X RATED RIOT
The British riot every decade, give or take: 1981, 1990, 2001, 2011, 2024. There is always an extensive debate why the riots have taken place and commentators, coming to the issue with confirmation bias, usually find reasons consistent with their outlook.
Racism, deprivation, taxation, multiculturalism, post-industrial dereliction and immigration have been singled out in different riots, though the consensus prevails that in a democratic society, however imperfect, there should be peaceful ways of making a point.
But there was something different about the urban riots of 2024: the role of social media in stimulating them. An horrific knife attack on a summer dance class for young children in the sleepy seaside resort of Southport was judged online within minutes to have been the work of a recent Muslim immigrant making his way to the UK via a boat across the channel, even though no details had been released about the suspect in custody.
It turned out to be a 17 year old born in Cardiff of Rwandan heritage instead, but by the time these details were released, the damage had been done. X/Twitter played a starring role. Since its takeover by Elon Musk, content moderators have been axed and previously banned individuals – like the far right agitator Tommy Robinson and professional misogynist Andrew Tate – have had their accounts restored. Neither was slow in spreading lies about this incident and using it to stoke ethnic tension in the UK. Millions saw these posts and Elon Musk himself provoked matters with a series of tweets to his 193 million followers which culminated in the claim that ‘civil war was inevitable’ in the UK.
Hotels housing asylum seekers were attacked and set alight; foreign nations pulled from cars and beaten; people from minority ethnic backgrounds threatened and assaulted. The riots were calmed eventually both by the delivery of quick justice and by some impressive displays of people power in peaceful demonstrations.
The seventeenth century satirist Jonathan Swift said: ‘if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work’; he said this centuries before the lie could be shared across the whole world and seen by hundreds of millions of people within minutes. Legacy media is often made fun of for being outdated and slowly dying, but much so-called ‘independent’ online media shows no corresponding responsibility or interest in fact checking, only in creating its own reality in a manner Putin’s erstwhile maestro, Vladislav Surkov, would approve.
Elon Musk claims to be a champion of free speech, but this is a free speech where misinformation, disinformation and bare-faced lies can take their place alongside truth-telling and get a wider hearing because hatred and anger spread faster. Without the means to establish facts and sift evidence, platforms like X have become deeply irresponsible in pushing anti-social conduct.
X is not the first platform to incite a riot. In 2014, Facebook’s algorithms promoted racist based atrocities against Rohingya Muslims. There will be more such instances unless tech companies are compelled to make changes to systems which encourage anger and hatred because these vices boost profits. Tech companies cannot be trusted to make necessary changes to their algorithms because their primary duty in our stripped-back laissez-faire world is to make as much money as they can for shareholders; never have we needed a re-discovery of the social purpose of companies as much as we do now.
GK Chesterton said: ‘the poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all’. This is the response we are presently seeing in Silicon Valley. Authoritarian governments routinely pervert the truth in Orwellian ways, but social media is now spreading this kind of poison around the world every minute. It is not going to be easy to address this because there are corresponding risks, in legislating, of shutting down debate, disagreement and dissenting views. But it is a transcendent task. Satan, in scripture, is described as the father of lies. Right now he is doing a lot of hands-on parenting. In John’s Gospel it says: the Word became flesh…full of grace and truth. Today, the word has become digital, full of bile and hate.
