Far-right X accounts, including that of billionaire Elon Musk, “played a central role” in spreading racially charged misinformation that ignited violence after last year’s Southport murders.
When a 17-year-old Alex Rudakubana (now jailed for a minimum of 52 years) murdered three young girls at a children’s dance class in July 2024, chaos ensued across the country.
Social media exploded with racially-charged fury and riots soon began, with thugs mostly targeting Muslim and migrant communities.
Violent demonstrations over the killing of three girls in Southport have gripped parts of the UK in recent days. The government has pledged firm action against those participating in the riots, but questions remain as to what continues to stoke the unrest https://t.co/XIO5WyBdcD pic.twitter.com/TVvh28bfkV
undefined Reuters (@Reuters) August 7, 2024
Now, Amnesty International says that X, formerly Twitter, played a “central role” in spreading false narratives and harmful content. The platform’s content-ranking algorithms, which prioritize posts that spark outrage and heated engagement, obviously helped.
Indeed, right after the tragic murders, falsehoods about the killer’s identity, religion, race, and immigration status (in fact, Rudakubana was born in Cardiff, Wales, in 2006) began to spread across social media, especially X.
The latter platform, according to Amnesty, has no adequate safeguards to prevent or mitigate harm from misinformation but “systematically prioritizes content that sparks outrage, provokes heated exchanges, reactions, and engagement.”
In its technical explainer, Amnesty said it analyzed X’s open-source recommender “uncovered systemic design choices that favor contentious engagement over safety.”
The algorithm itself actually has no mechanism to assess the potential for harm.
Hashtags such as #Stabbing and #EnoughisEnough were also used to spread claims falsely suggesting the attacker was a Muslim and/or an asylum-seeker.
An account on X called “Europe Invasion,” known to publish anti-immigrant and Islamophobic content, posted shortly after news of the attack emerged that the suspect was “alleged to be a Muslim immigrant.”
That post garnered over four million views. In fact, within 24 hours, all X posts speculating that the perpetrator was Muslim, a refugee, a foreign national, or arrived by boat, were tracked to have an estimated 27 million impressions. All this wasn’t true.
The infamous Tommy Robinson told his 840,000 X followers that there was “more evidence to suggest Islam is a mental health issue rather than a religion of peace,” further stoking hostility against Muslims.
Finally, even X’s owner Musk – who has 140 million X followers on his personal account – also notably amplified the false narratives that were exchanged regarding the Southport attack.
On August 5th, 2024, as the riots were spreading, he commented on a video posted by Ashley St Clair, saying that “civil war is inevitable.” In total, Musk posted 46 times during the UK riots, generating a total of 808 million impressions, another analysis has found.
Amnesty isn’t exactly surprised, though. That’s because, since Musk’s takeover in late 2022, X has laid off content moderation staff, reinstated previously banned accounts, disbanded Twitter’s Trust and Safety advisory council, fired trust and safety engineers, and restored numerous accounts that had been previously banned for hate or harassment.
“Without effective safeguards, the likelihood increases that inflammatory or hostile posts will gain traction in periods of heightened social tension,” said Pat de Brún, Amnesty’s head of big tech accountability, who also called for greater accountability and stronger enforcement of the Online Safety Act in the UK.
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