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| Demonstrators attend a protest against illegal immigration, in Leeds, Britain, on Saturday. (Hollie Adams/Reuters) |
| Days of discord and violence found their apotheosis in displays of solidarity. After far-right rioters set cities ablaze, attacking mosques and hostels hosting asylum seekers and harassing ethnic minorities across Britain, thousands of anti-fascist counterdemonstrators took to the streets Wednesday in towns across England. They denounced racism and stood before buildings housing asylum seekers — a protective stance amid fears that the refugee centers were vulnerable to further far-right attacks. The explosive scenes that rocked the nation were triggered by the horrific fatal stabbing of three girls in the seaside town of Southport on July 29. They were, more specifically, triggered by false reports on social media linking the attack to a Muslim migrant.
“Within hours of the stabbings, an obscure social media account associated with an outlet calling itself Channel 3 Now News shared that the attacker was an immigrant who had come to Britain illegally by boat and had been on watch lists related to security and mental health,” reported my colleagues William Booth and Leo Sands. “The post, on the X platform, gave a name for the suspect that police said was wrong.” The post would get amplified by an ecosystem of far-right personalities on social media, both within and outside of Britain. It would turn out later that many of its reported details were flatly wrong and that the assailant was a teen, born in Britain to Rwandan migrants. His religious identity was likely not Muslim. But a match had already been lit. “It looks like the tweet has been deliberately fabricated to generate hostility toward ethnic minorities and immigrants, and it’s a potentially Islamophobic piece of propaganda,” Andrew Chadwick, professor of political communication at Loughborough University and expert in the spread of online misinformation, told my colleagues. |
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| People hold placards while taking part in a rally supporting migrants and refugees and opposing recent anti-immigration protests, in Brighton on Thursday. (Toby Melville/Reuters) |
| What shocked so many onlookers was how much kindling in British society was already there to be ignited. Myriad governments outside the West issued travel warnings to their citizens to avoid Britain. Authorities have already carried out hundreds of arrests linked to the violence, with the Labour government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer vowing stiff punishments. “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 of the rioters arguably reflects a deep-seated resentment of minorities and Muslims among a segment of the British populace, embedded in decades of angst over Britain’s particular multicultural project. Though polls show the vast majority of Britons deplore the violence carried out by far-right “hooligans,” their motivations are inescapably linked to a more mainstream set of politics. “Islamophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment has been a staple of Britain’s right-wing press for decades, but we are emerging from a period in which a Conservative government made right-wing populism a central part of its platform,” wrote Daniel Trilling in the London Review of Books. “At each inflection point since 2019, the Conservatives and their media cheerleaders chose to double down on the populist rhetoric, painting their opponents as enemies who threatened the integrity of the nation,” Trilling added. “The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were treated as signs of an ‘alien’ culture that had taken over Britain’s cities. Demonstrations demanding a ceasefire in Gaza were smeared as ‘hate marches’ by Suella Braverman when she was home secretary.” The departed Conservative government may also be to blame for the deeper socio-economic conditions underlying the far-right riots. Many of the cities that saw the worst violence were in areas most profoundly affected by Britain’s deindustrialization and by Tory spending cuts in the previous decade. “These are all classic examples of post-industrial Britain — places that had the heart of their economies ripped out in the 1980s and 90s, and where the factories have been replaced by call centers and distribution warehouses,” noted Larry Elliott, the Guardian’s economics editor, gesturing to towns like Rotherham and Stoke-on-Trent. “They have suffered more than most from the austerity imposed after the 2010 election.” Migrants have long been easy scapegoats in any context of inequity and disillusionment. But, in the current moment, social media plays a crucial role in accelerating rage and misinformation. Yvette Cooper, Britain’s home secretary, said that social media platforms acted as a “rocket booster” in fueling the unrest. Though it seems some platforms like Meta, Google and TikTok responded quickly to take down disinformation and posts that seemed geared to incite violence, X, owned by the increasingly far-right tech billionaire Elon Musk, conspicuously locked horns with Starmer’s government. Rather than reckoning with the toxic misinformation enabled by his platform, Musk seemed to encourage it, boosting the hysteria of far-right commentators and adding his own. He remarked that “civil war is inevitable” in Britain and accused the Labour prime minister of being unduly harsh on the far-right protesters. Musk’s animosity here is hardly new. Under his watch, X has reactivated a host of incendiary, oft-racist accounts, some of which played a role in fanning the flames last week. “Last November, X reinstated the account of the U.K. far-right activist and co-founder of the English Defence League, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known as Tommy Robinson, who has posted continual commentary and videos of the rioting on the site,” noted the Financial Times. “Before Musk’s takeover, Robinson had been banned from what was then Twitter in 2018 for breaching its policies concerning hateful conduct.” Heidi Alexander, Britain’s courts minister, slammed Musk’s interventions earlier this week as “totally unjustifiable.” “I think at the moment everybody should be calling for calm,” she told the BBC. “He does have a responsibility, given this huge platform that he has, and so to be honest I think his comments are pretty deplorable.” If Musk heard that message, he didn’t heed it. On Thursday, he amplified a post by a far-right British activist that spread a false newspaper headline suggesting Starmer’s government was establishing detention centers for far-right protesters in the Falkland Islands, a remote South Atlantic archipelago. Before he deleted it, the post was viewed close to 2 million times. |