren’t inclined to view Jews any more warmly than Muslims.
Raging Bee says
They don’t have to like Jews to be amenable to Likudnik manipulation and incitement.
lpetrich says
It doesn’t have to be that. It can be appreciation of Israel as a supposed bastion of Western civilization, one that hates the people that these people hate.
Has anyone tried to research the European far right on Jews and Israel after World War II? Are there any such people who say “Jews are bad but Israel is good”? Or “Jews aren’t as bad as we thought they were. They gave us Israel.” Or “Jews are good in Israel but not so good here.”
KG says
The pre-Israel non-Jewish supporters of Zionism were often antisemitic, including Arthur Balfour, of “Balfour Declaration” fame. They wanted fewer Jews in their own countries, and thought establishing a Jewish state would help them achieve this. Post-WW2, a lot of American Christian Zionists support Israel because they believe the Jews must gather there before Jesus will return – at which point they will either convert or be exterminated.
sonofrojblake says
I take it back. The fact you ask the question reveals you to be so benightedly oblivious you don’t understand what most adults are perfectly well aware of, which is that anti-semites commonly use “supporters of Israel” as code (and conversely Zionists will weaponise the accusation of anti-semitism even where it’s obviously not applicable). Sorry.
@8
They also seem like the kind of people too stupid to wonder who’s paying to distribute the information that they’re using to justify their thuggery.
Raging Bee says
You’re calling ME “benightedly oblivious” while utterly failing (or refusing) to understand what I said? Oh well, thanks for that sorta-original-sounding phrase anyway…I might use it…
Silentbob says
@ Raging Bee
Not sure what “non-coded” term one is supposed to use for “supporters of Israel”. X-D
KG says
Rather the opposite I think – they feel validated by the success of Reform Party UK Ltd.* in gaining 5 MPs and nearly 15% of the vote, and far right “influencers” online were eagerly awaiting an opportunity. Polls have shown that Reform Party UK Ltd. is the only party of which a significant proportion of party supporters (around half IIRC) are willing to tell pollsters they approve of the riots. Its Fuehrer Nigel Farage has deplored the riots, while stirring them up by questioning whether “we are being lied to” about the identity of the Southport suspect (we’re not). Aside from Farage, Yaxley-Lennon, Tate and other influencers, sonofrojblake is right that the Conservative Party should be assigned a large share of the blame – but the Labour Party is also far from innocent, having failed completely to provide a counter-narrative to the demonisation of migrants and Muslims.
*Yes, it’s a limited company, largely owned by Nigel Farage, rather than a political party in the usual sense.