Elon Musk’s misinformation machine made the horrors of Southport much worse
www.prospectmagazine.co.ukWithin hours of a local 17-year-old boy being arrested for the mass-stabbings in Southport, a seaside town in northwest England, untrue narratives started circulating on social media naming him as “Ali al-Shakati”—a Muslim migrant to the UK—alleging that he was on an MI6 watchlist, and that he was an asylum seeker who was known to the Liverpool mental health services.
None of this was true, but research by Dr Marc Owen Jones, an expert in digital authoritarianism, has traced how this kind of speculation rapidly notched up 27m impressions on social media.
The self-proclaimed misogynist and alleged rapist Andrew Tate, with nearly 10m followers on X, posted a false image of the supposed attacker, claiming he was “straight off a boat”—even though by then the police had told us he had been born in Cardiff 17 years ago. But that, according to Tate, was a lie promoted by what he calls “the Matrix”.
One of the most prominent amplifiers of this untrue information was a shadowy organisation calling itself Channel3 Now. Quite who is behind this outfit is unclear. Investigative journalists soon found that it had started life as a place for Russian car rally videos. It may be now run out of an address in Pakistan or the US. That’s the joy of Musk’s beloved “independent media”—you haven’t got a clue who half of the fabulists are.
[…]
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community’s icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
- 0 users online
- 13 users / day
- 237 users / week
- 638 users / month
- 1.28K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 1.67K Posts
- 28.2K Comments
- Modlog
Oh really? Try writing “cisgender” on a tweet and see what happens.
I went on FB a while ago just to see how bad it was, and it’s so horrible. I know the article is about Twitter, but all social media is like this. Everything everywhere is just bots feeding that everything is scary.
I live in Seattle, and according to any facebook post by bot or person it’s just a constant warzone of homeless people and liberals just setting fire and causing crime. It’s so disheartening. I have no idea how to fix it either, it’s just outright lies, and terrified suburbanites just eat it up.
I’ve never had a Facebook account but been questioned by UK police who demanded my non existent Facebook account maybe a dozen times.
Unfortunately I’m now on benifit having lost my job and they keep bring up damn Facebook and trying to make me make an account.
There’s something badly wrong here, don’t use Facebook imo I honestly think it’s some kind of trap at this point.
What’s the context? Are the police the ones trying to get you to make a Facebook account?
I was raided they accused me of wanting to shoot up my workplace, I worked out later someone made a joke when I was on my holiday and a new member took it seriously and phoned the mayor’s office.
I was questioned about my non existant Facebook account in almost every police interwiew I went through which all in all I’d say was close to a dozen.
Whole thing was a nightmare which ruined my entire life at the time, the fact the mayor was involved I think made the police absolutely crazy with trying to get me on anything at all. But yeah Facebook came up way way too often to the point I felt they wanted to arrest me for not having one and I was some type of criminal scum or some psychopath for not having one.
Ultimately they didn’t get me on anything but I kinda feel if I had a Facebook anything I ever posted on it would be twisted in some kind of way to get me.
That’s horrible. I’m so sorry to hear that.
Yeah it sucked at the time, took me quite a while to work out what actually happened.
I actually heard a story where someone made an allegation of racism against somebody, the police logged it but never visited that person or informed them about it. Then that person had a check for a job (I believe working with Children) which involved seeing police records, and it was recorded there. It couldn’t be overturned or be removed because it was in no way a conviction, but it still stopped them from getting a job regardless.
Reposting things like this doesn’t help - people will pick up this as fact. Unless you can prove it, don’t post it.
I tried for a while fighting in my local facebook groups, but it just served to make me mad and didn’t put a dent in the constant barrage of nonsense. I started blocking them all and finally just stopped using facebook entirely.
It’s sad since those are really the only online groups for my town. I just have no interest in engaging in the local community now.
Local groups are the absolute worst. I realized exactly what you did, that it’s the absolute worst most horrid people in my area all together. Nextdoor was even worse. I remember (no shit) a picture of a black man walking down a sidewalk with a caption “Anyone know why he’s here?”. I was horrified that my neighbors were like that, just the absolute horrible racism in doing that.
My local nextdoor has an issue with non white people in vans. Like normal builders eating their lunch and Sharon down the road is posting “Anyone know why this man is here? Stayed there for 45 minutes, very suspicious, might be stealing dogs”.
I legit chuckled at the ending. Because that is exactly how they write comments. Some stupid fucking thing in their brain, “Black people steal dogs”. They heard somewhere that a dog went missing and their critical thinking skills go “The boogeyman black person obviously did it”
It’s practically a guarantee that this Sharon’s dog is the most obnoxious, poorly trained little shit to ever walk the earth on four legs, too. Nobody wants your fucking dog, Sharon, it’s an unholy terror.