What sparked all this?

The past week has seen the UK shaken by numerous angry protests that have escalated into rioting. Today alone, police are expecting upward of 100 protests across the country. With fears that these protests may again get out of hand, you may be wondering – how did we get here?

On Monday July 29th a horrific knife attack in Southport, England left three young girls dead and 10 other people injured 🔗. They were attacked while taking part in a Taylor Swift themed dance and yoga workshop at a local dance studio. The victims were aged just six, seven and nine. Of the 10 injured, 8 were children and 2 were adults believed to have been attempting to protect the victims.

At this time little is known of the attackers motivations. Police have named him as Axel Rudakubana – a 17 year old who lives in the Banks, Lancashire area and was originally born in Cardiff, Wales. It is thought that his parents are originally from Rwanda. While counter terror officers have been assisting police in their investigation, it is not thought that there is a terrorism motive at this time.

A downward spiral

Prior to the suspects identity being released by police, rumours began to circulate online that he was a muslim asylum seeker who arrived in the UK via boat 🔗. As this false information spread via social media and platforms such as WhatsApp, members of far right groups held a number of protests across the country with significant anti-immigrant, anti-muslim tones.

The first riot occurred in Southport the day after the attacks while families were still coming to terms with what had taken place the day prior. Hundreds of people descended on the town and targeted a mosque in a violent confrontation that left 50 police officers injured.

Over the following days rioting spread to London, Manchester, Hartlepool, Aldershot, Liverpool, Sunderland, Belfast, Bristol, Plymouth and more.

While no single group seems to be solely responsible for organizing these protests, police have suggested that many involved may be supporters of the disbanded English Defence League. Further, the BBC found a clear pattern of influencers calling for people to protest 🔗 online.

Unhelpful rhetoric

There’s been a fair amount of public opinion shared over the past few days. Some of it helpful, some of it less so.

Elon Musk, always one to give his two cents, had this to say in reply to a tweet falsely blaming “the effects of mass migration” on X:

Civil war is inevitable

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 4, 2024

Needless to say it didn’t go down too well with some, with Tim Bale, a politics professor at the Queen Mary University of London saying: “No one who has even a passing familiarity with the country would embarrass themselves by making such an absurd prediction” 🔗.

Action needs to be taken by the social networks

Simple misinformation is responsible for over a week of violent protests across the United Kingdom. It’s clear that this information can cause real harm, and it’s time for Government to consider how they want to tackle this moving forward.

While the ultimate blame for this disorder lies with each and every individual involved in rioting, I feel that the social media networks need to stand up and take some action. These protests stemmed from false information being shared online, but what was really being done to prevent that information being shared? Nothing. While I’m not a fan of the idea of suppressing freedom of speech, I do think that freedom of speech comes with certain limitations. One of those is that if you’re blatently lying online, you should have to be able to defend those facts online. Adding simple fact-check information to each post of this nature might be enough to make some think twice before posting obviously false information.

Secondly, there is a time and a place for suppressing a users posts, and that’s when they take things too far and begin to escalate their posts from the sharing of false information to the recruitment of others to attend illegal protests and riots. At that point, the content should be removed and users should be barred from using that platform further.