Online Misinformation Worsened the UK Stabbing Attack that Killed 3 Children

London: Within hours of a stabbing attack in northwest England that killed three young girls and wounded several more children, a false name of a supposed suspect was circulating on social media. Hours after that, violent protesters were clashing with police outside a nearby mosque — the first of several violent protests in across England.

Police say the name was fake, as were rumours that the 17-year-old suspect was an asylum-seeker who had recently arrived in Britain. The suspect charged with murder and attempted murder was named Thursday as Axel Rudakubana, born in the UK to Rwandan parents.

By the time a judge said the teen suspect could be identified, rumours already were rife and right-wing influencers had pinned the blame on immigrants and Muslims.

“There's a parallel universe where what was claimed by these rumours were the actual facts of the case,” said Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a think tank that looks at issues including integration and national identity. “And that will be a difficult thing to manage.” Local lawmaker Patrick Hurley said the result was “hundreds of people descending on the town, descending on Southport from outside of the area, intent on causing trouble — either because they believe what they've written, or because they are bad faith actors who wrote it in the first place, in the hope of causing community division.” 

One of the first outlets to report the false name, Ali Al-Shakati, was Channel 3 Now, an account on the X social media platform that purports to be a news channel. A Facebook page of the same name says it is managed by people in Pakistan and the US. A related website on Wednesday showed a mix of possibly AI-generated news and entertainment stories, as well as an apology for “the misleading information” in its article on the Southport stabbings.

By the time the apology was posted, the incorrect identification had been repeated widely on social media.

“Some of the key actors are probably just generating traffic, possibly for monetisation,” said Katwala. The misinformation was then spread further by “people committed to the UK domestic far right,” he said.

Governments around the world, including Britain's, are struggling with how to curb toxic material online. UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said Tuesday that social media companies “need to take some responsibility” for the content on their sites.

Katwala said that social platforms such as Facebook and X worked to “de-amplify” false information in real time after mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

Since Elon Musk, a self-styled free-speech champion, bought X, it has gutted teams that once fought misinformation on the platform and restored the accounts of banned conspiracy theories and extremists.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned social media companies that crime is “happening on your premises”.

“Inciting violence online is a criminal offence. That is not a matter of free speech – it is a criminal offence,” he said Thursday.

Rumours swirled in what was initially the relative silence of police over the attack. Merseyside Police issued a statement on Tuesday saying the reported name for the suspect was incorrect, but initially provided little information about him other than his age and birthplace of Cardiff, Wales.

That's because under UK law, suspects are not publicly named until they have been charged and those under 18 are usually not named at all. A judge allowed Rudakubana to be named, in part, to correct "misinformation".

That included suggestions by some activists that police were withholding information about the attacker.

Speaking before the suspect's name was released but after police said he was UK-born, Tommy Robinson, founder of the far-right English Defense League, accused police of “gaslighting” the public. Nigel Farage, a veteran anti-immigration politician who was elected to Parliament in this month's general election, posted a video on X speculating “whether the truth is being withheld from us” about the attack and suggesting it might be an act of terrorism.

Brendan Cox, whose lawmaker wife Jo Cox was murdered by a far-right attacker in 2016, said Farage's comments showed he was “nothing better than a Tommy Robinson in a suit”.

“It is beyond the pale to use a moment like this to spread your narrative and to spread your hatred, and we saw the results on Southport's streets last night,” Cox told the BBC.