Fueling racism after the Southport murders in the UK: This is how the global industry of lies works

One of the main agitators of the racist riots that have shaken the United Kingdom over the past week is Tommy Robinson, an anti-Muslim activist, serial spreader of disinformation, founder of ultra-nationalist organizations and who has been convicted several times for crimes such as harassing an immigrant minor and a journalist. But Robinson considers himself an honest informant. “I feel like I’m two days away from being sentenced to death in the UK,” he told Alex Jones, a U.S. broadcaster who runs the far-right hoax channel InfoWars, after one of his court cases. Jones was ordered to pay $965 million to the families of the 20 children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre after self-servingly insisting the tragedy had been a hoax. On Sunday, Robinson went on InfoWars again to explain that “the civil war in England has already begun,” in Jones’ words. The expression “civil war” had been applied to the unrest in the United Kingdom a few hours earlier by Elon Musk, who assured on his own social network that such an outcome was “inevitable.”

Jones and Robinson (whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) have been stirring up xenophobic hatred on X, Musk’s platform, for a week since last Monday’s multiple stabbing in Southport that claimed the lives of three girls, and of which a 17-year-old boy, Axel Rudakubana, a British citizen born in Cardiff into a family of refugees from Rwanda, has been accused. They are not the only ones. Moments after the tragedy was reported, the global machinery of lies, which parasitizes the permissiveness of the networks, was set in motion. And in the case of Musk’s they benefit from his favor, which has been harshly criticized by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government. “There’s no justification for comments like that,” a Downing Street spokesperson said of the tycoon’s tweet. “If you’re inciting violence, it doesn’t matter whether it’s online or offline.” The government has announced it will hold a high-level meeting with the social media platforms.

Disinformation specialists are well aware of how this response was orchestrated, tapping into a xenophobic seed that has been taking root for years. In the first hours after the multiple murder, major hoaxes accusing a Muslim immigrant of the attack reached 27 million views, according to specialist Marc Owen Jones. His analysis of how the disinformation spread shows a pattern that repeats itself over and again during these crises that take on global relevance, through the so-called trumpet of amplification: the first account that came up with an Arab-looking name as the suspect did not have many followers, but from there it jumped to a fake news website and, shortly after, the hoax influencers managed to reach millions of people. " Within 24 hours Dr Jones was able to assemble and publish a map of the key accounts which had spread disinformation. If Musk cared, his team could have done the same. We are entitled to think he doesn’t care,” said Alan Rusbridger, former editor of British newspaper The Guardian.

The study of this episode helps to produce an X-ray of a growing phenomenon. Jones points out that the same sequences and the same actors have been present in previous disinformation campaigns, such as the stabbing of a woman in Australia or the hoax about the 15-minute city. And all those same accounts were spreading transphobic hoaxes against boxer Imane Khelif just a few days ago. They jump from one outburst of indignation to another until they provoke a permanent state of tension, in what hoax expert Renée DiResta calls the “industrial complex” of falsehoods — robust networks that activate their machinery as soon as they see the opportunity.

A perfect occasion is the information vacuum that occurs after a tragedy such as Southport: while the authorities remain silent (by protocol or ignorance), hoaxers fill the gap with self-serving speculation or outright lies. Liverpool Crown Court lifted reporting restrictions and made public the identity of the suspect in an effort to stop the spread of further disinformation.

The complicity between Alex Jones and Tommy Robinson is only the tip of the iceberg formed by the two extremist agitators: half of the posts blaming a Muslim immigrant for the Southport attack came from the U.S., according to Channel 4′s analysis. A coordinated copy-paste was unleashed by numerous accounts attempting to spread the lie and subsequent attacks against Starmer for describing the far-right protestors on UK streets as “thugs.”

Each episode of hoax-spreading is a wave that authorities and media try to combat, but there is a common background tide churning the sea against the shore. The same photo with the same immigrant hoax that spread in the UK reached Spain just a few hours later through the Telegram channel of the agitator Alvise Pérez, whose political formation, The Party’s Over, gained three seats in the EU elections. At the demonstration called by Robinson after the massacre, attendees cheered him with shouts of “Tommy for parliament.” Alvise, who has also been convicted of harassing of a journalist, could gain a seat in the Spanish Congress, according to the latest CIS poll.

The structures involved in the dissemination of these hoaxes have been taking advantage of their knowledge of the ecosystem of platforms and media for years to grease their machinery. This is not 2016, when the world was taken by surprise by the apparent sophistication of orchestrated campaigns on Facebook or Twitter to try to generate electoral overturns. And yet, the situation is getting worse: as soon as Musk acquired the platform, he cut 80% of Twitter’s workforce and swept away the teams in charge of ensuring the platform’s security and reliability. After the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, of the 100 most successful conspiracy theory posts on X, only five contained community notes refuting the false claim and collectively they garnered more than 215 million views, according to the Center to Combat Digital Hate.

In December 2023, Musk readmitted Alex Jones to X, despite his convictions for spreading damaging lies. In the days following the Southport attack, the mogul has responded on his platform to both Robinson and the EuropeInvasion, Visegrad24 and RadioGenoa accounts, known for disseminating racist and bigoted messages, in what is a proven way to skyrocket the visibility of accounts and discourses.

In a June report for the United Nations, disinformation expert Claire Wardle warned of the various combinations of disinformation and hate speech that were becoming normalized on the networks because “they can have very serious and immediate impacts,” but also low-intensity ones as they cause “severe damage over long periods of time.” The report also warned: “With hate speech, years of demonization and dehumanization can create the conditions under which genocide and related crimes are more likely to occur. Similarly, with disinformation, a steady drip of conspiratorial thinking [...] can undermine confidence in institutions.” Wardle quoted linguist Susan Benesch, founder of the Dangerous Speech Project: “As people come to accept a moderately dangerous message, they also become somewhat more likely to accept an even more dangerous one. Thus, the usual social barriers against violence erode as increasingly dangerous speech begins to saturate the social context.”

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