Soon after news broke of the knife attack in the English town of Southport on July 29, a surge of disinformation on social media immediately began to affect public responses to the horrifying crime. Within hours of the attack, which left three girls dead, far-right accounts began to circulate false claims that the attacker was a Muslim asylum-seeker. Just a day later, hundreds of far-right sympathizers from outside Southport converged on the town to attack a local mosque, while showing no concern for local residents still mourning the victims.
The speed with which the group had seemingly spontaneously mobilized led many commentators and politicians in the U.K. to point to social media as the primary source of societal destabilization today.
Fears that the effects of disinformation could spiral out of control grew further as disorder fueled by online far-right rhetoric spread to other cities over the weekend. In English towns such as Sunderland, Plymouth and Rotherham as well as parts of Belfast in Northern Ireland, openly racist mobs coordinated through apps such as WhatsApp to attack mosques and hotels where the U.K. government had housed asylum-seekers. These escalations were further stoked by far-right influencers who circulated clips of the violence on social media while doubling down on racist narratives. Though the violent mobs were relative minorities in the cities where they gathered, their size was large enough to push overstretched British police to the breaking point.